Sandi Toksvig faces her own mortality Because my life is never less than unpredictable, this coming Saturday I shall be giving the Sandi Toksvig Memorial Lecture as part of a festival in London entitled Death: Southbank Centre's Festival for the Living. I'm sure there are plenty of uncharitable people who would be delighted to give my memorial lecture but not everyone gets to give their own. Naturally, I shan't be talking about myself. If I want to be remembered for anything it's having good enough manners not to be self-centred. I suppose at some time or other we all stop to consider our place in the world. For some it is very clear. When Queen Victoria died today in 1901 she was no doubt confident that her empire would be littered with marble tributes of herself looking marginally grumpy. I don't know what Karl Nessler (who died today in 1951) imagined as his legacy. His contribution to the world was that he invented the perm, which is a hairstyle difficult to replicate in stone. He was buried in New Jersey and one can only hope his fans attached a mechanical arm to his tomb which endlessly moves back and forth in a permanent wave. There is a splendid equality in the fact that we are all required to enter and exit the world stage and there is a marvellous website which tells you where you rank in this unchangeable scheme. I inputted my date of birth and can tell you that when I was born I was the 2,920,563,771st person alive on Earth and the 76,466,378,607th person to have lived since history began. That we shall die is as certain as taxes but what we die of is mostly unpredictable. I had a look at some recent statistics for Britain and was amazed to discover that in 2009, 164 people died of "malaise and fatigue," which I thought we gave up in Victorian times along with "having the vapours." In these days of medical advance, I was also slightly disturbed to discover that 1,223 folk popped their clogs from "unexplained causes." I love life and if I'm going to go I shall want someone to give me a jolly good reason. Historically what unites all cultures and peoples seems to be a desire to have some say about our lives even after we have shuffled off the mortal coil. Wills are often fantastically prescriptive. In 1862, Henry Budd died leaving everything to his son Edward on condition that he never grew a moustache. Jonathan Jackson of Columbus, Ohio, left money and plans for a cats home which included dormitories, a canteen, areas for conversation and an auditorium where the cats were to gather for an hour every day to listen to a man play the accordion. Even the philosophic Plato (who died in 348BC) left his son a farm on condition that he never sell it. Not all legacies bring a spring to the step of the inheritor. In ancient Greece, Eudamidas of Corinth named two friends, leaving his mother to one and the responsibility of finding a husband for his daughter to the other, while in 1395, Lady Alice West left her daughter Johane all her books in Latin, English and French. The latter sounds a nice bequest until you recall that this will was made five years before the death of Chaucer and nearly 80 years before the first book was printed in England. It cannot have been a thrilling collection. I like Aristotle's will. He died in 322BC and his last testament begins "In case death should surprise me..." Death can surprise but in a mix of perhaps misguided manners and an understandable fear of morbidity the British don't often talk about it. The festival challenges that and covers all aspects of death, with my own lecture perhaps more intrigued by some of the unusual ways there are to depart. Take the tailor named Franz Reichelt who believed he'd invented the ultimate parachute. In 1912, he persuaded the authorities that his overcoat-cum-parachute was ready for the ultimate test of throwing himself off the Eiffel Tower. Suffice to say it was not and if you look online you can see his only real success was in inadvertently creating the world's first snuff movie. The audience and I will conclude with a rousing chorus of You'll Never Walk Alone. If people should take one thing away from a memorial lecture it is that it is wonderful to be alive.