Reed reflects on death:
"Death in Ireland is always a celebration of a life that has been well lived. I've been to some fearsome wakes and I've had some fearsome hangovers burying the dead. When I die I want all my friends to have a glorious wake. That's why I've left £10,000 out of my estate to be spent at my local pub. But only those who are crying --and I don't mean shedding crocodile tears-will be allowed in. The solicitor who helped me draw up The Last Will and Testament of Oliver Reed (Mr England) was worried about this clause. He explained to me that these matters have to go to probate and that he couldn't see himself standing in front of a judge in chambers, trying to argue how you can tell the difference between crying and pretending to cry. 'And besides that,' he said, 'does it mean there will have to be some sort of sob check at the door of the saloon bar?' He wanted the clause taken out but I made him leave it in.It's his problem, not mine. My worry is how long I've got before the piss-up that I won't be attending.

* * *

I asked both my grandmothers before they died if they were frightened of death. Granny May said, 'I am not afraid. I think I am bored now. The only thing I regret is leaving behind the people that I love.' The other told me: 'Every day that I wake up I am thankful, but I'm not afraid. Why should I be? When it happens, I shall have a cocktail with Laurence [my grandfather].'

As a youngster with my whole life still before me, I was quite astonished by their attitude towards an event that for them was so near. I suppose that as you get older and your metabolism changes, you get used to the idea of death and it is only youth who is afraid of it. I met many people in that hospital where I worked as a porter who were close to death, yet none who were terrified of the final meeting with it. Those who were frightened were those who were still young enough to run round a football field. When they were very young and could run roung it even faster, death was too far away for it to even cross their minds. The fear comes when you are a little older and you come to man's estate and shut the gates against knaves and thievesmen and start protecting your castle and your attitudes.

When you reach forty, you begin to realize that you know nothing at all and that you had better start learning something fairly quickly. One of the factors we conclude is that we know nothing about death. That's the fear that everybody always questions and usually die before they have been given the answer. So they give up and let their minds dwell on more earthly matters. I think it was King George V who said, 'When's Goodwood this year?' And then died.

* * *

Although I fear death, I am not afraid of the hereafter because I believe very strongly that we don't disappear forever but return through the living. Not reincarnation in the sense generally believed by many, as a new baby and a brand new soul, but living on through the living. I know that my grandfather lives on through me, and as I take a great joy in nature, the trees and the birds and the way that the wind blows, just as my grandmother did, I know that a part of her also lives on through me. It is because of this knowledge that I will never grow old. I shall remain youthful and my metabolism won't change which means that I shall continue to be afraid of death.

Part of my fear is the thought of what is going to happen to my body when life has left it. It is the same fear, I am sure, which decided rich Americans like Walt Disney to arrange for their bodies to be stored in the deep freeze. For I believe that they wanted to be put on ice after death, not so much in the hope that perhaps in a hundred years time science might discover a way of bringing them back to life, but because of the terror of waking up under six feet of earth and being suffocated Edgar Allen Poe style. The advantage of being kept on ice is that if they do wake up, somebody will be bound to spot them blink or hear their teeth chattering.

I have left no instructions for my refrigeration but I do care about what happens to my body when I am no longer in it. I don't want to be laid out for days in my best Douggie Hayward, silk pyjamas, rugger jersey or whatever, and have people gawping at me to see what a dead hellraiser looks like. I don't like the idea of lying there with my insides rotting and my bowels sqeezed clean so that I don't stink.

And I don't want to be a burnt offering, either. I have witnessed cremations. Seen the body enter the flames, start to buck and twist in the heart of the inferno and fry in its own fat until finally the skull, the thickest bone in the body, disintegrates. As my skull is a good deal thicker than most, there will not be time for the flames to shoot out of my eye sockets before it crumbles and only my femur is left and then that, too, joins the communal pile of ashes, some of which will be scooped into a little box, claimed to be mine and sent to my next of kin. My familiarity with all these grisly details makes my fear of waking up just as I am about to slide into the flames a thousand times more terrifying.

Alternatively, I don't want to inherit my six feet of earth so that maggots can have a ball crawling up my nose and out of my mouth. And burial at sea is also definitely out. Who wants to be gobbled up by a big fish and become excrement that gets eaten by a sardine whose excrement is swallowed up by a prawn? I can't say I relish the thought of lying on a lettuce leaf, smothered with mayonnaise, being nibbled at by a pretty girl and then when I have passed through her body, being flushed into a sewer and then into the sea again. I don't want to be permanent shit. I would much rather end up a fertiliser under a sunflower which is eventually made into sunflower seed oil so that instead of nibbling me in her prawn cocktail, the pretty girl will rub me on her bristols as the suns herself on a beach in the Caribbean."

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