some corner of a foreign hospital research lab

Having worked hard in the garden on Saturday, not realising just how strong the sun was, I was probably fortunate only to feel slightly under the weather yesterday. Sunstroke can be fatal, of course, and is perhaps more likely to be so for those of us who were brought up in colder, wetter, and altogether greyer, northern climes.

So I was interested to read this story about the Brits in Alicante who have worked out what to do if (when?) they die here. Apparently many of the 350,000 who are resident there are donating their bodies to science.

I’ve always thought that shipping bodies round the world for home burial is an enormous waste of energy and resources, and I’m perfectly happy for my body to be cremated wherever I happen to be at the time of death. I’m not sure I want it to be mauled by foreign medical students, though.

However, as the article points out, the motive for the donations may be “para ahorrarse dinero y papeleo”, so perhaps I’ll rethink, as even a cremation would be expensive. I certainly don’t want to get stuck in one of those impersonal high-rise Spanish cemeteries that remind me more of row upon row of morgue drawers than anything else.

It seems a crying shame that the cemeteries should be so ‘built up’ and urban alongside such beautiful countryside. The one in the photos is the local cemetery. It’s tucked behind a gas station and a colourless hostal and bar when all around we have pine woods and olive groves. I don’t expect to find green lawns and neat flower beds here in Spain, but it surely would be possible to have something a little less drab.

For those who haven’t recognised the reference in the blog post title, or who have and want to re-read the poem, here’s Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier:

If I should die, think only this of me;
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.