I had found this autographed copy of Robyn Williams' book for sale at the CWA's tea room and carelessly left it lying beside my emptied plate of scones with strawberry and cream to look for anything else in their Book Nook that may be of interest to me.
When I returned just a short while later, I saw a young girl tentatively fingering it. "You wouldn't be interested in it", I told her. "But isn't he ...?" she wanted to know. "No, he isn't! The one you'd be interested in is the one with an 'i'", I replied. "The one who committed suicide", I was going to add but stopped myself as it would've been too upsetting.
Who could forget the greatest comedian who had ever lived? He had died at his own hands in 2014 at the age of 63 from asphyxia due to hanging. According to his widow, he had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, and had suffered depression, anxiety, and increasing paranoia.
"Losing your marbles" we used to call it. A certain world leader took pride in being able to repeat in the right order 'Person, woman, man, camera, TV' which may go down in history as the only things he got right. My German doctor, who goes by the unpronouncable name of Ziergiebel, asked me to spell 'World' backwards before wanting me to repeat, but in reverse order, the words 'pen, book, paper, table' which he had mentioned to me at the start of our conversation ten minutes earlier. I went one better and gave them to him in German: "Tisch, Papier, Buch, Kugelschreiber. Want me to spell them backwards too?"
I like to think that all that reading will stop me from losing my marbles; however, I doubt that buying more and more books will buy me more and more time to read them all. I just hope they have a comfy armchair and a decent reading light to read them by wherever I'm going next.
