Death - one of life's less enjoyable certainties

'm going to die. Hopefully not before I've finished writing today's column but at some future point I will throw a seven. Just like you, dear reader, and everyone else.

- ANDREW HAIGH

It’s a fact. One of two certainties in life - death and Rachel Reeves’s hairdo fund. Curiously, the former is the only way I know of avoiding the latter.

And though my demise would leave a literary genius-shaped hole in your preferred newspaper — one day there'll be something or somebody else here sprinkling bon mots.

Maybe it will be my obituary. In which one of my peers will tell you what a good egg I was and how I'll live on in the minds of those whose lives I’ve touched with my words. This is called artistic licence.