A dreaded sunny day, so let's go where we're happy

Reading, contrary to popular belief, has a lot going for it. Quite aside from not being Bracknell, Basingstoke or Swindon it has lots of lovely restaurants, a magnificent annual beer festival (six days and counting before I spend my Friday off in a field necking “Janet’s Jungle Juice” until the ground starts to spin and talking becomes a challenge), the occasional decent play at the nearby arts centre and an array of the grimmest and least photogenic Brutalist architecture devised by the sadism of any local authority anywhere. I love it.

But, if none of that floats your boat, it’s half an hour to London by train. Last time I went to London a few weeks back was with my ma and it was a trip of contrasts. We started in young, edgy, multiracial, vibrant Brick Lane and ended up on old, conventional, monoracial, sedate Belgravia. Being in her sixties and irritatingly trendy my mother fitted in perfectly in both while I was left feeling out of place. Where, I found myself thinking, is the justice in that?

My favourite story to illustrate how cool my ma is took place almost 10 years ago. Her birthday is at the end of November in the run-up to Christmas and I had gone to HMV in my lunch break to buy her Felt Mountain by Goldfrapp as a present because she’d expressed an interest in it. This, incidentally, was their first record, before they made it big. That’s how cutting edge she was. I stood in the queue behind a couple of chavs for about 10 minutes as they argued with the guy behind the corner about exchanging a copy of Bangin’ R&B Hits 3 on cassette (I know, cassettes! Remember them?). By the time I got to the front of the queue he looked bored beyond all comprehension. He glanced at the cover of the CD.

“Do you know, I’ve been here since 10 this morning and this is the first decent thing anybody’s bought.”

“Thanks. It’s a present for my 53 year old mother.”

“Nice one.”

I went to London again today and again managed to fit in experiences which were almost diametric opposites. My trip ended strolling from the theatre to the Tube through London’s grisliest areas. Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus have always left me a bit cold. There’s something about walking past an Aberdeen Angus Steakhouse, all grotty red banquettes and depressed looking families of six tucking into sirloin shoe leather, that’s always struck me as Edward Hopper’s worst nightmare. Why do those restaurants only exist in London where there seems to be one every few hundred metres? Ditto the sinister Garfunkels – I don’t think I actually know anyone who’s ever eaten at one. And the shops full of tourist nack that nobody in their right minds would buy. Before that I was on Oxford Street on a quick and fruitless dash round Selfridges. There’s something about the grandeur of London’s truly great department stores (though I’ve always preferred Liberty, and Fortnum and Mason for that matter) but the hardest thing is to get into them at all. The thing I hate most about London is that from the moment you get off the train you find yourself turning into another person. Your temper shortens, your pace quickens and people magically turn from human beings with hopes, dreams and aspirations into lobotomised cretins who seem to make queueing at a ticket barrier look about as difficult as writing a 200 word précis of Brief History Of Time.

This homicidal feeling grows and grows as the day wears wearily on. Once you actually get to a major thoroughfare like Oxford Street you find yourself longing for a machete and diplomatic immunity. And by the time you get home your heart, once warm and full of love for your fellow man, is as black and shrivelled as the inexplicable bogeys you end up cleaning out of your nostrils. So I love it but thank Christ I don’t have to live there.

So what’s the diametric opposite of Oxford Street? I hear you ask. And the answer is: I spent the first half of my trip to London wandering round Highgate Cemetery.

Bit of an odd confession this, but I've always loved cemeteries. The first time I went to Paris, aged 19, my then girlfriend who lived out there said “Where do you want to see?”. She expected me to say the Tour Eiffel, or the Louvre, but no. I wanted to go to Pere Lachaise and see Jim Morrison’s grave. And, to her eternal bafflement, that’s the first thing we did. Pere Lachaise is amazing – like a giant, beautiful, peaceful city of the dead. I was genuinely smitten with it – not in a weird gothy way, not even in a flower waving Morrissey way (well, there might have been an element of that) but it was so gorgeous. And it’s not just the famous people, though there are many of those in Pere Lachaise. One of my favourites was Gertrude Stein’s grave – it proudly proclaims her name on the front and if you wander round the back you can make out Alice B. Toklas’ name. Even in death she remains both figuratively and literally in the background.

It was the start of something. When I was at Oxford there was a beautiful cemetery next to the law library. Kenneth Grahame, the author of “Wind in the Willows” is buried there and his headstone reads “To the beautiful memory of Kenneth Grahame… who passed the river on the 6th of July 1932 leaving childhood and literature through him the more blest for all time.” Isn’t that lovely? The theatre critic Kenneth Tynan is also buried there. Sadly his headstone doesn’t say “Here lies Kenneth Tynan, the first man to say ‘fuck’ on English television.” But you can’t win them all.

Last year in Paris I went to Montparnasse, another fantastic cemetery with a smattering of famous alumni (I am pretty sure that really isn’t the right word but it’s a lot better than “inmates” which was my next choice). Serge Gainsbourg’s grave is amazing and full of weird Serge related bric-a-brac. His number one fan, a crazy old French lady, seems to permanently tend it (when she isn’t sleeping in a soiled pile of carrier bags, that is) and if you linger too long she tries to flog you second hand CDs.

Beckett is buried in Montparnasse too and people compete to leave suitably deep and intellectual tributes, usually on the back of a Metro ticket. I, on the other hand, just dedicated an especially poignant 30 second silence to him, because I know how to do these things with class. But again, the graves that really strike you are the unsung ones – often heartbreaking tributes to families that suddenly find themselves with a gaping hole that can never be filled.

So how did Highgate live up to its illustrious competitors? If I ever end up writing What Cemetery? magazine (and on this showing I’d say it’s unlikely) it’s not going to finish in the upper echelons. It’s overgrown and ramshackle and I kind of liked that but it was short on, you know, graves worth having a good look at. But the sun was shining and I’d walked up a fucking massive hill to get here so I was going to make the most of it. So here are a couple of pictures.

And top marks for this last one – if you’re going to have some kind of memorial I think a sense of humour like this is definitely the way to go (one you’ve gone, if you see what I mean).

The feature attraction at Highgate is Karl Marx’s grave. You can’t miss it because it’s got a massive bust of him on top of it. It didn’t really do a lot for me, I was hoping he would have something a bit smaller and humbler. I was struck by the irony that the man behind the big ideas around communism, redistribution of wealth and the power of the common man has the biggest grandest grave of the lot in a part of North London where you have to work for a hedge fund to be able to afford a flat the size of a shoe box.

I wonder if he’s turning in it?