Oblivious to the event or on the brink of a genuine religious conversion.

Showing off onstage, with everyone laughing and applauding.

That process depends on what you are dying of. The body can fail in ways that are extremely distressing, slowly and painfully, demanding much stoicism, or it can switch off with little more than a flash of dizziness. In my family we seem to have been uncommonly lucky in that respect. There was the 82-year-old uncle who was at a meet of the Norwich Stag Hounds, enjoying a drink with friends, when crash! And he fell off his horse, dead. There was the cousin in her eighties who fell dead as she was filling a kettle to make tea, and the other cousin, 98, who slipped away so gently that the sister who was holding her hand didn’t realise that she had stopped breathing.

And even if my voice goes before I do, I shall continue to write polemics against religious delusions, at least until it’s hello darkness my old friend. In which case, why not cancer of the brain? As a terrified, half-aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be “me.” (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.)

As someone who left the world around me a little kinder and less hierarchical.

I’ve had cancer three times, but never felt close to death except when I walked between parked cars on my street and a car sped past my nose.

First a horse rancher, then a dancer.

I’m walking down a street in New York, the sun is shining, I’m on my way to see friends who are chosen family—and I’ve just written a couple of pages that I like.

I behaved badly with two old lovers. Years later, when I took one to lunch to apologise, it made it worse.

Dr Denis Mukwege, because he is to sexualised violence against females what Mandela was to apartheid.