Reflecting on immortality this morning, I couldn’t help wondering what the difference is between immortality and immorality. One letter and fifty years, I decided. Even if I were single I wouldn’t have the energy for chasing women these days and nights of beer and curry are restricted by my digestion and fear of hangovers. I am not the man I was.

A mixture of books

I would like to achieve immortality through my writing, though I doubt that this will happen. The best I can hope for is that I actually get round to producing a book of poetry and that I get myself organised enough to fulfill my legal requirements, someone may dust my book off in a couple of centuries and cite it in their thesis on whatever they are doing – average poetry, vanity publishing or analysis of paper types.

Legal requirements? That’s right,  books published in the UK should be sent to the following Legal Deposit libraries – the British Library, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales. the Libraries of the University of Oxford, Cambridge University and the Library of Trinity College Dublin. It’s a strange list and one I’m not particularly happy with as Scotland, Wales and Ireland are always critical of England and Oxford and Cambridge can afford to buy their own books.

However, it’s nice to know that it will be available, whether it’s for a future scholar, a survivor of WW3 looking for toilet paper or a monkey dressed in leather armour. Or anybody dressed in leather armour, for that matter. Why, in all these fantasy and post-apocalyptic films do they never invent the printing press or a system of proportional representation, but they always manage to rivet bits of leather together?

That’s my thought for the day.

The Gardening Section