Being able to bring your father's body to UK

I tend to agree Malcolm, we are not the flesh, we are the dynamic electro-chemical pattern that moves through the flesh and that ceases at the moment of death and shortly after death that mind has left the building, flickered to nothingness.

I would want my family to keep some DNA kept though in case they had arguments with governments to answer in future.

There is a school of thought that no one is really dead until all trace of collective memory of that person is gone, a bit of you lives on in all your friends and relatives, they think about you so part of you still exists in the landscape of the mind.

People who make great achievements like Isaac Newton are in a sense still alive in the minds of all of us, it's a very low grade life it does not allow for awareness but they are still there, my friend Smithy died from pneumonia aged 49 back in 2006, I was in Manila at the time, broke my heart he was a useless bastard but very very bright a really intelligent smart man, this post keeps him alive in a small sense, he achieved some minor fame by competing in the 15 to 1 programme on TV, he got to the last round on his instance of the program it was a close thing the bloke that beat him won only because Smithy got a simple question about a type of window wrong

I still have the recording of that episode and I sometimes watch it to bring my old friend back to life both on screen and in my mind, he was really ill by that time, when I am gone and that recording is gone that is when he truly dies.

This is him, our friend Kenny had bought him a flight lesson for his birthday when I took this photo.