Euan ferguson biography of martin

Death: The Great Adventure. Either the most exciting sentence ever written – if, um, true – or one spitting bitter, sarcastic brimstone, probably written near the writer's end, while surely rather scared and angry.

And how we approach the end, for most of us do have the time to "approach" it, if we're not so unbearably unfortunate as to be mown down in a random instant, can say a lot about how we have lived our lives.

About 1,800 people will die in Britain today.

Euan ferguson biography of martin

Worldwide, 70,000 over a 12-hour span this Sunday. Dying is something we, as a species, do a lot, even if we keep evolving better ways to keep from doing so. It's all around us, not least just under our feet. Where the National Gallery now stands, on what was once a tiny burial ground for St Martin-in-the-Fields, an estimated 70,000 bodies – about the same as our worldwide death toll today – are packed on top of each other.

They were packed on top of each other in diff