However, my favourite macabre sight there is not the Lenin mausoleum, but the Novodevichy cemetery, tucked away behind the old monastery. Besides Chekhov, Kruschev and some other greats, you can find a scientist with the sign of the atom on his tomb; a group of airmen in the shade of a giant Zeppelin model; urns in one wall with pictures from the 1930s; and when I was there, the grave mounds, heaped with flowers, of the great ballerina Ulanova and the great clown Nikulin, buried side by side. I wonder sometimes, when my train takes me past the hideous modern cemetery at Gidea Park, line on line of identical white marble headstones, whether the fun has gone out of death. Certainly, the way it was commemorated in the past has left us an interesting, if not lively, sort of tourism.