I often think about death, most particularly those awful throbbing seconds before it, that tiny glance of moment where you – you, your brain, you id and your ego, they all realise together that this is the last breath, and flood your body with adrenaline – that creeping feeling up your body, toes to throat, of the last of the life of you escaping. And I always think: that sounds bad. Dying, I think, I could cope with. But the few seconds of panic just before death: no, not for me. That doesn’t sound fun at all.

Thankfully I have devised the perfect way to die, and all I need is a basketball court, like 200 guns and a bunch of lasers.

So first you get a basketball court. I figure like a basketball court at a secondary school over summer, that sort of thing. Somewhere you can really let loose, and also die. Where you won’t be interrupted or anything like that. Put some bulletproof metal down at the half court line. That’s when you get your 200 or so guns: rifles, pistols, anything with a decent medium-range, anything that can splatter shrapnel through your head and guts. Aim all the guns at the half court line. Figure out some sort of relay system so they all go off at once.

And here’s what you attach that trigger to: the basketball hoop. But you use detection lasers or whatever so, if the rim shudders or vibrates in any way, the guns do not go off. The guns only fire if you get a perfect swoosh.

Please, take a moment to imagine your death:

You, having driven your car off the end of a pier in a jealous rage after you find your wife in bed with her lover, whisky drunk and crying, crying and snotting, and veering, you steer the vehicle off the pier and into the sea, where the cold water hits up your nose like concrete, or—

You, having turned up two minutes to closing at Chick-fil-A, order their most expensive and complex chicken meal, the one that means the already overstretched and overworked staff have to fire up the fryers again that they had just started wiping down to make it, and they hand it to you with surly brows 15 minutes later, and yeah yeah the meal is good and everything – big up the Polynesian sauce – but also something seems off, somehow, you swear one of the patties was pink in the middle, and so it turns out to be, a crippling case of E. coli, you bent and doubled by your toilet, all night and all day, depleted of fluids, I mean it is spraying out of both ends of you like a Catherine wheel, and you are exhausted, and coughing, and pale, and losing you are pretty sure blood, and there is the acrid taste of vomit in your nose, and you are going light headed, dizzy, and hold on, is this it, are you d—

You, having lost all your riches on a single 32 red blackjack bet at a high rolling casino, you out of your mind with that one, you thought it would be a thrill but you lost it all, you flew to Las Vegas for this, you were seduced by the glitz and the glamour and the free Scotch and the low-plunged dress-wearing women, how will you tell your wife the house is gone, how will you look her in the face, and you are on the top floor of The Palazzo, full tux, and you think you will flutter to the ground but in practice it feels overwhelming, the ground rushing up to meet you, no stop, you didn’t mea—

Or my way, where I spend a relaxing hour or two trying to score perfect swooshes, because scoring a perfect swoosh is the most awesome feeling not only in sport but in all of life, it is a hundred thousand orgasms at once, it is winning every lottery in the world, and yeah alright it’s taken me a few hours of rim bounces and straight up air balls to get here and I’m sweating a little, slightly clammy, but I can feel myself warming up, it’s coming, and bounce, bounce, arch the toes, bounce, this one feels good, oh this one looks good, oh it’s marvellous, oh my god, it’s dipping, it’s dipping, and—

Swoosh

And for one perfect second I feel elation.

And then the guns explode my body into atoms.

Who in the world knows best how to die? It is me. I know best how to die. Golby: 3; Life: 0.