I know you’d rather wouldn’t, but the time has come to deal with it. Unless you’re under 30, in which case stop reading now! This post is not for you and I suggest you go and read my post “In Praise of Drunkenness”, which is much more worthy of your time. Come back when you’re old.

Now back to you, dear mature reader. We both know that this entire business of dying is rather unpleasant, and no doubt you would prefer to go and watch the game instead, or shopping or something. Unfortunately, we don’t get a vote. I’m sorry to have to tell you, but you’re going to die very soon – you see, in cosmic terms our whole life cycle is no more that the batting of an eyelid.

To all the big shots and important people I say: Stop taking yourself so seriously! Before you know it you’ll be a speck of dust, and if you keep up your self-important attitude you’ll look pretty silly to other specks of dust around you.

But there are of course also serious aspects to dying, which require careful consideration. It is extremely important not to show up at D-day unprepared. For one thing, your kids will be pissed when they discover that trying to make head or tail of your papers is a nightmare and that you never wrote down the password to anything. Various appliances, bank accounts and what nots have stopped working because you (always a stickler for proper security procedures) refuse to release passwords to them over the oouja board.

I have made my own decision: I am all in favor of the quick fix. No long and tedious preludes to my departure that would inevitably turn me into a bore. A tap on the shoulder from the chap with the sickle will suffice for me to take the hint. But I still have to deal with the aftermath. My desk is a mess since at any given time I work at ten different projects. I, too, am concerned about cyber safety, so sometimes it takes me hours, if not days, to reconstruct a password I urgently needed yesterday, from crumbs I’ve cleverly left all over the house. The moment I’m gone, cyber hell will break loose for my dearest and nearest, so I must organize, and I must do it now, because you never know…