There doesn’t seem any way around dying. Well, actually there is. Like Kevin McCarthy‘s Walter Jameson, I could get lucky by meeting an alchemist who could give me immortality with a special mixture of something or other, and I could become a kind of mummy figure, like Boris Karloff‘s Kharis. (Or Imhotep…whatever.)

The idea of being online for centuries to come seems like heaven to me, and not just that but eternally travelling around on and sampling great foods and inhaling all of that magnificence, year in and year out. Not to mention all those great Italian shoes I could wear.

I never dwell upon death (it’ll happen when it happens…big deal). I’m not overjoyed about this, but moving on is darkly comforting in one respect at least. It will at least spare me the anguish of having to share the earth and particularly Twitter with certain odious life forms whose names I won’t mention. Everything in the universe is perfect in this respect — the worst people in the world (Millennials included!) will eventually transform into mulch. Yes, boys and girls — we will all one day be “equal”, in the William Makepeace Thackeray sense of that term.

I guess I’ve been touched by what happened to that poor older couple in Lafayette Park yesterday, I suppose. Tagged by lightning, over and out. Now that I think of it there’s probably something to be said for an absence of warning. JFK in Dallas, John Lennon at the Dakota.

“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work — I want to achieve immortality by not dying.” — Woody Allen.