pandemian

27 September 2006

When bored at work or otherwise feeling like a little light self-affirmation I like to look through the Recent Deaths article on Wikipedia. Apart from producing never-ending stream of amusing names (current favourite Barry Bingham - American television executive, respiratory failure aged 72 - quite plain on first sight but sounds exactly like my doorbell), I am forever entertained by the sheer number of ways there are to suddenly discover yourself immortally challenged. My own body is donated to medical science, so as long as I I don't die of one of the long list of contagious, malignant, deforming or dementing contraindictions out there I may yet achieve my desire to be cut open in view of a gaggle of queasy first year medical students and make instant medical history by being discovered as the first woman to have been able to live to one hundred with her arteries lined exclusively with Twix.

I'm likely to be thwarted though - for every stingray attack there's innumerable liver cancers and as such, while I hope to live a long and disgraceful life and die in a painless and useful to my local anatomy school fashion, I have considered it only prudent to draw up a short list of alternative ways I'd like to go should this not prove possible.

1. Assassination
If your enemies can afford a professional sniper over an amateur car bomber this is quick and easy and confirs upon you a coolness in death and a post-mortem fame that you probably never managed in life. Unfortunately this would probably require an unfeasable amount of preparation on my part to get myself into a position of power and influence where I could annoy someone so greatly that they'd want to kill me. For real, that is.

2. Apoplexy
Not the brain haemorrhage kind but the sort that strikes you in a Victorian drawing room and causes you to hop up and down on one foot, shaking your fist at the sky and shouting curses and drat while staring at the wallpaper with a mad eye until you fall down dead on the spot from sheer ire.

3 . Falling off the top of a waterfall along with my nemesis while engaged in a epic yet gentlemanly battle to the death
I like this one a lot. However there's a crucial and very obvious element to this plan currently missing, and as long as www.nemesismatch.com remains vacant it's looking likely to remain that way.

4. Consumption
Again, not actually tuberculosis. Rather the kind than turns you pale but beautiful and means you must spend the last few months of your life lying prettily in a four poster bed attended by a score of handsome, heartbroken young men who will bring you petit fours and read you slim volumes of poetry until finally drowning themselves in rivers when the loss of you becomes too much to bear.

5. Martyr
Currently accepting petitions for people I should take out with me on my short but glorious exit from this world in a barrage of police fire. The list currently stands at real men who get on the bus together but sit three seats apart in case someone thinks they're gay and people with diagonal haircuts. Immediate canonisation by a sobbingly grateful public only a bonus.