Dialogue: Sorry, Grim Reaper, I've got 18 years of soap to use first

By JOE BENNETT

The reaper's trying to put the wind up me but he's wasting his time.

Everywhere I go I hear him sharpening his scythe with a noise like fingernails on a blackboard but I don't give a fig.

What he doesn't understand is that I have unfinished business. I mean to outlive my soap.

In 1992 the first XI at a school at which I was teaching decided to go to Australia to get beaten. They needed money to get there, so the entrepreneurial daddy of the wicketkeeper bought them, as one does, a containerload of Indonesian soap.

It was called GIV and it was the colour of dung. He sent the boys out to sell it by the box load. Each box held 48. I bought three boxes. That's a gross of soap cakes. Today, after nine years, I finished the first box.

The stuff's still as good as the day it was made - which isn't really that good - but I intend to use it all. Call me mean, call me stubborn, but it's become a quiet obsession with me, an obsession that should please the dingbats who insist that the secret of life is goal-setting.

There's something about the mute durability of this mass of GIV, the patience with which it merely squats in my cupboard and waits, that excites my competitive urge. I have 18 more years of GIV in my cupboard and I intend to take them.

But the reaper insists in offering me warnings. Only today I went to visit an old friend who isn't old but is in hospital. Two days ago at work he developed hot flushes as if he'd just drunk five pints of Guinness in a sauna. Ten minutes later he was in the cardiac unit having a bottle scourer shoved up an artery in his thigh.

Apparently a bit of something had dislodged from the wall of something else, jammed up against his ventricles and starved his heart of blood. If he hadn't been near to a hospital full of clever medicos with all the gadgets, he'd have been reaped.

As it was, he was able to sit cheerfully up in bed while the white-coated ones went at his plumbing. Furthermore - and I envy him this bit - the whole exercise was played out on a wide-screen television beside the bed and he was allowed to watch his own innards being painlessly reamed.

He said that all that was lacking was the slo-mos and a beer.

Anyway, he's now condemned to a life of margarine but is otherwise hunky dory and no more likely than you or me to suffer a recurrence. Apparently the medicos were just a little miffed during the post-op interrogation of his lifestyle to discover that he didn't smoke, jogged a lot and drank that hideous green milk.

It seems the docs still believe in Sunday School notions of death being the wages of sin rather than the wages of living. They are wedded, the darlings, to the principle of cause and effect, which is all very well in the test tube but a little less than precise in the big wide world of experience.

Naturally I got great vicarious excitement from someone else tap-tapping on death's door. We all know in theory about time's winged chariot but this chap had come nose to nose with its radiator grille.

I drove home from the hospital with scythe-sharpening noises ringing in the skull, made a cup of coffee, checked the e-mail and got another dose of the Grim One.

A friend in Germany had written to tell me she'd been flattened by a BMW. It left her prone and all unnoticed on the autobahn with the life dripping out of her.

But then who should stroll along but her hairdresser, and he of the combs and curlers did the needful, stemming the blood, summoning the ambulance and insisting on holding her hand all the way to the hospital and then all through the night.

She couldn't speak too highly of Herr Dresser, and I can understand that because she, like my pal with the ticker, is going to be fine.

At the same time I couldn't help thinking that if my local barber - an artist immediately recognisable by the blood on his apron - were to do the same for me, I doubt if I'd want to pull through.

So, anyway, as I say, the evidence is clear that the reaper's on the prowl in my vicinity, but he's whistling in the wind.

I am measuring out my life in boxes of GIV and I am confident they'll see me through to indoor bowls and slippers.

What's more, I'm going to send a cake of GIV to each of my shaken friends. I shall tell them to use it slowly.