At the age of 29, the truth of my certain death is, in normal circumstances, an idea which is still to be fully formed.
Yet earlier this week, I felt the breeze from its sad, effortless wings against my face; the slow bird which has all of us eventually came momentarily into view. No sooner had I registered its presence than it had disappeared again, leaving behind the untouched perimeter of my mind.
Two photographs on the front of the newspaper: one to mark the passing of the singer Isaac Hayes; one to illustrate the Olympic gold medal of the British cyclist Nicola Cooke. It occurred to me that each of the images contains two timing devices, referring respectively to the subject of the photograph, and the reader.
Consider the devices to be egg-timers or stopwatches or whatever other conceptual tool you might choose. In the case of Isaac Hayes, the timing device which refers to him has run its course. The adjacent one - mine - ticks on or drops grains of sand inexorably. In the case of Nicola Cooke, both timers continue to eat away at the seconds, minutes and hours.
As conceptual devices go, I hardly astonish with the force of my explanation. Yet nevertheless, the realisation startled me, and caused the dark wing of eternity to cast its long shadow. All other things being equal, someone - even if it is not Nicola Cooke - will read about the demise of the mediocre blogger Nogomet, and anxiously check their own watch.
They'll presumably do so in the early morning, on their way to work, when they are least able to cope with linking my demise to their inevitable own. An obituary referring to Blogomet, the painful symbiosis of man and word, and how he met his end flying through a windscreen, or during copulation. Christ, they'll realise, I'm going to die too!
For the next few minutes they'll mourn - not for the stillness of Blogomet, but for predictively for themselves. This is the purpose of an obituary - it permits the anterior mourning of the self, and asks us to reflect on time elapsed versus time remaining.
