Nunhead bramble jam

To make them feel better, the ones left behind, we'll say something nice, or at least palatable. We'll say he was called home, fell asleep and is in a better place. And that better place is an ornate stone box on a marble shelf in a grand - though modestly scaled - mausoleum with Romanesque arches to bring to mind his patrician nobility and a black iron grille for a door. And he can hear the birdsong and feel the changes in the weather and the seasons and listen to people crunching by on the gravel in their black outfits and reverence. Hah, and listen to their mobile telephones going off.

That is our idea of what happens after death and it has been so - save for the mobile phones - since Queen Victoria's years, when the churchyards of old London were filled to bursting and municipal necropolises - 17 of them, I believe - were created in the suburbs to dispose of the infants and ostlers, the coopers and ropemakers, the merchants and mothers and muggers, the shopgirls, servants and hansom men who had breathed their last. One such is in Nunhead, a corner of south-east London which seems to have missed the tide that has lifted neighbouring areas into expensive gentrification. It is quiet though - which is handy, I suppose, if you've fallen asleep among the brambles.

It must have been a grand place when it opened, with neat paths in the hillside and little men in mutton-chop whiskers and button-up tunics promising to keep down the weeds in perpetuity and to patrol at night against toughs and blackguards and maybe even resurrectionists, although I suspect that sort of thing had died out by then.

Most of the graves are quite unremarkable, but the vistas they create, all jumbled up among the nettles and ivy and blackberry bushes and in groves of birch and yew and ash, are quite beautiful and moving. And the stories: Obadiah Suchabody fell on rest in the 79th year of his age, joining his beloved Nellie, who was took so unfairly 50 years before. There are heartbreakers, too - infant deaths recorded year after year after year on family tombs and sometimes just scratched into headstones and now hardly visible.

The well-to-do thought to cheat death by creating memorials whose scale would make later generations look and go to investigate. Under slabs of marble or Portland stone the stench of decomposition - and the sight of it - would be unbearable. So by way of diversion, a pillar entwined in roses surmounts a tomb, though the top of the pillar is snapped off and the roses are losing their looks to lichen. Change and decay in all around I see. And here's the best of it. All those graves from years ago, whether for a wealthy sea-captain with a grand house in Old Rotherhithe or for a dun cart man from Catford, are tipping over, being swallowed by the ground. So much for all that expense at the monumental mason's yard. Ultimately, it doesn't stand the test of time and, just like us, will turn to dust.