Ten minutes, 38 seconds.

Ten minutes, 38 seconds. There's a phrase for you. I have just bought a book with that title and it's got me thinking.

I have only read a few pages so I can't give an opinion on the book but Ten minutes, 38 seconds is the length of time it takes your brain to die after you die. How they know this, I have no idea but it's worth thinking about.

I remember in LA I drove a friend of mine to visit her husband in hospital and as we drove away she got a phone call from the same hospital; it was to tell her that her mother had just died. She went straight up to her mother's room at the hospital because, she said, she wanted to get there before her mother actually went. She was talking about spirits and that the soul of her mother would still be there.

She came back to me after a short while and I believe she believed she had caught the spirit.

The other thing I heard was that the very last bit to go from your brain is your earliest memory. I can understand that in a way as that is the time when we are still living in a world of wonderment, seeing things for the first time and having the luxury of being naive and not caring who knows we have never been there before. That is opposed to someone who likes to pretend they know the place, knows the best way to get there and those are the people who do get lost.

I remember when I went to India the woman who was a member of our party was absolutely amazed by me because I wanted to see everything. I asked what certain tubes were, what they were for and nobody laughed at me. One of the other people knew everything – he hadn't been there before either but he told us that we were going through the Western Ghats and that they are a mountain range that runs parallel to the western coast of the Indian peninsula, located entirely in India. It was way before the Internet (where I got that bit of info from) so he'd looked it up in a book before the journey but it was me who was experiencing the wonderment and excitement of India.

The thing he didn't do was to try some Indian food before leaving for India so he spent most of the time being ill – this was, of course, after eating fish'n'chips as opposed to the local bill of fare.

The 10 minutes and 38 seconds has fascinated me since I heard the phrase and I was thinking, as I walked down the street the other day, that if I dropped dead at that particular moment with the garbage laying around the street and bits of rubbish being discarded that I would be experiencing the worst things of modern life with my 10 odd minutes.

By the way the 38 seconds was put on by the author so it's just 10 minutes.

Some of the things of modern life that disturb me is the rush to get everywhere quickly. Someone knocked my wife over at Baker Street Tube Station running for a train on the Jubilee Line. Now when you think that the Jubilee Line has a train every one minute why would the guy run to save one minute?

I was having a cup of coffee last week with a pal and I told him I'd been to Mousehole in Cornwall (pronounced Mowzel); he asked what I did there and I told him nothing – and that's what I went there for. Five and a half hours on the train which gave me plenty of time to read my book and then five and a half hours back. Wonderful! Read: have a sleep: look out the window, have a snack and another read. What more could I want? Then to think about that man who ran into my wife to save one minute. And I actually did nothing. No schedule, no itinerary no nothing. My wife would go down to breakfast at 8.00 and I would stay in the fart sack till she came back with The Guardian – I'd have a browse then walk to another fishing village called Newlyn for a late breakfast – I have a very late breakfast every day which I usually eat sometime after lunch.

My wife would take the tiny bus to meet me and took the photo, above, of me arriving one day.

At Newlyn I saw the fisherman statue by a local artist called Tom Leaper. The statue shows a fisherman casting his line as the boat arrives in port. It was built to honour dead fishermen with over twenty local men having died fishing since 1980. Here's the photo I took of it.