Death

… how mean and foolish are the living, with their never-ending terrors and curiosities, the puny effort of their lives, when faced with the quiet kingly dead.

Jacques was talking, Mathieu looked at him, it was all so tedious, the bureau in the half-light, the snatches of band-music from beyond the pines, the curls of butter in the little dish, the empty bowls on the tray: so futile an eternity.

Reflect on this: The realisation of impermanence is paradoxically the only thing we can hold onto, perhaps our only lasting possession. It is like the sky, or the earth. No matter how much everything around us may change or collapse, they endure.

We shall not ever meet them bearded in heaven,
Nor sunning themselves among the bald of hell;
If anywhere, in the deserted schoolyard at twilight,
Forming a ring, perhaps or joining hands

No pensioner in Hull was safe last week after the bizarre revelation that a £2.1 million National lottery jackpot ticket is lying uncashed on an elderly local widow's front room table.

When my parents passed on, and we read their wills, we discovered something we didn't at all expect, especially from our devoutly Catholic mother: they had both left instructions that their bodies be donated to science.

And who by fire, who by water,
who in the sunshine, who in the night time,
who by high ordeal, who by common trial,
who in your merry merry month of may,
who by very slow decay,
and who shall I say is calling?

The Bushmen, who walk immense distances across the Kalahari, have no idea of the soul's survival in another world. 'When we die, we die,' they say. 'The wind blows away our footprints, and that is the end of us.'