I have lived for over 73 years. In the last two years, I have become more and more conscious that I am approaching the end of my life. Various parts of me have gone wrong; various parts of me have needed some adjustment or some medical intervention. Today I’m not too bad. My knees are not too sore, my hip is not too sore, my eyes are not hurting, other parts of me are not hurting very much, and I progress.

73 years is, for this little creature, a very, very long time. I’m not convinced that I’ve used my time wisely, but I do know I’ve used it in the only way I could have done, because I know now that I have no free will.

It has been very varied. It’s been a life that has carried me from post-war black and white austerity in the 1950s, through the excitement of the Beatles and rock music and the changes into a sort of colourful world at the end of the 1960s, through watching wars in Vietnam and the Middle East and other places around the world, through finding out about wars that I didn’t know about at the time.

I have been fortunate not to have been conscripted.

I’ve worked with remarkable people. Sometimes I look at my CV and see the places that I’ve worked, and I think about the men and women I’ve worked with—some of them my own age, some of them much, much older than me, most of them I suspect already dead. 

Sometimes I’ve wondered how they went and how they died. I hope they didn’t die in great pain, and I hope they came to accept their end because we’re hurtling through space on this little rock that’s hurtling around the sun, which is hurtling through space itself, and it’s incredibly unlikely that we even existed in the first place. But here we are.

Me with my CV and all those people I worked with. I could draw up another CV of all the people I’ve loved but I won’t do that because it’s unfair to them and probably unfair to me. 

I just wanted to say it’s been a fascinating, challenging, frightening, exciting, varied, and wonderful life, and I hope you all have a life like this. Speak to you soon, I hope. Bye bye for now.