From the sketchbook #3

Near where I live is a cemetery which I pass on my way to the bus stop. After some months I finally got round to going inside to do a bit of sketching. To my astonishment, I was faced with an Heironymous Bosch-like sight: the cemetary had clearly been the victim of some quite drastic subsidence. Most of the older gravestones were tilted over at peculiar angles, and those people who'd had the money to build themselves a grander memorial were now marked with some alarmingly skewed statues.


Some statues were missing entirely, either fallen off or taken down. One statue to a war veteran lay on its back, having toppled off its pedestal years ago, but had lost its head due to falling onto the stone border of a neighbouring grave. The head was nowhere to be seen, leaving its headless body lying in the grass.


My sketches don't really do the scene justice, but this is the kind of thing I like: an extemely surreal experience hidden behind a set of unremarkable gates that I pass by almost every day.