I've done my 40 minute run every other day for over a week now, partly, I suspect, because I want to see how my old friend Dead Crow is getting on. I have to say he's not getting on too well any more, mainly resembling one of those fossils of pre-historic bird creatures: flat, squashed and feathery. Today the only thing that took him out of 2 dimensions was a lone feather which was sticking up at 90 degrees to the rest of the remains, as if the bird was giving the finger to the world that didn't care about his demise. But I cared Dead Crow. I cared more about you in death than I did in life. You don't know what you've got until it's splatted on the verge and no one has bothered to bury it.
You may be the most documented dead bird from the 21st Century.
I quite like the idea of being fossilised and fingers crossed it might happen to me sometime. Becoming a fossil is the ultimate way to stick it to your peers and rivals. Sure, you might not have achieved much in life and lived an eminently forgettable life, but if you happen to just fall into the right mud pit or bog or be consumed by some lava, then you could become practically immortal. Long after your contemporaries are gone and forgotten you'll be all that is remembered from your generation and possibly from the history of your species. I hope my crumpled old face will be staring out of one of the cases of some futuristic alien or evolved cockroach museum and there will be a little smile playing across my lips. Because all those people I've come second to in my life will be nothing but dust blowing on the breeze and I will be held up as a prime (maybe only) example of humanity.
Of course one day the evolved cockroach museum will also fall and disappear, but with luck it will fall into a mud put or bog or be consumed by lava so that the fossil of my fossil can be found after even more eons of time have passed and I will live (in the broad sense which encompasses being dead) until the sun explodes and maybe beyond that if some alien is so taken with my image that he takes it away with him to another galaxy or Universe. I might be all that survives from this entire Universe. And so I think that will make me a bit better than Hilary Kay. Yeah enjoy your Mastermind trophy you cheating harridan. I am going to be the most famous thing in this entire Universe. By dint of dying in the right place.
Wanna swap Hilary. I bet you do. And actually, OK. Let's swap. Please let me have the trophy.
I may never be an immortal fossil and my dead crow probably won't be either. But he's now been immortalised in a blog that is going to be stored in the British Library and which might be read by someone who chances across it in 500 years time. Which is pretty good work for a crow, whose only skill was to not stay alive and then not be buried. And not a bad work for someone who's only skill is to make the death of a bird form the basis of about half a dozen blogs.
