I HAVE grave concerns.

Or rather my concerns this week are graves.

I’ve always enjoyed visiting cemeteries. Some might find them morbid places, but not me.

Each headstone tells its own story. Lined up, they are like a chain linking us back through the centuries to our ancestors.

They tell the story of who we are and where we’ve come from.

As hippy Neil in the Young Ones said when asked in a cemetery if he dug graves, ‘Yeah, they’re groovy, man!’.

I think it’s a healthy preoccupation, death, actually. Many cultures dispel the fear of it by being open about it.

That’s not the English way, of course. I’m not including the Scots, Welsh and Irish here as I think the Celtic culture is pretty comfortable with the inevitability of death.

But not us English. We speak in hushed tones or mouth syllables silently like Les Dawson when it comes to dying.

Perhaps I was a strange teenager because I could sit peacefully for an hour gazing across headstones, appreciating the silence, contemplating – as self-obsessed teenagers tend to do – my mortality.

Whenever I visit an area associated with a famous person, if there’s time, I like to seek out their grave.

The most impressive was Roald Dahl’s in Buckinghamshire.

Fans of the late children’s author had laid bars of chocolate on his grave stone in honour of his love of the confectionery. Close by were monstrous concrete footprints belonging to the Big Friendly Giant, leading visitors to a beautiful memorial bench dedicated to Dahl and his family. That’s how we should deal with death: with irreverence.

You might think I’m odd but I’m not alone. How many thousands of people each year parade past Elvis’s tomb at Graceland? Or light a candle and daub a message at Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris’s Père Lachaise cemetery?

During a visit to see my parents recently, my dad and I took my son and daughter to see my grandparents’ graves – all four are buried within feet of each other. They wanted to see Morning’s grave. Readers of this column will recall that ‘Morning’ was the nickname I gave to my paternal grandfather who lived with us when I was a child.

After viewing them, we strolled to the gate to leave. We passed a peaceful section shaded by trees but filling up with newer headstones save for an empty patch of grass between memorials, looking like missing teeth at the front of a mouth.

“That’s where your mum and I will end up,” my dad whispered. “We’ve booked our spot.”

In that moment my English DNA took over. This was too much information.

‘So, dad, what’s for tea?’ I asked, quickly changing the subject.