What would you like to leave your children?

So it seems to be my responsibility, particularly to my children, also to my wife and friends, is not to be Pollyanna and pretend everything's okay no one would take me seriously if I said that but it's to be as present in their lives now as I can be so that in years to come, they don't feel either guilty or bad at my having been left out of their lives, that they feel still a very strong not a memory of particular actions but a memory of a complete family rather than a broken one. That seems to be something I can do or try to do.

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.

Exactly what my parents left me: the knowledge of the difference between good and bad and right and wrong. Everything else is entirely up to them.

A sense of the world being full of possibility and it being in their hands to make it a better one.

The best possible understanding of who they are and where they came from.

A book of passwords for all the electrical stuff in the house.

A sense of what’s right, a few quid and some nice paintings.

A deep sense that they will be fine in the world without me.

The wisdom to become who they are in the truth of their spirit.