I started wondering, variously, when and why we had started burying people in boxes in the ground, how the etiquette of tombstones and epitaphs and their symbols have arisen, and what all of that revealed about how attitudes to death itself have changed over the ages. Out of the questions grew a plan to visit a series of graveyards, ancient and new, around Europe, in search of answers, and eventually to record it in a book, How to Read a Graveyard (Bloomsbury Continuum, £16.99), that has turned out part travelogue, part history, and part practical guide. Among the stopping points on my itinerary was St Margaret's. I feel so at home here that I keep coming back. I even think I'd like one day to make it permanent — to be buried here. 

My most immediate given reason when I voice this thought demonstrates how illogical our attitude remains to death. It's because, I hear myself saying, I like the view — but of course I won't be in any position, six feet under, to savour it. There are other reasons, though. It comes back to that chain of human history and hope.

Here, for centuries corpses wrapped only in a shroud or winding sheet, knotted at top and bottom, would have been delivered to the gate I step in through today. They would have been transported here not in hearses, elaborate coffins or "private ambulances", the modern packaging we put round them to distance the rest of us from death, but on a bier by family and friends who wanted to consign them to the eternal care and protection of the Church, as symbolised by the priest who waited there to receive them. 

I was 38 before I saw a dead body, partly the blessing of growing up in a generation that hasn't lived through a world war. And I only saw one then because, wrong-footed by grief, I mistook a funeral director's invitation to "view" my mother in the chapel of rest for a summons. In a converted garage behind the parlour — the coy Victorian language persists — the chapel was filled with tanks of goldfish (presumably because the emphasis was on forgetting the pain of grief as quickly as possible). Hideously made-up, a slack lower lip attached to the rest of the familiar face by a clumsy stitch, my mother's body was sanitised, odourless, thanks to the formaldehyde, and deserted. It was a shock, but at least I knew for sure she'd gone.