DON'T talk to me about death.
Seriously, I'm sick to wotsname of it. Death is a pain.
It gets on your wick before leaving you without a wick to get on. It taketh away everything. It turneth ye into history. It maketh ye talk like some pillock from the Bible.
But we are, not unnaturally, intrigued by deatheth. What will it be like? Will it be worse than that two weeks in Paella Del Scorchio? And when will it be? I'm a busy man with a diary full of urgent television programmes to watch. So some advance notice would help.
Well, luckily, yonder internet has come up with the goods. I need to qualify that statement so much that, by the end of this article, only the words "well", "has" and "the" will emerge unscathed. But we'll come to that by and by. I'm trying to write an article about death here, and already you're wanting to know how it ends.
Never one to oblige, let us begin at the beginning. An online test has been devised that allows you, the punter, and I, the influential man aboot toon, to peek through rheumy eyes at our mortality.
Let's be clear here: we're talking about a limited timeline. It only gives our chances of surviving the next five years, which you'd think were surely pretty good, as long as we don't go out anywhere or eat anything that tastes suspiciously pleasant. Even then, I wouldn't get your hopes up.
The website under advisement is called Ubble. So, if you're aged 40 to 70, go Google your Ubble. Once you've got one foot in the web, you'll be asked a series of questions - slightly different for men and women - the answers to which will reveal your doom.
The topics are fairly predictable: smoking, diabetes, high blood pressure, walking pace, van ownership. One asks how you rate your own health. Another asks if you've got cancer. We're hardly talking about an ouija board here. Only women are asked about their nerves, as if man the hunter was far too tough for that sort of thing.
Oddly, the questionnaire contains nothing about weight, diet or drinking habits, usually important indicators of whether or not you'll still be blundering about blithely in the year of that Lord, 2020.
Hoping to see 2020 myself, I took the test and, believe me, there's naught for your comfort here. Nobody gets out of this alive. My Ubble age turns out to be 73, 15 years more than my actual age. My five-year risk of dying is 16.8 per cent.
How can this be? Look at me, for God's sake. Sure, the beard adds 10 years. But I'm wearing a checked shirt. What does that tell you? Correct: I'm a man of the great outdoors. I'm Grizzly Blenkinsop, stravaiging hither and - provided I'm wearing the correct millinery - yon. I follow the spoor of poodles being walked in the park. I breathe in lungfuls of clean, fresh air.
Moral of the story? Never answer questions honestly. Taking the test again less honestly I came out at 68. Er, yay.
According to the project's lead researcher, Professor Erik Ingelsson of Uppsala University, Swedenshire, this might indicate I need to change my lifestyle. To what? I'm already known as The Monk. I haven't inhaled a fish supper for weeks and only get drunk once a night.
Seriously, I'm vegetarian and a mostly teetotal gym-goer. But, according to this study, I might as well inject steak pies in my eyes and bathe nightly in Barr's Irn Bru. Maybe it's because I haven't got a van.
According to reports in Her Majesty's Press, the researchers used "complex algorithms" to devise their questionable questionnaire. Yes, that probably explains it.
Apparently, they based their questions on data from half a million volunteers. Half a million weirdos more like, with their brisk walking pace and their lies about never having smoked.
It's a shame that the men's questions, unlike the women's, didn't include one about depression, because I could have said: "I was fine until I started this test."
Fair enough, you're advised not to take it personally, and that the results are only general indicators for the mob. But I wish I'd never encountered this questionnaire. It's like these stories where the crone asks if you want to know your future. "Unhand me, madam," you should say, before waddling rapidly to your van and lighting up an e-cigarette.
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