If I live as long as my father, I’ll be checking out on 9 December 2017. Since every man in my family drops dead of a heart attack at a ridiculously young age, it’s not inconceivable. I mean, obviously the chances of me dying on precisely that day are tiny, but it’s my ballpark figure.
This faces me with big questions. Given that I’m probably croaking soon anyway, should I try smack? (I mean, try it properly: the only time I was handed a heroin pipe, by a professor, I was far too scared to inhale.) Do I need to worry about my miserably empty pension pot? Is there a God? And if there is, should I stop being so monstrously selfish? Big questions, as I say, but I still shunt them to the back of my mind.
What I can’t ignore is the memento mori of my 3,000 classical CDs. Music obsesses me: you should hear the chorus of ‘Goodness me! Is that the time?’ if I raise the subject at a dinner party. But, as the shadows lengthen, I’ve been feeling guilty about the laziness of my listening. There must be so many fine works — Josef Suk’s Asrael symphony, for example — that I may have already heard for the last time without realising it, and without having absorbed them properly in the first place. Bad musical hygiene, you might call it.
Because classical music is my one unfeigned enthusiasm, I feel this weird moral obligation creeping over me: to prioritise my listening so I can go to my death…well, screaming for a priest, probably, but also satisfied that I didn’t overlook music that could have enriched my life.
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