When my mother died a few years ago her husband played some Joan Baez music at the end of the funeral as a way of communicating the sort of person that she was and the way she would like to be remembered.

Ever since then I've been wondering to myself what I would like to be played when the time comes for everyone to say goodbye to me.

Music is very important for me - I listen to music a lot while I'm working.

Actually, I think that music is a necessity for programmers that I think a lot of non-programmers struggle to understand. The reason for this is that programming is an activity that alternates between the highly cerebral and the dreadfully boring. Ramp up someone's mind to fever pitch and then give them something dull to do and you are in danger of causing depression. Music is the way that programmers rescue themselves from that. When you're thinking hard you turn it off; when you're committing your thoughts to keyboard you turn it back on again.

Despite the intervening decades I remain principally into 70s music.

The thing about growing up in the 70s was that there was so much good stuff around back then that you couldn't possibly be into it all at the time. I'm catching up with a lot of it now, particularly with the Rolling Stones (loved Black and Blue) and more recently Genesis.

And I think I have found in "Dusk", from the album "Trespass", my Requiem song (assuming Messrs Gabriel and co don't mind me pinching it off them as I'm sure they wrote it for themselves).

Music works, of course, when it engages you emotionally, and when you're considering something of this importance it's going to be a very personal. "Dusk" gets it spot on for me because it communicates the beauty of the tragedy of human existence (if that makes any sense to you).

The beauty of existence comes from its intensity, even if only for a few short moments:

"The scent of a flower,
The colours of the morning,
Friends to believe in,
Tears soon forgotten,
See how the rain drives away, another day."

The finality of life gives it its pathos. I will never see the wonders of the 22nd century and beyond and I wish I could. We are, as the song says in its final line, "passers by, born to die."

And when, finally, a false move by God does destroy me, there'll still be another day, albeit not for me. The leaf may have fallen but the tree isn't broken. I was what I was, loved life as much as I could, even though I knew I wasn't going to be here very long. I wish I could have stayed longer but the option wasn't offered. The world belongs to our children, and then they'll have to pass it on to theirs.

Richard