I’m sitting in a café on Salisbury high street and a frail old man in a big black hat has just told me that he is going to die. “No medicine can prevent it,” says Sir Terry Pratchett, 64, national treasure, author of 54 books and counting, campaigner for assisted dying and professional morbid bastard. “Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom,” he explains.
This is a story about death. Not Death with a capital “D”, that bony guy with the scythe and the sparkling blue eyes who shows up in nearly every one of Pratchett’s 30-plus novels in the Discworld series, swearing and smiling ineffably and being kind to cats. This is a story about death with a small “d” – the inconvenient little fact, the “embuggerance” that has been an implicit feature of Pratchett’s life and work since the author was diagnosed with posterior cortical atrophy, a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer’s, in 2007.
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