I died at seven minutes past midnight, serenaded by Simon & Garfunkel as I plunged to my death.

Hello darkness, my old friend.

The Snake Pass is a scenic but treacherous stretch of road that winds across the moorland between Ladybower reservoir and Glossop. There are steep ravines to one side of this infamous stretch of road and it has a poor accident record. When I was a kid I used to stare out of my dad’s car window and look down at the rusty relics of vehicles that had somehow found their way down there and it seemed unbelievable to me that people would just drive over the edge like that.

There was a serene moment of suspended animation as if dangling from a parachute and I could see every detail of my dashboard; illuminated phosphorescent green and achingly real. A split second before the car exploded I became disengaged – miraculously free from my seat belt – and tugged effortlessly through the roof and upwards as though attached to an invisible bungee cord; catapulted out of the flames like a spiritual phoenix.

I knew the instant that it happened that I was dead.
Out of darkness comes light; and suddenly everything made sense.

The last time I died was in 1952. It was the twenty-fifth of November and we had just returned home from the opening night of Agatha Christie’s Mousetrap at the Ambassadors Theatre. I was seventy-two years old. I lived with my brother in Islington and I died of food poisoning; bad oysters.

The time before that was in 1847; crushed to death in a German coal mining accident. I was twenty-seven years old. And before that was in 1769; I was a French prostitute and I died of syphilis at the age of thirty-two.

My lives so far have been fairly mundane; I have never been famous or significantly involved in any historic events. I have lived through wars, natural disasters and the bubonic plague. I visited Crystal Palace before it burned down in 1936 and I witnessed cannibalism in New Zealand over a hundred years before the Europeans arrived.
It’s too early for me to decide who to come back as next time but I think I’ll wait several decades; I’m not in much of a hurry. With the state of the world at the moment I’ll be interested to see what develops before I throw myself back in to the mêlée. There are a lot more lessons to learn and, as comfortable as things are here, I know that I will feel compelled to gain more knowledge at some point in time.

There’s no hurry.

I have all the time in the universe.

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