I would stop working out right away. I wouldn’t lift another weight, I wouldn’t run another mile. I would sit on my ass and eat as many cookies as I could find.

It would be too late to write my autobiography. I guess I would drink coffee and talk with my friends. Hopefully we could do some jamming as well that would be recorded. I think it would be quite an emotional moment. I would definitely be playing flute. Flute is the instrument of death in a way.

Let’s pretend I’ve been training for my pilot’s licence. I’d like to take off in a two-seater sea plane from the loch in Mull and land it expertly in the little boating lake at Heaton Park. Which interestingly has a pair of my spectacles at the bottom of it from my last day at school in 1990.

I think that dying might bring about a profound loneliness. I don’t feel lonely in life, but I do think this would be a very hard discovery at the end. Assuming there might be a time of consciousness, I think that serious medication might be a help. Not to put me out, but to smooth things over. The last time I had surgery, the anesthesiologist visited me in Recovery and gave me a sheet of paper on which was listed all of the drugs he had administered. I was glad to get it after the surgery, since I went down the list thinking, That’s what killed Michael Jackson, that’s what killed Prince. I don’t take recreational drugs, never did, but I would like to have the option of taking the edge off of fear. People I love at my bedside—I don’t see that being a comfort, but a reminder of who I’ll be losing. Music might be welcome. I could imagine wanting to hear Jorma Kaukonen sing “Genesis.”