My Death Waits for me on a Polished Wooden Floor

I have had a vision of how I will die in what doubt will come to be seen in suspicious circumstances. I will not bow out whilst on journalistic duties with a bullet in my back in Belgrade. No. My death waits for me on a polished wooden floor.

In the months after I breathe my last, conspirologists will argue it is just not plausible that I died after getting out of bed in an unseemly rush, spectacularly slipping and cracking my head open. On some obscure part of the net, there will be those that claim that I would never be so careless as to die in some bizarre bedclothes wrapped around the ankle accident. They will even put forward endless proof that I never got out of bed at lightning speed in my life.

Others will mutter that it was odd that I died in a part of London that someone very close to the author had already considered ‘too genteel’ for him. At least one conspirologist will point out the accident happened just before a new official statement about the death of Prince Diana was due to be made. Those that try to suggest there was a sexual element to the death or a mystery foreign woman involved will be rightfully derided as the worst type of conspiracy fantasists.

This is the fate of anyone who has written the sort of books I have. You will die from a notably dumb domestic calamity. The conspirologists will take the irritating grit of discrepancy in the stories of those trying to spare your blushes and produce a black pearl of conspiracy. It will be believed, because in the end, no one can credit you are that stupid as to fall and kill yourself on the polished wooden floor of a bedroom.