Momento Mori

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Reflections on one's mortality start at an early age, usually with the death of older relatives, and possibly, pets. As one enters puberty, all manner of morbid thinking enters the mental fray, albeit, largely, in a completely abstract way. However, these feelings of unease never quite escape one's consciousness, however spiritually balanced one would imagine one to be. This applies to those of a religious bent, and probably, I would suppose, to those of an atheist tendency. Even those of us who tread that middle path of [in my case, Zen] Buddhism get the occasional shiver on contemplation of the void. Where there is a human psyche, there is always doubt, always some shred of anxiety. Always worry, however futile and baseless.

I was mulling over such stuff - as I do more frequently these days: approaching my Biblical Three-Score And Ten has lent me a tendency to focus more on morbidity and my demise than I would have thought would be the case, even five years ago, given my glass-half-full approach to existence; and I pulled myself up, whilst studying a module of the IBM programming course I mentioned the other day - the language 'R' for reference - as I was engaged in the usual 'Hello, World!' exercise that everyone does when learning a new programming language.

The thought that struck me was that the first time I ever programmed a 'Hello, World!', was back in 1979, when I worked at Birmingham University [more stuff, blog posts, passim]. But what hit me was that my late French mate and collaborator, Jean-Charles Boude - JC, to us all in the firm and family - who quite acutely and rightly pointed out to me that I understood and could read code, but that I was not a coder - was only three years old when I wrote that first 'Hello, World!' I am sixty-eight, going on sixty-nine; JC has been gone for over five years, now. It puts my mortality into some perspective, methinks...

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