Sometimes I see a funeral cortege passing by. I look at the black hearse with the coffin and corpse inside it and I say to myself: “This man has spent his last day on earth.”

The notion that a dead man lives beyond the grave originates from the innate self-importance of man. Albert Einstein said: “Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbour such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism.”

In his poem Aubade, Philip Larkin writes about: “the sure extinction that we travel to, and shall be lost in always.

Not to be here, not to be anywhere – and soon! Nothing more terrible, nothing more true!”

John Guillaumier

ST JULIAN’S