I just had a comment on an old post from 2017. It was about a visit I made to a childhood haunt and two brothers that drowned there. Since then I have had two comments from people who also knew them, one of whom I also knew.

This got me thinking about the old saying about us all dying twice, once when we stop breathing and  once when people forget us. It’s slightly more complex than that, as mot people die for the second time when the last person who knew them dies.

Others, such as Marilyn Monroe (to pick one at random) will not die as long as films are shown and Hollywood legends persist. Nor, you hope, will Shakespeare. What of Newton and Einstein? They are well known and legendary, but do we really know them in the same way we know an actor or a playwright?

And how about the bloggers? Laurie will be about for a while because of her books. The rest of us, I feel, are slightly less immortal, though we are likely to persist longer than non-bloggers, though only as pixelated phantoms, until Microsoft withdraws support from the internet and relaunches it as  a pay-per-view service on its latest “new and improved” (sic) version of whatever it is working on at the time. They may, by this time, be pushing for the beatification of Bill Gates, though my enthusiasm for making him eternal ends at contributing to a project to have him stuffed and mounted.

So, what do you think about immortality.

Or having Bill Gates stuffed? He could join Lenin and Jeremy Bentham as part of a triumvirate of strange funereal practices.

I chose swans because the post on Orton Mere used a swan picture (the one at the bottom of this post, to be precise, and because of the connotation of “swan song”.