States

Emma Jones, ‘Death’s Sadness’ (in The Striped World (2009) imagines how sorrowfully isolated Death must be. I liked this line: ‘Death was a sad Vatican, his own state.’

After all, what does the Vatican say? ‘Look at us, a Church that is as big as a country, its own state!’ Or, ‘look at us, though a billion people subscribe to our faith, our country is the size of Croydon!’