a sense of persistence

i do not have any obvious reason for this (if this is being morbid) but i have been reading Miles Kington's columns on The Independent. It is some indication of how fast time flies on the blog-land that when I first put up a link to his columns on my other blog he was definitely alive. Then I ducked out of the b-l and by the time I came back he had been died for a while, and today he has been dead for better part of the year.

Well, to begin with there is this book that he was working on, a collection of letters to his agent once he knew that he did not have too long to live. Which also reminds me of the US Army guy whose final blog post appears after he had been shot down by a sniper. I tried then, as I have tried now, to write a final blog post and leave it with someone, you know, just in case; but it doesn't seem to work for me at all. I keep changing my mind about nearly everything about a couple of times a day, so a final blog-post is really unlikely to be final unless it was actually written minutes before i died. also, i find it hard to imagine death, there is this lingering sense of persistence - nothing really ends, it just converts to something else. don't get me wrong, i can imagine and have experienced pain, and loss; but not death.

But finally, aren't these pretty awesome words to be written in an obituary,

"The last time I spoke to Miles Kington was three days before he died. It was 6pm, the Comment pages were due off in an hour, and he still hadn’t filed. For Miles, this was unheard of. His stuff was usually in by early afternoon. Day in, day out, for more than 20 years, he was 100 per cent reliable, and 100 per cent brilliant."

now it does make one wonder what they might be saying about me! the word reliable somehow doesn't spring to mind...