Being Dead used to be ever so easy. They’d put you in a Box, lower you gingerly into the ground and let you rot in peace. Or if the ground in your town was full, they’d throw you on a fire and let you spend the rest of time in a vase, on your mother’s mantelpiece.

            Now, though in the same way that you can get married underwater or during a parachute jump, you can choose how you wish to be disposed of when you have done dying, for instance, a former navy seals diver called Derrick Redfern was attached to the nose of a torpedo, which was then detonated on the sea bed. This means that now, and for all time, Mr Redfern is part of the Ocean.

            Meanwhile, in Spain, officials at the Cataluña circuit near Barcelona announced that motor racing fans can now be laid to rest at the track. Quite how this will work I don’t know, it’ll certainly be a big nuisance for Mark Webber if he skids in the final corner on Bruce Douglass of Melbourne

            Perhaps they mean that a dead person can be used as part of the tire wall. Or maybe to soak up oil spills.

            Some may argue that if you are used as a crash barrier or detonated on the sea bed, some of deaths dignity is lost. I’m not sure this is so, because I don’t see much dignity in lying in a box with your eyes leaking out of your face either. Far better, surely, to use your liquefying body as a soft landing for racing drivers. And if you wind up in the streams of the ocean, at least you’ll get to see the Caribbean once and a while.

What would i choose? well, Space is Tempting Because there’s no wind, and it doesn’t change, am I’m delighted to report there is indeed a company that will blast your ashes into orbit for just $500. A word of warning, though. While the company managed to get bets of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of star trek, into orbit, it made it a bit of blunder of things when it came to getting the enterprise’s chief engineer up there. The first time they tried, the rocket crashed and Scotty ended up not in the Andromeda galaxy but just outside Santa Fe, in New Mexico. Happily he was found and he was launched (Again) from a Pacific atoll but that went wrong too when the rocket exploded , sending the Canadian actor into the sea, where, one day he will probably crash head-on into Derrick Redfern. Almost certainly, this is not what either man would have wanted.

            I should Also Explain that, if you do manage to get you Loved one in to Low Orbit, they will be a hazard to navigation in the years to come. So don’t come crying to me when what used to be your loved one’s left leg punches a bloody great hole in the died of a space shuttle, killing everyone on board.