An invigorating walk in the Highgate Cemetery

From home, I can walk to the Highgate cemetery; so I did on Saturday morning, a precious, sunny morning. The cemetery is now run by a Charity, parties of guides and gardeners are made of volunteers. It was opened in 1839, after the 1836 Parliament Act that tried to stop the unhealthy conditions of existing cemeteries, the robberies and vandalizing and control the dig-out of dogs. Highgate Cemetery was 1 of the 7 cemeteries built around London and run at the time by private companies. They were known as The Seven Magnificent.

It is so interesting the cult of death in the Victorian society, its symbolism, the appealing and Gothic architecture and all the cultural manifestations developed around: burials, clothing, social and envious relationships. Farady is buried in the West part, but it is not covered in the tour. The East side is more straightforward: Karl Marx is there, with a big head-bust above the grave and the sentence: workers of the world, unite. I heard that the sentence is not his and that this suntuose grave is not the original.

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From there, I walked Hampstead Heath across. Niiiice! At the very top, a numerous group of people noisily looked upon the whole London and the vast surrounding and undulated land. Kids played with their kites, lovers sat in benches or on the grass. A mighty breeze and a reason to stop the wheel of time.

From there, I reached John Keats' house, the place he shared with Charles Brown and where he fell in love with Fanny. Keats wrote there Ode to a Nightingale or La Belle Dame Sans Merci. He was 25 when he died in Rome, from TB.

Nice are this area of Hampstead. I walked the streets, Spaniard's Road. Then I bought a Marie Curie daffodil from a little girl at the entrance of Hampstead Tube Station... The daffodil that survived the thorns of evil that later came upon me, in a rain of woe and devastation. O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, / Alone and palely loitering? / The sedge has wither'd from the lake, And no birds sing. (John Keats).

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If you visit Highgate cemetery at different times during the year, you will hear from the guide different stories each time, we were told. I got that of James William Selby, the great name and great couch driver of the time; the fascinating story of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal; the business of George Wombwell, his exotic animals: the peaceful lion, Nero, and its brother, the ferocious Wallace; the historical and tremendous fight between Tom Sayers and John Heenan.

I have some pictures. Hope you like them.

                                          Highgate Cemetery (1): West Side

                                         Highgate Cemetery (2): West Side

                  Highgate Cemetery (3): East Side. Where Michael Jackson could have been buried.

                                          Highgate Cemetery (4): East Side

                                                 The Egyptian Avenue (West Side)

     The Circus of Lebanon (West Side). At the very top right, you see the Lebanese cedar. In some old movie, you can see Christopher Lee, as Dracula, moving on this area.

                        The Broken Column of Life. A symbol of death dear to the Victorians.

The Sign of the Cross. There is a movie of the same title from the times of pre-code Hollywood (1932) directed by Cecil B. DeMille. The sign in the center is the contraction of IHS, the millenarian name of Jesus Christ. The Christian church started in secrecy and was illegal. The sign of the cross, the secret sign to communicate and recognize among Christians. In many places today, it is certainly needed.

                      The Sleeping Angel. So cooool!

The Tree of Elizabeth Siddal. Behind the tree it is her tomb. Here, with the aim of a slight torch, Dante exhumed the boy of his wife seven years after her death to recuperate his notebook of poems and publish them, in an attempt of escaping drug addition and alcoholism. Her face is said to be intact and her hair to have grown. She was even more beautiful than she was the day of her death. She died of laudanum overdose.

Elizabeth Siddal. This model looks to me very similar to a famous drawing that we loved when youngsters, the type of woman that inspired Sarah Brightman or Lorenna MacKennitt.

                                                      Marx. No comment.

Love for ever. An anonymous example of love. A lady gets widowed when she is 34 years old and waits for reuniting with her husband 50 years after that, to be together again. Oh!!! I want this kind of Love. That is LOVE. Or if not, I want to make it real!

                                         John Keats' House.

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