PEOPLE seem to be dying like it’s going out of fashion. With the Warhol exhibition now running so successfully in Colchester it got me thinking – maybe in the future everyone will be dead for 15 minutes.

What a year. First Bowie, then Ronnie Corbett, followed by Victoria Wood and hot on her heels Prince. I can hardly keep up.

It’s certainly got me looking over my shoulder I can tell you. I may have dodged the sniper’s bullet so far how much longer can it last?

For those still in the first flush of youth, I have to report whilst in that phase of exuberance, thoughts of one’s own mortality may be entirely absent, but they first puncture the consciousness like a sprinkling of pepper on a tender steak at around the age of 40.

These thoughts steadily intrude with increasing regularity until that tender steak is well and truly buried under a weighty mass of pepper, sauces, additives, anxieties, aches, hypochondria, depression, pain and despair.

When the crumpled, trusted suit comes out of the wardrobe these days, it is not now wedding invites and job interviews which surface but funeral orders.

The ratio of weddings to funerals attendance in recent years has inexorably shifted to the side of death.

It seems I’m constantly surrounded by reminders that our time upon this globe is brief and all these celebrities popping their clogs is not helping. Just this weekend, in amongst this year’s new intake to the eternal city was the marking of a former celebrity’s passing. Some 400 years ago mind. As he so rightly says: Woe, destruction, ruin, and decay; The worst is death, and death will have his day.

William Shakespeare from Richard II (1595) Anthony Roberts is appearing live in Colchester until he dies. Phone the box office for more details.