How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [52]
Funny, isn’t it? If you laid out all the permutations for a Rubik’s Cube, the list would stretch for 261 light years. There are 519 quintillion alternatives for one of those cubes. And yet it turns out that for the human race there are just eight.
Sunday 23 November 2008
Sorry, worms, you won’t be getting a piece of me
Being dead used to be ever so easy. They’d put you in a box, lower you gingerly into the ground and let you rot in peace. Or, if the ground in your town was full, they’d throw you on a fire and let you spend the rest of time in a vase, on your mother’s mantelpiece.
Now, though, in the same way that you can get married underwater or during a parachute jump, you can choose how you wish to be disposed of when you have done dying. Just this week, for instance, a former navy diver called Derick Redfern was attached to the nose of a torpedo, which was then detonated on the sea bed off Plymouth. This means that now, and for all time, Mr Redfern is a part of the Gulf Stream.
Meanwhile, in Spain, officials at the Catalunya circuit near Barcelona announced on Monday that motor-racing fans can now be laid to rest at the track. Quite how this will work I don’t know. It’ll certainly be a big nuisance for Lewis Hamilton next year if he skids in the final corner on Geoff Simmons of Batley.
Perhaps they mean that a dead person can be used as part of the tyre wall. Or maybe to soak up oil spills.
Some may argue that if you are used as a crash barrier or detonated on the sea bed, some of death’s dignity is lost. I’m not sure this is so, because I don’t see much dignity in lying in a box with your eyes leaking out of your face either. Far better, surely, to use your liquefying body as a soft landing for racing drivers. And if you wind up in the Atlantic conveyor, at least you get to see the Caribbean once in a while – something that’s not possible if you are lying under 6 ft of Surrey.
I’ve always said that when I die I want to be buried, because if it turns out there is a heaven, it’ll be hard to enjoy its bountiful magnificence if I’ve been cremated. Seriously, you’re never going to pull an angel if you look like the contents of a Hoover bag. It’s for this reason I’m nervous about donor cards. I don’t think it’d be much fun in the land of milk and honey with no liver.
However, now that it’s possible to make all sorts of odd requests, I’m reconsidering my post-Reaper strategy. This needs serious thought. I know this because I have watched people try to scatter the remains of their loved ones near my holiday cottage on the Isle of Man. It sounds lovely, but because it’s always windy, the bereaved family normally ends up going home with bits of their dearly departed dad in their hair. This means that, far from ending up on a lonely rocky outcrop, he winds up being washed down the plughole amid much sobbing.
I see the same sort of problem with those who scatter the ashes of loved ones in their back garden. Schoolboy error, this, because one day it won’t be a back garden any more. It’ll be a branch of Tesco or a Travis Perkins depot. And that means your dad could end up as a breeze block. Or in the sandwiches of someone he disliked.
Space is tempting because there’s no wind, and it doesn’t change, and I’m delighted to report there is indeed a company that will blast your ashes into orbit for just £250. A word of warning, though. While the company managed to get bits of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, into orbit, it made a bit of a hash of things when it came to getting the Enterprise’s chief engineer up there. The first time it tried, the rocket crashed and Scotty ended up not in the Andromeda Galaxy but just outside Santa Fe, in New Mexico. Happily he was found, and earlier this year he was launched again from a Pacific atoll. But that went wrong too when the rocket exploded, sending the Canadian actor into the sea, where, one day, he will probably crash head-on into Derick Redfern. Almost certainly, this is not what either man would have wanted.
I should