Last Word - Radio 4
Unreliable Memoirs - Radio 4
GIVEN that this year is in its dying throes, perhaps it's a time to look back and remember those no longer with us.
Some of them, like the funny, intelligent, witty, poetic Clive James lingered a lot longer than they really thought they might.
He wrote Japanese Maple as a final farewell poem when he received a diagnosis of terminal leukaemia in 2014.
It's a very poignant, beautiful poem and it went viral on the internet.
In it, he predicted that when the Maple tree in his garden turned to flame in the Autumn, then that would be the end for him.
Only it wasn't.
He had "written himself into a corner", he later confessed and felt a bit embarrassed to be still knocking about through the following summer watching that flaming Maple again.
He got a lot more time too - he died this year.
You can hear him in Last Word, the radio obituary programme which offers a true taste of other people's lives.
James was so very funny. His television column was a masterpiece in wit.
Who else would describe Barbara Cartland 's masacara-ed eyes as looking like "the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff" and Arnold Schwarzenegger as "a brown condom full of walnuts"?
But there was an intense and serious side to him too that shines through in his poetry.
You can hear more from him this week too.
Book of the Week is Clive James's Unreliable Memoirs as read by the man himself.
Perhaps it's an age thing but I'm addicted to reading obituaries and listening to Last Word.
Perhaps because the dearly departed are more my generation.
The Last Word website offers too many familiar names - David Bellamy, Gay Byrne, Deborah Orr, Toni Morrison, Jacques Chirac, Ivan Cooper.
It makes for sobering but fascinating listening at a time of year when you want to raise a glass to those who have gone before us and all the riches they brought to our lives.
