Make no delay

Another day spent with Lee; he phoned me mid-afternoon and came round an hour later, supposedly to dye a shirt black, but that never got done. My cheerful optimistic mood continues.

We went down to Farnshaw and I cashed my dole cheque. We looked round the second-hand clothes shops but ended up in a cemetery which I’ve often noticed but never been in before. It stands on a small hill overlooking the railway station and Kirkgate and seems to have been completely overlooked.

There can’t be above fifty graves there, all of them black with soot, a few headstones but slabs laid flat mostly, inscribed with the names of the dead and with epitaphs reminding readers that we are mortal and must die too. Lee found one grave dating back to 1689 and a couple to the eighteenth century, but most seemed to be from the 1830s and 1840s. It seems incongruous to me that this plot of land has survived for three hundred years while all around it the world has changed

It’s a shame that it’s so neglected, overgrown and filled with rubbish. I went up to Farnshaw and bought a pen and some paper to write down some of the epitaphs:

All you who come my grave to see
As I am now so you must be
Prepare in time make no delay
I in full bloom was call’d away.

We wandered back via Douglas Mills warehouse where I bought two shirts, inbetween laughing until tears were streaming down my face at the tacky clothing therein. Lee stayed until well-gone nine.

Later I watched a 1979 horror film, worth watching if only for the effective bald-headed yellow-toothed vampire which appears in the second part.