So, late last year everything went a bit pimp skitters, so I got a new job (heaven knows, &c.) and hauled a bin bag full of tea pots and old tights down to South Oxford, many (2) miles from the phantom pube shedder, her chubby lover, and the poor old alkie whose semi-forced incarceration was the final stake in the hole-riddled corpse of my unsatisfactory sleeping arrangements. Now everything is adequate.
I now spend a good chunk of daylight at a large scale reference work which deals with lives of distinguished dead britons. A portion of that is spent recording the time, place, and manner of death. An obvious thing which never occured to me is that nobody every dies of old age; there is no category for recording this in the databases we use. Most people pop their clogs under the category of disease/condition, which covers infarctions and carcinomas and complications and all kinds of medically graphic unpleasantness. Present terminology is nowhere near as nauseatingly lyrical about these things as say, the eighteenth century. It is all rather morbid, and certaily puts paid to any daft assumptions about shuffling off the mortal coil surrounded by weeping great grandchildren. One is more likely to burst in an unmentionable place in a home, not at home, Nobel Prize or whatever be damned. That said, I’m utterly fascinated.
