Our friends are sad and miss us for a bit but, hopefully, they find other people at the party.

Oh, man. Well, I hope when we die, it’s the same as before we were born. No one’s really frightened of that enormous, infinite blackness before we were born. No one sits there thinking, “Oh, God, how awful. I was nothing.” So I don’t really see why we should be frightened of that after we die, as long as it is black. I really don’t want to be up there on a cloud playing a harp, meeting some of the people I’ve hated in my life. I can’t imagine a greater nightmare. That would be hell, in fact.

What I expect to happen is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. I am comforted by Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes. Those are mental units: thoughts, ideas, gestures, notions, songs, beliefs, rhymes, ideals, teachings, sayings, phrases, clichés that move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body. After a lifetime of writing, teaching, broadcasting and telling too many jokes, I will leave behind more memes than many. They will all also eventually die, but so it goes.

We finally get to be with Jesus, face to face.

I can always see two points of view, which makes it hard to have a row.

My parents died within four days of each other. I was engulfed as I ran from one bedside to another.

For the words to fly from my fingers as just occasionally they do.

I bumped into an old schoolteacher and her even more ancient and deaf sister, and she shouted to her, “Remember Esther? Now she writes books … ABOUT HERSELF.”

An inability to see the other side.

Small, determined, lucky.