[Trafalger Square, London. The National Gallery of Art in the background. A fast car in the foreground. A lion and a blue-lit fountain in the middle ground. Photo is mine.]

Keep calm and go to London…

The title above makes it sound like it’s a skip and a flip to make the three and a half-hour trip to London from the Red City of Marrakech. Well, it’s a bit more complicated than it sounds. We left Morocco in tear-inducing brightness and landed in England, not quite in the loaming gloom, but nearly so. We were late taking off so already we were off our schedule. Luggage, customs and ordering the cab ate up more time.

And then the drive to our hotel. I’ll make this ordeal as brief as possible. It took us longer to get to the Club Quarters Hotel off Trafalger Square from Gatwick that it did to fly in from North Africa.

That said, I’ll skip the few things we managed to do in the three days we’ve been here. We shopped. We went to the Tate Museum. We went to a play called Abegail’s Room. But what we did today, Sunday, September 29, was something else entirely.

We went to a place I’ve always planned on visiting but never seemed to have the time. That would be Highgate Cemetery. It’s not on the usual tourist maps because it is well to the north of the city center. One famous grave draws most of the visitors, I would suspect. That of Karl Marx. The rest of the cemetery, divided between the East Gate and the West is a feast for the eyes of anyone interested in famous cemeteries…and who isn’t? I am. The ivy, the moldy stones, the dead flowers, the wind in the trees, the architecture of the mausoleums and the dark shady areas along the muddy lanes. Some would say such things are morbid, but nothing could be further from that. Indeed, it’s a place to revere the departed, celebrate the famous dead and the majority of the people who were known only to their families and friends. All of them were loved, cherished and honored in some way while they took a breath. And we should do the same after they depart this earthly moment. The deceased are not to blame for the overgrown holly or the shady foliage. There are no lawns to mow here, few benches to sit and rest and visit. To be fair, even though I find this kind of place calming and contemplative, it’s not necessarily a place I would choose to spend a night, hidden where the night-guards could not find me. And, I would like to be able to tell people I could easily carry a lantern and be such a night-guard…but that would not be the truth. If Dracula roams anyplace in London, it’s here. If the Werewolf of London, stalks any lanes, it’s here.

It’s all here.

[Photo is mine.]

[Photo is mine.]

[Photo is mine.]

[The Man. Karl Marx. Photo is mine.]

Be sure to click below.

[Video is mine.]

[Photo is mine.]

Oh, there’s more videos and photos where these came from. No pictures of Piccadilly Circus on this day. Not from this blogger. Instead, I took you on a little trip…from North Africa to North London. From a hot breakfast in a warm hotel to a chilly windy afternoon among the stones of a famous cemetery, bearing witness to the lives and memories of the innumerable dead.

Written by a true Irishman…