Signs of Signs: Staples and Pins

A few weeks ago, one of our cats went missing for eight days. A hideous week, and so homemade 'Lost' flyers were stuck through letterboxes and posters put up around the local area. Thankfully, she reappeared as mysteriously as she disappeared (4am, and noisily, at the bottom of the bed), so all the posters were taken down.

Even as distracted as I was, I kept noticing the telltale signs of other signs and posters. Many may not have been lost posters, of course - home-printed posters advertising zumba are fairly common round here - but I did view the rusted staples and pins with an understanding empathy.

The Dying Angels: Broken Figures in Earlham Cemetery

Walking around Norwich's Victorian Earlham Cemetery. This Eastern, older section, much wilder, is effectively left to its own devices by the council: groundskeeping work is kept at a minimum to encourage wildlife in the area. As I wandered, I kept noticing the decaying graveside figures - mostly angels, occasionally children, with heads, wings, limbs broken off at some point over the years. These graves were all of children who died sometime between 1918 and the late 1930s. The decyaing of gravestones - edges of statues breaking off, as here, or the more usual weathering into an indecipherable smudge - seems almost a second, gentler death, a softer reminder of the inevitability of the erosion of all things - life, flesh, stone.

Flowers

Flowers left on a bench overlooking the ocean, on a collapsing Overstrand cliff.