Sunday, February 03, 2008

Dead reckoning

A little while back, they dug up a body in an Irish peat bog. A male, about 25, head and legs removed, a murder victim. Probably Neolithic. Perfectly preserved - they could even see his fingerprints. And they poked him about, they analysed him, they x-rayed him, they probed his innards, they documented him down to the last follicle.
And I thought, in a few thousand years' time, they might dig me up out of the East Anglian peat and - god, this hurts! - will have NO idea what a warm vibrant interesting erudite witty passionate human being I was. Just a blackened torso.
I have just added a codicil to my will asking to be cremated: let's see what they make of a pile of ash.

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