"DO YOU ever think about what happens afterwards?” asked my friend the Philosopher, as we sat amid the ghosts of players at our table on the old bandstand in the marble cafe.

“After what?” I said, feeling the saliva rise in anticipation of the breakfasts of bacon, sausages, eggs, tomato, hash-brown, beans, mushrooms and toast, which were at that very moment being carried to us by the light-stepped waitress gliding from the kitchen.

“After, you know, after we have been touched by the Good Shepherd’s crook, as the newspapers put it in those days when people used euphemisms for death,” said the Philosopher, watching the plate being laid before him. “We spoke of someone’s passing then, as though he was a footballer,” he added, pausing to chuckle, while dabbing his lips with a napkin, whiter than a virgin lily.

“Well, I had a friend once,” I replied. “Pull the other one,” said the Philosopher, quick as a lizard’s tongue, but I ignored his interruption.

“Anyway, this friend told me that when his time came he wanted to be buried in a candy-striped, cardboard coffin at his favourite place – a high, wild hill of heather and rocks, where you can feel the silence and the thin-legged sheep with barrel bodies step-nimble over the tiny streams, which flow into the lake spreading below. In the corner of his eye, he could see the stone boathouse and the slow, sighing drift of the rowing boat tied to it.”

“You are not a travel guide,” snapped the Philosopher, breaking the yolk on his egg with a stretch of still-sizzling bacon. “Get to the point.”

“Ah, but it’s a beautiful place of sacred memory,” I whispered, almost to myself, before continuing: “The thing is he wants to be buried there so he can appreciate the view.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” said the Philosopher.

“Except that his sight has been deteriorating for years and it wasn’t very good to begin with. He had trouble seeing the numbers on buses, never mind reading the small print on life assurance policies. Unless he enjoys a posthumous miracle that resparkles his eyes, it is difficult to know how he will be able to admire the vista while sealed in a box under tons of black earth – especially when you consider that he can’t even recognise his wife from more than five yards in brilliant sunlight, unless he hears her voice first.”

“Wonder,” said the Philosopher. “You don’t hear much about that these days – wonder. It’s a great word and it means such a lot. Science provides the evidence for many things that were once mysterious, but we still have wonder. Every child senses it when he hears the sea rinse the sand or watches the sun sink on a summer’s night. It seems to me that we don’t know what happens afterwards and we never will, before we’re actually taken there. Holy men say one thing, cynics another. All we really have is a sense of wonder.”