Church Island

Church Island lies in the Menai Strait, between the Menai and Britannia Bridges. A short causeway connects it with Anglesey. It is entirely occupied by the church of St. Tysilio and its surrounding graveyard. On the highest point there’s a simple memorial to the local servicemen who lost their lives in the two world wars. Without being at all remote, the quiet offshore location with its omnipresent signals of mortality is conducive to reflection. The war memorial is all the more affecting for the absence of rhetoric - the beautifully carved roll of honour with dates and places of death carries a lot of weight. Each name stands for a fractured family and the grief of relatives and friends. As the poppy emblem mutates from a message of “Peace among Nations” to a nationalistic symbol of patriotism, it’s a relief to be reminded of more dignified and restrained methods of commemorating human sacrifice than indulging in a phoney war with FIFA. 

 An English translation of the above inscription: "To the glory of God and in memory of the men who fell in the war. That their name will live forever."

Unconcerned but not indifferent

A trip to a Parisian cemetery is not to be missed. Memorials to bygone celebrities, literary heroes, artists and philosophes rest side by side with generals and admirals and leaders of business and finance. Montparnasse is the Manhattan of cemeteries – none of the winding paths that follow the undulating topography at Père Lachaise – all is laid out on a grid on a site that could not be more flat. A plateau of morbidity in marble.


Sartre and de Beauvoir occupy a prime position just inside the entrance, against the perimeter wall. Over the wall is Boulevard Edgar Quinet which, conveniently, is where Sartre lived in his last decade. So he would have had no need of the Métro tickets scattered by pilgrims over the marble slab. There are also flowers, hand-written tributes in a variety of languages and a scallop shell. The Métro ticket offerings have no obvious symbolism beyond an act of witness.


Elsewhere, the pre-eminent flâneur, Baudelaire reached his final destination in the family tomb of his step-father, Jacques Aupick, military man and faithful servant of the state. Baudelaire too gets his fair share of tribute in the form of recycled paper products.


The memorial to Tristan Tzara displays the sort of restraint not normally associated with Dadaism. A simple inscription on a slab laid on the earth surrounded by plant life. Brassaï and Man Ray each re-imagined Parisian life in their photographs – now they are near neighbours in Montparnasse. Man Ray’s epitaph, Unconcerned but not indifferent strikes a defiantly nonchalant note. And Susan Sontag gets an apple for the teacher.

Pont Caulaincourt

In the 1860s Haussmann was pursuing the third phase of his Parisian grands travaux driving new roads through the recently incorporated outer arrondissements. One project that got stopped in its tracks was his plan to build a bridge across the Cimetière de Montmartre to carry the rue Caulaincourt. Parisians were affronted by the casual way in which the remains of the dead were to be relocated and a vociferous campaign in the press forced Haussmann, for once, to abandon his scheme. The Pont Caulaincourt was finally constructed almost 20 years after Haussmann left office, in the form of a steel truss bridge in 1887-88. Marcel Duchamp would have crossed the bridge en route to the apartments he occupied at 65 and 73 rue Caulaincourt between 1906 and 1908. The young Duchamp found the bohemian fervour of Montmartre hard to take and soon departed for the bourgeois anonymity of Neuilly. The bridge is every bit as calamitous as its opponents claimed in its impact on the cemetery below with a steel superstructure that grazes the tops of the tombs and symbolically obstructs any possibility of heavenly ascension on the part of the unfortunate souls trapped underneath.