Unfinished Business

Today we completed the process of selecting a headstone to mark my in-laws burial plot in New Kilpatrick Cemetery, Bearsden. We have had this on the back boiler for years and years, but the time has come to grasp the nettle and get on with it. My own parents' remains are interred in my father's birthplace on Unst, Shetland. Lund is a stunning ancient burial site at the edge of the ocean, and in days of yore the deceased were ferried there by boat as this was the only access. I'll visit their grave again this May when we spend a week enjoying the wonderful ambience of this most beautiful northerly island in Scotland.
I don't think it's morbid to visit graves, but a wonderful connection with good times and parents who did their best for us, and enjoyed our successes as if they were their own. By May, the gravestone for my in-laws will be in place also and we'll have completed that unfinished business and honoured their lives in a symbolic way. The Blipfoto shows Scott checking out his choice of headstone. In the background is St Kentigern's Cemetery, Lambhill in NE Glasgow. The cemetery covers a vast area and contains 134 scattered burials of the First World War, and a Jewish section. We strolled through part of it as it was dry, sunny and windless today and pleasant to be out, although the temperature was low. We noted that a significant number of headstones had collapsed, and wondered if this was due to former mining in the area and resulting subsidence. We spotted a plaque to the Cadder Mining Disaster in 1913 when 22 men were killed by fire in No 15 pit near Bishopbriggs.
I'll be back to photograph the engraver of our stone - a young man who is one of only three craftsmen in Scotland to have perfected a special technique that has almost disappeared in the monumental headstone business. That'll be an interesting Blipfoto!