The Latter Days of Alex

2007-12-05T14:47:00.000Z

Check out Henrik Ulstrom and his dodgy taxi service http://henrikulstrom.blogspot.com/

I've got a terrible, terrible cold today

2007-11-26T22:31:00.000Z

Ache, cough, splutter, curse. A triple Lemsip with honey and Famous Grouse hardly begins to blur the edges. It's been down-hill now for two months. Couldn't even beat porky Jim Ferg at bad-minton tonight.

Only ten days since the last viral assault, and once again my defences are crumbling like old cake. Plus I've got a nasty bit of conjunc-tivitis. What's that all about? An immune system that's in total Gordon*, that's what. It's bleak. I'm finalising the will tonight.

*Gordon Brown - meltdown

How to die

2007-11-23T15:39:00.000Z

Dying elegantly, graciously, memorably... I'm turning my thoughts and the efforts of the research team (thanks guys, sure you'll land proper jobs once I'm gone...) to this important topic.

Meanwhile the slow progress on the funeral-planning is worrying. Time is running out. Each step we take is towards the grave etc, etc...

So what is the worst poem about death?

I've always loathed honey-addict Rupert Brooke and his noble corner-bagging. Not in my back paddock, mate. It's full up!

And the worst song about death? Seasons in the Sun? Knocking on Heaven's Door?

Suggestions, please, for planning an anti-funeral...

Bad funerals

2007-11-23T15:38:00.000Z

Deathics

2007-11-18T09:51:00.000Z

Less purple a death

My younger, greener brother Dan is very concerned with negativising his carbon footprint. (See Harnessingmymethane where you can read how he plans to lose half a shoe size by learning to read in the dark.)

Dan is not happy with my funeral arrangements, so far. He has pointed out that I could be more useful after I die.

My father plans to be buried under the rose garden, but, excitingly, the technology now exists to turn corpses into fuel. Reclaim your own carbon! Apparently 100 lbs of human fat will make 20 gallons of usable diesel-type fluid.

I could use my own self to, say, fuel the central heating for a top wake in a draughty place. I could probably power a spit-roast, too.

Or my mortal remains might provide the bio-diesel for a trip-of-a-lifetime sailing holiday for my friends on luxury yacht Spirit of Kenbane (see pic above). Mourning moments and contemplation-halts would be worked into the itinerary, but there'd be a lot of laughs, too, and some surprises!

For more details on the classic Ohlson 38 sloop Spirit of Kenbane and information on how to charter her, skippered or bareboat, at special rates only available to readers of this blog please contact Cap'n Dan or, if I'm still alive, me.

Competition time!

2007-11-12T10:21:00.001Z

Checking out the styles: Adam likes a neo-classical look. I'm keen on the old-fashioned"crucifix", a common symbol of the Christianity religion.

I need an obituary.

I've asked a couple of pros I know to have a go at a first draft, but I thought - why not throw the job open? How hard can it be? So, let's get eulogising. There will be a small but poignant bequest in the will for the obituary I like best.

I'll post some bullet-points of my career and life highlights, a sort of Brodie's Notes of Me. But if you want to start right away, there's lots of info you can get through Google, obviously. Please note though that many of the seedier and frankly silly stories there almost certainly concern the other Alex. I can still sue, up to the last day.

On Saturday I went cruising graveyards with the family, looking for inspiration. Such fun. I was very taken with a double cross grave (see the picture above). It's a nice retro look, don't you think? One day there could be room for Ruth, if she plays it right and stops blogging against me.

Crucifixes - a problem for a humanist? Don't think so. They're not really "Christian", anymore, just as Candle In The Wind isn't an Elton John song now. Both are universal artefacts. And overused, in death situations.

Talking of which, should I have Candle sung at the funeral with the Marilyn Monroe lyrics, or the Princess Di/England's Rose rewrite? Think the lattter are a bit cheesy, and, frankly, I've got so much more in common with the big M than poor sad Di.

Not sure who should sing it. My sisters, who have the voices of angelic Winehouses? Though they would have to do their bit after Alex Linklater performs Nights in White Satin, in order not to put him off.

Adam, I suspect ,will want to sing The End (Beautiful Friend) by the Doors, accompanying himself on imaginary guitar.

Misery-lit publishers, sod off!

2007-11-10T09:35:00.000Z

Clinical update
Temp 35.6 degrees at 3am - near hypothermic
Pathology no blood test results till Monday because the GP surgery is closed for the weekend! Like death works a five-day week.
Demeanour angry - so alive
Drug cocktail bacon and nurofen

Ruth (left): losing her interior monologue

Knew it! A mere 36 hours after starting this blog about my punch-up with the big D the first grasping book publisher has waddled up, waving his chequebook. Vulture.

You can't catch a cold these days, without someone bidding for 100,000 words in journal form in time for Xmas '08. Throw in some quirky boarding-school abuse memories (see alexschooldays ) and it's HarperCollins on the email, Random House leaving Comments - like staphylococci in an English casualty ward.

Get this, publishers! My demise is open-source, OK? No more of your dead-wood media tyranny. That's just so over. So Bush.

So is blogging, of course. In the Guardian today Marina Hyde rightly calls for a cull of blogs, with a target of reducing Britain's current 9 million bloggers by 90%. She says this will have to be done through legal sanction up to and including imprisonment, but I think that's too drastic: simply cutting the broadband links to their homes will do the trick.

Too much? I don't think so. Look: my wife (pictured above) has started a blog, too, a full two days after me! It's called wifeofdyingblogger. Thus her gentle bedside solicitude is now as the breezes of summer: where once she was Florence Nightingale, now she's the 3am Girls. The most basic question about my illbeing is charged with steely, profit-sniffing inquisitiveness.

God knows what this will do for my possible recovery.

So if she wants to talk to me she should do so through my agent, Stan, who can set up the neccessary copyright-acknowledging apparatus.

As Marina says - you're risking losing your interior monologue. You're invading your own privacy. Right, Ruth? That means you.

Slowly down that good hill

2007-11-09T10:09:00.000Z

Clinical update

Temperature: 38 and a bit, rising and falling. Like a yo-yo in treacle

Drug cocktail: codeine, paracetamol, vitamin C and Assam tea

Pathology: blood test results still not in

Demeanour: pale as old ivory in this morning's wintry sunlight (though there's noone here to look at me , of course)

A troubled night. At 2am I was - in one of those moments of piercing clarity you get in the ebb of a fever's tidal flow - painstakingly deleting all the stupid music cluttering up my lap -top. Goodbye, Jamie Cullum; adios, the White Stripes.

The fact that the blood test results still aren't in may mean that the falciparum variant (Haitian sub-genus) is so complex they've had to call in more white coats. Or... What? Did the virus escape when they opened my test tube? Are the entire Royal Infirmary lab staff now lying gibbering on the floor, tearing at their skulls as they scream for intravenous ibrupofen? We'd probably have heard about it on the radio.

I feel too frail to write much more.. But let me say how very buoyed I've been by the expressions of love, suppport and sympathy that have poured in since I started this blog yesterday. So very heartening - do look at the comments. Among the messages these stand out:

Alex Linklater's promise to sing Nights in White Satin at my funeral

My mother Alice Renton's sure-fire way to tell whether someone's really ill or not. You ask them these questions: "Have you had a drink recently - I mean a proper one? Did you enjoy it? Or do feel you definitely do not want one tonight?"

James Fergusson's e-mail with an excerpt from Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in a Boat about men talking themselves into thinking they have severe illnesses, like scarlet fever. Hilarious but absurd.

The novelist William Coles's immensely cheering bedroom visit, with two second-hand works of popular fiction. Has anyone not read his The Well-Tempered Clavier, a book that made my wife blush?

Enough. I must gather some strength for lunch.

If I don't have malaria, I may have a severe masculine-variety influenza

2007-11-08T14:20:00.000Z

This is how serious that is: please click here (thanks Ruth) - Man cold

Dr Russell the GP was quite sarcastic when I stumbled through his doorway this morning. But the surgery was taking it very seriously - they gave me an appointment for the same day! I must be really sick. Or living in Scotland.

After he'd taken quite a lot of blood out of me (syringe, not leeches) he said: "Well it'll be great fun if you have got malaria." What can he have meant?

I feel pretty good, though, compared with 4.30 this morning, when I was so feverish that I started this blog. It really does work, going to the doctor. I wonder, if you went when you were feeling really well, would you feel even better? Like after a week in a spa (whatever that feels like)?

Have new painkillers. C0-codamol. Like Distalgesic, but with a lighter top-note.

frightening small boys

2007-11-08T07:09:00.000Z

A little worried that if I do die, I'll be remembered as cruel and tyrannical, especially in boats.

My first blog

2007-11-08T06:26:00.000Z

It's 6.25 am. I'm lying in a broth of night-sweat and bed-life croutons: DVDs, telephones, a thermometer, packets of pills, crumpled New Yorkers and The Weeks, an old and boring William Boyd novel and various species of gadget.

I've been awake since 4.30am, moaning discreetly and trying to remember which pills I popped when. Not that they do anything at all to erode the great pulsing bag of pain behind my eyes. I took my temperature: a satisfying 39.1. I went online to check out the symptoms of malaria. I've clearly got it - look at the photo.

The sweet nurse on NHS Direct with the voice of a teenage Kirsty Wark clearly thinks so too. Though she couldn't say it. I wept a little at the tenderness in her voice as she told me not to go to hospital now but wait till the Doctor's surgery opens. What's really cool about recurrent chronic severe malaria is you get to tidy up the medicine cupboard. Since Saturday I've eaten nearly every pill in there.

If it's cerebral malaria then I will be dead before breakfast, and thus my first ever blog will also be my last. I wonder if anyone will use it for my obituary. I wonder if I'll get an obituary.

Goodbye (just in case).