(Actually, I once met a lady who had known Lawrence - tho' not in any Biblical sense as, like so many advocates of sexual liberation, Lawrence was more mouth than trousers. “And anyway”, she said, “his fingernails were filthy!”)

If you want the kids to hate everything you hold to be precious and true, stick it on the school curriculum.

So we're in Paris last week, show the kids a bit of culcher and that, so if it's Thursday morning, it's time for Père-Lachaise. Not for the sake of any pilgrimaging, but because, well, really big cemeteries, proper cities of the dead, are amazing places.

There's these coachloads of schoolkids, most of whom seem to be Italian, slouching their way around, being marshalled by teachers, immaculately-dressed bearded men in middle-age. And here, younglings, is the Great Jim Morrison in his fenced-off and security-guarded tomb …

Morrison probably deserves better than the canonical spaying involved in examination board approval and school trips, though he would probably meet all this posthumous reverence with some amusement. Like his beloved Rimbaud, he has joined the ranks of the immortals. But wouldn’t he be alarmed that rock ‘n’ roll is now so old and conservative in a western society every bit as hypocritical and far more risk-averse than it was in his day?

Oscar Wilde's monument, mind, is a beautiful, triumphant, joyous thing. The Jacob Epstein sculpture, covered in graffiti and lipstick kisses. This is the tomb of a martyr and a liberator whose appeal goes way, way beyond anything schoolteachers can ever drum into you. That’s kind of the point, isn’t it? Wilde never had any message, never tried to change anything, just wanted all the finest things in life and to love whoever he wanted. In living it rather than preaching it, he’ll live longer than D.H. Lawrence.

And am I the only person who visited Père-Lachaise to have ever been excited by accidentally coming across the grave of Fernand Braudel? A man who wrote a two-volume history from memory in a PoW camp? One of the first historians who tried to write from the viewpoint of the peasants and workers, the poor and the ordinary?

Père-Lachaise never ceases to enchant in all sorts of different ways. That was my third visit, and I hope I’ll see it again before being composted somewhere far more ordinary.

But you know what? In terms of spectacle, architecture, and the sheer weirdness of being in a true city of the dead, Bristol's amazing Victorian necropolis at Arnos Vale runs it pretty damn close. You might not have such a huge roster of celebrities, but you do get an awful lot of elaborately confected monuments and an awful lot of dead people. If you live round these parts, go see. Again and again.