Peace And Quiet

Yesterday, being a rare nice day during our not-so-nice so-called Summer, I took the opportunity to go to the cemetery to visit my parents' graves.

This entails a quick trip on the Silverlink out of Acton Central for a massive one stop journey to Willesden Junction and then a similarly huge one stop journey on the Bakerloo Line/Silverlink to Kensal Green. I know that two stops doesn't sound like much of a distance but it would take an hour to walk otherwise and it was a rather humid day, so I didn't really fancy turning up all sweaty and knackered.

As it was, I missed the first Silverlink train as it had left a minute before it was supposed to and the one I eventually caught, fifteen minutes later, actually left two minutes before its scheduled time. Aparrently, I was told by a passer-by, this is quite common on this branch.

I've not yet had a gravestone put on my mum's grave as I'm a bit concerned by the subsidence of all the other new grave stones in the area where she is buried. Instead I've fenced off the area around the grave and put silk flowers down to colour it up a bit.

However I discovered that the downside to the little white wire fence I had put around was that whilst it looks nice and tidies up the grave no end, it perhaps isn't as robust as I had first thought.

I turned up on Saturday morning to find the left side of the fence, broken having been pulled completely pulled inwards and warped. It didn't look like some kind of deliberate act. I'm guessing that it was more than likely to have been a wild animal in the cemetery trying to run through the fence, getting snagged and pulling it along to get free. It wasn't too bad. It would appear that someone had picked up the fence pieces and left them in a nice pile on top of the grave, so all I had to do was twist them back into place for them to be usable once more.

Also, to top it all off, since my last visit at the tail-end of April, the weeds had been busy multiplying. *sigh* It took me over an hour of work to clean up the grave by which time the sun had come out and I was thoroughly hot and aching all over. But it was worth it. Check out the before and after pictures and you should be able to see a nice contrast.

Unlike my last visit, it was really peaceful in this part of the cemetery and during the few breaks that I took, to let my back and legs to recover, my only company was a lone crow cawing and a squirrel scampering about across a fence by me and up and down a tree a few feet away.

"Hmmm", I wondered if it was the wire fence wrecker?