Last orders at the Death Café

The coffee and walnut cake was excellent. As was the chocolate cake, and the tea and biscuits. The conversation was wonderful too. We talked about death.

We were here, we dozen or so people in a meeting room in a small Suffolk market town on a sunny June evening, to do something British people never do: hold a conversation about the fact that we will all, in the end, die. Weather, football, the state of Kerry Katona’s finances — all these are acceptable topics for discourse. Death, on the other hand: not likely. There must be a subconscious fascination with the subject: otherwise why would Midsomer Murders get so many viewers? Yet no one discusses it openly. A new movement called Death Café has been established to challenge this. Starting in Switzerland, where the gatherings were called ‘café mortels’, the idea has now spread to France, Britain, the US, Canada and elsewhere.