It may be that our reverence for the dead masks a certain fear of them. Tombstones are usually inscribed with a few pious reflections on the deceased, but they’re as weighty as they are in order to keep them down. Otherwise the dead might go gallivanting off around the place, rattling their bones and dragging their shrouds behind them. Something like this is the point of a wake, which is still a common custom in Ireland. The corpse is treated with extravagant courtesy, with the coffin lid left open and perhaps a bottle of Paddy’s or Bushmills conveniently to hand. In the good old days, he might even have been taken for the odd whirl around the dance floor. All this is to persuade the deceased that he isn’t dead at all, since otherwise he might grow envious of the Guinness-guzzling living and return to plague them. The dead body is treated as though it’s really alive; but if it’s able to haunt the living, then maybe it is. Wakes exist to console the dead for not being alive, thus disavowing the fact of death; but they also celebrate death as part of the great natural cycle of growth and renewal.

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Corpses and ashes are really fetishes. For Sigmund Freud, a fetish was a piece of matter invested with a mysterious power, and which thereby enters the sphere of the sacred. It’s a liminal affair, dead and alive at the same time, transgressing borders and disrupting our tidy conceptions of what’s inanimate and what is not. Ghosts have this unsettling capacity, and Freud’s word for the realm in which things which are suspended between life and death is the uncanny. Scarecrows and snowmen are uncanny because it’s hard to tell whether they’re dead or alive. Children may also appear uncanny, which is one reason why they play such a role in horror movies. They resemble adults in many ways, but at the same time they’re an alien species. In fact, it’s hard to say what they are for. They don’t work or rustle up delicious soufflés or have fascinating views on Islamic architecture. They are like visitors from some other dimension, and as with the creepy children in The Midwich Cuckoos, they may well be secretly communicating with each other at this very moment. If they are, then they’ve got a head start on AI.

The fetish plugs a gap — the gap left by the deceased, but also, more fundamentally, that perpetually unfulfilled void at the heart of the human subject known as desire. What bereaved relatives desire is for the dead to be present again; and if this can’t be accomplished by bringing them back to life, you can at least treat their remains as a surrogate for their living selves. It’s a way of disavowing the fact that they’re gone forever, since “forever” is not something we can conceptualize. No doubt this is why those who have lost a loved one but can’t locate their body are often desperate in their efforts to reclaim it. Recovering a single cadaver can involve extraordinary amounts of time, people and resources, but what’s being searched for is the nearest thing there is to a live human being. From another standpoint, however, the corpse is also what’s most different from it. When we hear the phrase “the body in the library”, we can be fairly sure that the body in question is unlikely to be reading a book.

Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the finest theologian who ever lived, refused to use the word “body” of a corpse. He spoke instead of the remains of a body. Human beings were in his view naturally embodied. If heaven doesn’t involve my body, Aquinas considered, it doesn’t involve me. The true self in his view wasn’t some elusive spirit lurking within the flesh, but the living flesh itself. This is why he wouldn’t have believed that the soul of Cleopatra was Cleopatra. To say that Cleopatra was human isn’t to say that she was a body with something superadded to it, but that she was a body of a certain kind, one different from material bodies such as ashtrays and umbrellas. Ashtrays aren’t able to join political parties and umbrellas aren’t capable of irony, whereas Cleopatra was presumably capable of both. Whether an AI machine can be ironic or join a political party is a question yet to be resolved.

Ashes, in this view, are the remnants of a dead body, not a living one. Our future ashes will have little more to do with us than someone else’s ashes will. The same goes for corpses, which aren’t the bit of a person that’s left to us after death, but are no person at all.

There’s no reason, then, to think that it’s outrageous to mix up people’s ashes or sling their corpses casually around. I would have no great objection to having my ashes lapped up by a leopard, granted that I was around to have such objections in the first place. Corpses and ashes can’t be treated abusively, any more than a can of sardines can be. Dead bodies are as senseless as slabs of concrete. It’s our fear which makes us afraid of enraging them. Revering the dead is a way of keeping them at arm’s length. They’re also stark reminders of our own impending dissolution, which may then breed a certain unconscious hostility to them. Jesus’s dismissive remark that the dead should bury their dead would have struck the pious Jews of his day as obscenely offensive. For them, burying the dead was a sacred duty, whereas Jesus himself turns out to be rather less in awe of the grave.

One might claim, then, that the 20-year sentence handed down to the rogue undertaker has no rational justification. It’s equivalent to the amount of jail time you would get for strangling someone, not just messing around with their remains. This isn’t, to be sure, a popular view. A great many people find what the man did abhorrent, and no doubt some families have suffered severe trauma as a consequence. Their disgust must be acknowledged and respected. Some years ago, however, millions of people in the Muslim world felt a similar sense of scandal and outrage at the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses. Not many people in the West, and certainly not many intellectuals, considered those sentiments worthy of esteem. Yet the disciples of Islam in Baghdad and Birmingham were no doubt as mortally affronted by Rushdie’s representation of Mohammed as those families who feel that their deceased relatives have been grossly mistreated.

Perhaps Rushdie might have been rather more alert to how his satire might appear to a people who already felt abused and humiliated by much of Western civilization. Yet if corpses aren’t sacred, neither are books. There are devout Christians who enjoy jokes about Jesus, and plenty of Jews who laugh at anti-Jewish jokes or even pass the time inventing them. Not many Jews would be offended by the story of one Isaac Goldberg, who was walking with his adult son beside a river when the son missed his footing and fell into the water. “Help, help!” Goldberg shouts. “My son, the lawyer, is drowning!”

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The point is that you can be serious and light-hearted about something at the same time. If we live our beliefs from the inside, we can also get a fix on them from the outside; and this double-take is part of the dualistic animals we are. This, admittedly, isn’t the case with those evangelical Christians who believe that every word of the Bible is literally true. To refute this view, you simply have to look at the nature of language. To read is not to move from one fixed, absolute meaning to another, but to interpret; and interpretation always involves open-endedness and ambiguity. No sign can be fixed and absolute, since it’s a sign only by virtue of being caught up with other signs. No piece of language is ever finished. This is true of notices in theaters which read “Please Do Not Sing Along with the Performers”, to which you could always add “You Drunken Yobbos”.

None of this is to claim that nothing is sacred. There are words which should never cross one’s lips (certain statements about the Holocaust, for example). It’s just that words of this kind shouldn’t include, say, jokes about mixing up corpses or the dog running off with the ashes. Some things are sacred and some are not; it’s just that we’re sometimes confused about which is which.

For a millennium there were Royal Sieges, Royal Weddings, and Royal Jubilees at Windsor. But nothing, in living memory, like this Royal Funeral; the Queen — a most revered and respected and beloved Queen — was to be buried within the King George VI memorial chapel. A million-strong crowd was expected. An invading wave of grief vaster than any the authorities had planned for, and more than Windsor could really take. A unique British Hajj.

It was standard for locals to see the Queen in Windsor. This is a Royal borough — the Firm owns 4,500 acres —  and the family took its name from the town. In return, the town received the Real Presence of Her Majesty, riding in horses in the park, or wheeling over asphalt in a Land Rover to her chapel. Windsor was charged with glamour by association.

After Elizabeth died, the town whirled into action: the paranoid iron railings, camera cranes and subcontracted stewards, whose hasty assembly marks every major public spectacle in the Kingdom, appeared. This was the heartland of the grieving process.

When the Queen was crowned, in 1953, a third of her subjects believed she was placed on the throne by God. There was no foreign travel, no wine, no Lady Chatterley’s Lover. No real teeth in the mouths of half the adult population. Stalin ruled Russia and virtually the whole of Africa belonged to Europe. The British had just informed the UN that they did not see how it was possible to abolish flogging in their mandated territories, thank you very much.

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Yesterday, there were thousands of people everywhere. Then thousands more. Walking from Slough and Staines through the misty morning, along closed roads, past tent cities set up for stewards in the greens around the town. More streamed in for the funeral.

The crowds are candidly patriotic. Monarchy is something they feel in their bodies. It is a powerful internal force, not a theory, not an idea. It’s an obvious decision: take the pram, and the dogs, to Windsor. They say the Queen was theirs. They say the same things, over and over: we expected her to go on forever; we knew her all our lives; we wanted to pay our respects. Trails of flowers are left, under trees, under the hard glare of the castle walls.

I’m reminded of Walter Bagehot, Monarchy’s most supercilious theorist. For the Kingdom, he said, the monarch was simply “a visible symbol of unity to those so imperfectly educated as to need a symbol”. The portraits of Queen Elizabeth, hung in every shop window across the town — including the Thai Massage parlour — are pure symbolism. She looks as exact and fictitious as the lines on a map. People are not always sure what to do when a symbol dies. I’m told they almost ran out of champagne in The Ivy Windsor on September 8. Hallowed British etiquette: if in doubt, drink.

Otherwise, a child walks up to one Elizabeth in an estate agent’s window, stops, pulls a handful of conkers from her pocket, and lays them there in a small line below the image. An offering. Walking around Windsor, Bagehot would have thought himself vindicated.

Yet he was too cynical. Being a fantasy does not make this unreal.When you speak to enough mourners, you realise Elizabeth was more than symbol. She was not abstract to Lee, a huge bull-thick slab of a man who is in charge of the catering in the Great Park. He cooked for the Queen twice when he was a chef in the Army. “She sat in the mess with 400 blokes, like anybody would.” The recollection cuts him somehow. “She remembered my name, three years after the first time we met.”

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Or David, a garrulous ex-guardsman, who is on his third wreath-laying trip to Windsor this week. Tourists are making him pose outside the castle gates with a corgi. He served in the household division. The Queen was as regular as post in his life for 18 months. What was she like? The memory enters his face and complicates his bonhomie. “She was… strict.” He always feared she would have him locked in a cell if he slouched on the parade ground.

Elizabeth was the people’s to make of her what they will. I begin to lose count of the number of mourners who compare her with their mothers, or grandmothers. “It’s like losing her all over again”, says one woman.

The mourning is not exclusively for the Queen then. It’s for them, and their families. They relate the Queen’s pain to their own; somehow this is the same pain their grandmothers felt. They saw them ground down by life and imagine that was the Queen’s fate too. All these grandmothers, never-ending in our heads, amen.

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A thick human hedgerow grows in two parallel lines up and down the Long Walk. We watch the funeral on jumbo screens. The silence here can straighten shoulders. When we sing God Save the King, the words feel curious in our mouths. Someone stumbles off to cry behind a portaloo.

Grace tugs the edge of her Union Jack shawl. She came to Britain from Ghana in 1985. “I am the Commonwealth”, she says. A producer from ITV keeps calling her, begging her to come to London to be interviewed. But Grace wants to be in Windsor. She turns her phone off.

“We have a saying in my country: when the frog dies you will know the length of the frog.” I ask her what sort of frog Elizabeth was. “A very good frog”, says Grace. “The best frog.”

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She tells me to wait under a tree, and returns with a cardboard cut-out, clearly well-used, of the Queen. “The moon and the stars will follow her,” Grace intones, posing for photos with machine-gun-bearing police officers.

After midday, we stand at the top of the Long Walk, waiting for the procession. There is static in the air. People say things out of nowhere. “Arlo, please stop, or I shall strap you in the pram.” Somebody says she will freeze her Bramley apples. “Once she’s in there, that’s it, it’s over — it’s over there, you can see the chapel.” Another, thinking ahead, wonders how long it will take to get back to Paddington.

A row of notables, in a dream of hierarchy, stands on the opposite side of the walk. They are wearing furs, white gloves, and spotless ruffs. On our side, there are no pearls, only Sandra handing rice crackers to perfect strangers. The first thing she did when the Queen died was post a poem on Facebook. They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old… “Me and Paul watched it all on the telly, everything”, she says. “There was so much we never knew.” She talks about the Queen like a song she can’t remember the words to. The telly told her to come to Windsor, so now she is forcing a rice cracker into my hands.

All of us shaped by television and language and the jokes we share, have never had so much in common: we are waiting on this smooth baize runway, in the sun, to watch her go home. And we are sharing the same frustrations in this crowd, which is ten heads deep. The same elbows in our faces, the same children crying and rustling; the irritations and bathos and peevishness, all the subterranean currents that flow beneath the splendour. Time feels like it’s buffering. Sandra sighs. There will be no more rice cakes.

It begins with a soldierly bellow. Then, hush. Then the squashed pom-pom thud of cannon half a mile away. They scatter rooks from the elm-trees, who corkscrew overhead. People tell each other to look.

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Look: the procession glints in the far distance. It moves into clarity. Cavalry in outline, a haze of red wool, eerie piping. Everybody is filming the slow, square marchers. Everybody wraps chains around these minutes, to keep them alive, to keep her with them.

They are filming the old style, the British high idiom, bury the Queen. Pageantry separate in kind and scale to any they have seen before, or will ever see again. A precious echo of the country this used to be. All this power kept in reserve for today. There are flashing swords, gorgeous armour, and blazing uniforms, but gentleness is the overwhelming impression. Militarism to send off a Grandmother, not to project power. Grief, not anger. We are its witnesses.

When the crown is level with my face there is so much brass in the air you can taste the metal. People close their eyes to stretch the crowded seconds out. The music rings flawlessly in a dozen directions. Skin and bone absorb the moment. A key is turned. History has been released from reality.

The car wheezes forward for the last time, followed by four billion eyes, through the gates of Windsor Castle. The Queen is swept along and swept up into the cheerful English heaven she believed in. She takes her final seat in the stands, with Charles I and George III, Henry VIII and Victoria, and all the others, even poor King John.

As dusk fell, we sloped back down the Long Walk, and the thumping drums faded away. Screens showed the Queen alive, accepting some carnations from school children. Elizabeth had no grand idea. No message of hope and change. No calls to arms. Her life was blockaded by duty. She seemed to ask nothing of us but to do ours too.

A funeral director friend — a woman whose job depends on not becoming too emotional — was livid at the omission. Clap for Our Carers celebrated “all those who are out there making an unbelievable difference to our lives in these challenging times”. Meanwhile, those making an unbelievable difference to our deaths were ignored, even though their times were just as challenging, if not more so.

It was not so much the case numbers — one of Amanda’s biggest grumbles was constantly tripping over the coffins she panic-bought in March, didn’t use, and had to store in the staff kitchen — but the ludicrous Covid theatre she had to choreograph. Instead of meeting families for tea and sympathy, she was giving advice over Zoom on strategies for deciding which ten people would make the cut, and whether these ten were allowed to place a rose on the coffin individually so long as they were socially distanced. And then, after she gave the correct answer — “No, but do it anyway” — there was the tedium of fighting with crematorium staff threatening to blacklist her.

Funeral directors weren’t even on the Government’s list of Key Workers when it was first introduced. Those who deal with the dead were forgotten, even when the shadow of death was over the whole country. It was not deliberate suppression of the facts, like the mobile crematoria rumoured to be following the Russian front line to keep reality at a distance from people back home; it simply never occurred to the authorities to think about who and what comes after death.

Someone who does think about the who and what is Hayley Campbell. Her new book, All the Living and the Dead, is a series of profiles of “death workers” — not just funeral directors, but embalmers, grave diggers, anatomists and, in one haunting chapter, an executioner. There is a huge emphasis on the physical: her chapter on the work of funeral directors is about the act of changing the clothes on a body, not the counselling or event organising (“all the work of a wedding planner but done in a week”) or the constant state of war with crematorium staff — the work that takes up most of a funeral director’s time. Funeral celebrants are not mentioned at all.

A couple of years ago, I interviewed a range of people from the funeral industry; and one of my standard questions was “What is a funeral for?” (The other one was “Who is a funeral for?”) It wasn’t until the very last interview that someone said, “to dispose of the body”, and I realised that everyone had been skipping over the one thing that defines a funeral, like those restaurant reviewers who never mention the food. The whole point of a funeral is that it gets the body where it needs to be — a physical presence that we can cope with, buried or processed into ash.

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Campbell doesn’t make that mistake. She has a whole chapter about what happens in crematoria. The part that will stay with me longest — possibly because both my parents died of cancer — is that a tumour takes longer to turn to ash than the rest of the body, unyielding while everything else is burnt away, like St Paul’s Cathedral during the Blitz. The operator has to fire jets directly at the lump — “almost like black coral” — until it too is dust.

Still, the book doesn’t talk about what happens to the ashes after they’ve gone through the cremulator and become powder. It is as if Campbell loses interest in human remains at the moment most of us can face up to them: when they are no longer recognisable as a body. She interviews a specialist in the niche and rather creepy art of death masks — “Nick thought that the popularity of death masks was on the rise… But it never really took off” — but doesn’t examine the growing industry surrounding ashes that have been safely unbodied.

There is no mention of the companies that will send them into the heavens in fireworks; or turn them into diamonds, pencils, vinyl records or tattoos; or pour them into hourglasses (“They cannot be exactly timed, due to the consistency of the cremains”); or mix them with concrete to create habitats for fish in coral reefs; or of the company in Alabama which will place them “with care and reverence into almost any caliber or gauge of ammunition”. Or, if you want niche and rather creepy, vibrators.

There is money in achieving the impossible — giving you a physical reminder of someone that isn’t a physical reminder of them. Perhaps the reason death masks never took off was that they are too good a reminder. Although it is worth noting that one high-profile British politician did commission one of his late father: Jacob Rees-Mogg.

It was different when ours was a Christian society, but we now find it difficult to admit that our bodies are what we are. The most popular reading at funerals is now the dreadful “Do not stand at my grave and weep”, which suggests that the deceased is wind or sunlight or glints in snow — anything but the body being buried. It’s a bit of doggerel so mawkish and vacuous that Ricky Gervais used it as the emotional climax to his telly show about death. The first time I laughed after my mother’s death was when a priest, to whom I had sarcastically suggested it as a reading, read it all the way to “I am not here / I did not die,” the final lines, before handing it back and saying, “Well, the crematorium’s going to be a hell of a shock, isn’t it?”

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Campbell, though, doesn’t shy away from the physicality of dead bodies — the smell of putrefaction, and why it smells like a gas leak; the sound of rigor snapping — and how they are physically handled. In many ways, emphasising the physicality is healthier than ignoring it: in a disaster, Campbell points out, those who actively do something are at much lower risk of becoming traumatised, as they are using their stress hormones for their proper purpose, than those who stand by. (On a smaller scale, it was felt deeply by my cousins that they were not allowed to carry my uncle’s coffin at his funeral, because of the social distancing rules, which everyone knew would be totally ignored at the subsequent wake.)

But, in a post-Christian society, it’s just as easy to ignore the fact we are not just our bodies. Most of the death workers Campbell interviews do this to a certain extent because they need to separate these bodies from their identities — technicians in the autopsy room who can weigh organs so long as they know nothing about the person whose body it is; crematorium workers who can pitch someone into a fire but find dressing them too personal.

The executioner is the only death worker in the book who knew the bodies in his charge equally well when they were alive — execution was among his duties as a prison guard. He is also the only one who believes in God. This is not a coincidence. Campbell dismisses this as wishful thinking: “God is the soft focus everyone [involved in an execution] puts on the scene… to me, it says they’re choosing not to think too deeply on whatever it is they’re doing because it doesn’t matter.” To me, it says something very different. He believes because he knows that death does matter. It is the rest of us who are looking in soft focus.

It was founded in 2013 by a couple of comedians, Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, and achieved much initial success with large congregations and an international programme of ‘church planting’. At a time when religious belief is declining — at least in the West — this movement was widely hailed as a way of organising goodness and wonder at a local level, bringing people together for support and edification. “Live Better, Help Often, Wonder More”, was their mission statement.

A number of traditional religious believers were overtly hostile to the project when it was set up, thinking it ludicrous and inherently confused to ape religious practise whilst decrying religious belief. I was not one of those.

Yes, I thought it a little hubristic to assume that it should be a piece of cake to get people together for church-style assemblies, once the remnant of archaic belief had been exorcised. But the basic idea was so clearly well intentioned, it felt churlish to act all superior and sneer at this deep rooted desire to come together to celebrate the best in life. Two cheers for the Sunday Assembly, I thought. I might even pop along one day.

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So, no, I won’t rub my hands together and take pleasure at a report in The Atlantic which suggests that the movement is struggling – attendance is down; centres are closing. But I would like to offer some friendly advice, albeit from the perspective of a traditional Christian believer. After all, we have been doing this kind of thing for a very long time — my church has survived at the Elephant and Castle for 800 years — and we have picked up a thing or two along the way.

Several reasons have been suggested as to why the Sunday Assemblies have struggled. First, because many congregations were split between those who wanted to experience something of the charism of religious worship, just without the God bit, and those who wanted the Assembly to be a rallying point for a campaigning hostility to religious belief. I’m not sure that this is a fatal weakness – all churches need a big tent element, and will need to manage internal disagreements.

Second, though perhaps not unrelated, is that those who came together just didn’t have enough in common to sustain a shared experience. In traditional places of worship, religious belief — and in particular its traditions and Biblical narratives — serve as a common point of reference for an otherwise extremely diverse crowd. It is hard to see how something as nebulous as ‘celebrating life’ can function as a uniting force for what should be an otherwise unrelated crowd.

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This may be the reason that Sunday Assemblies do not feel very diverse in terms of class or ethnicity. In the absence of a shared point of religious reference, social sameness can easily become the focus for community instead of belief. And taking a look at the images used on their web sites, Sunday Assemblies do have the feel of a Boden catalogue convention, with smiley, well-to-do, middle-class people celebrating their own niceness.

And it is actually this niceness that takes us closer to the root of the trouble. It’s all very well celebrating the best of the world. But what about the worst. The real challenge for a God-less church is how it deals with the problem of evil. On one level, of course, they can do this just as easily as traditional churches. When something terrible occurs in the world, the Assemblies can of course analyse its causes, commit to making the world a better place, and take a collection to relieve the suffering of those affected.

But there’s another sort of evil: the darkness within. How do they address that? My acid test, then, for a godless church is this: how would they tackle the funeral of a paedophile? Or: what do they say at the eulogy for a racist?

In church we can say: “Lord, have mercy” and “Father, forgive”. But what is the atheistic equivalent? At the heart of the godless funeral – longer established than the Sunday Assemblies – there is commonly a celebration of the good qualities of the deceased: what they achieved, how much they were loved and admired and so on. But what if that person were an out-and-out rotter, someone about whom very little good could be said? What then?

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Here lies the problem at the heart of the godless movement. Belief is not really about being good and celebrating life and wonder. More importantly, it is about being saved. That is, it is a way of addressing some inherent brokenness about human beings, a brokenness that we are unable to fix by ourselves. The traditionally Christian way of describing all this is original sin – a term that has been overly associated with sex, but is better understood as a meditation on human failure and inadequacy.

The nearest thing a ‘secular’ organisation gets to this — and thus, I suspect, the most promising model for a semi-godless church — is Alcoholics Anonymous. In these meetings, no one is there to celebrate their niceness. Participants are broken and openly so. They have failed and messed up their lives.

People come from all walks of life and from all communities. What binds them together is their failure not their success. And the first thing they need to acknowledge is that they do not have the power to solve their problems by themselves (original sin). Some higher power is invoked to help them (be saved). Without this element — without some deeper acknowledgement of that sweaty panicky sense of failure that steals upon us in the dead of night — all churches, religious or non-religious, are undermined by lies and kitsch.

So my friendly advice to Sunday Assemblies goes something like this. Don’t worry too much about declining numbers. Don’t think of what you are doing as a form of showbiz or entertainment. The best churches, the ones that make a meaningful difference in people’s lives, often have small congregations. And the worst, self-congratulatory churches often have big ones.

When numbers decline, a church is inevitably thrown back upon reflection of what they exist for – is it more than razzmatazz? Failure is often a much more intellectually energising experience than success. It forces you to ask what you really believe in, what you exist for. And there, I suppose, is the rub.

Other than as a glorified dating agency for lonely middle class metropolitans, no one really needs happy-clappy atheism. Because if you cannot accommodate failure – your own or that of your congregants – then you don’t have enough to exist for. And you deserve to perish.