DIY has never caught on. There’s something macabre about making your own coffin. You can buy boat kits, house kits, garden furniture kits, but not coffin kits. Providing the holes were pre-drilled and properly lined up I foresee no disasters. Wouldn’t it be the tenderest thing to do for the beloved?

The funeral here today is banked with flowers; pale lilies, white roses and branches of weeping willow. It always starts well and then gives way to apathy and plastic tulips in a milkbottle. The alternative is a fake Wedgwood vase jammed up against the headstone rain or shine with a wild Woolworth’s spray to topple it over.

I wonder if I’m missing something. Perhaps like calls unto like which is why the flowers are dead. Perhaps they’re dead when they’re put out. Maybe people think that in a cemetery things should be dead. There’s a certain logic in that. Perhaps it’s rude to litter the place with thriving summer beauty and autumn splendour. For myself I would prefer a red berberis against a creamy marble slab.

To return to the hole, as we all will. Six feet long, six feet deep and two wide is the standard although this can be varied on request. It’s a great leveller the hole, for no matter what fanciness goes in it, rich and poor occupy the same home at last. Air bounded by mud. Your basic Gallipoli, as they call it in the trade.

A hole is hard work. I’m told this is something the public don’t appreciate. It’s an old-fashioned time-consuming job and it has to be done frost or hail. Dig while the ooze soaks through your boots. Lean on the side for a breather and get wet to the bone. Very often in the nineteenth century a grave-digger would die of the damp. Digging your own grave wasn’t a figure of speech then.

For the bereaved, the hole is a frightful place. A dizzy chasm of loss. This is the last time you’ll be by the side of the one you love and you must leave her, must leave him, in a dark pit where the worms shall begin their duty.

For most the look before the lid is screwed down lasts a lifetime, eclipses other friendlier pictures. Before sinkage, as they call it at the mortuary, a body must be washed, disinfected, drained, plugged and made-up. These chores were regularly done at home not so many years ago but they weren’t chores then, they were acts of love.

What would you do? Pass the body into the hands of strangers? The body that has lain beside you in sickness and in health. The body your arms still long for dead or not. You were intimate with every muscle, privy to the eyelids moving in sleep. This is the body where your name is written, passing into the hands of strangers.

Your beloved has gone down to a foreign land. You call but your beloved does not hear. You call in the fields and in the valleys but your beloved does not answer. The sky is closed and silent, there is no-one there. The ground is hard and dry. Your beloved will not return that way. Perhaps only a veil divides you. Your beloved is waiting on the hills. Be patient and go with nimble feet dropping your body like a scroll.