High Fidelity # 4

You see those pictures of people in Pompeii and you think, how weird: one quick game of dice after your tea and you're frozen, and that's how people remember you for the next few thousand years. Supposed it was the first game of dice you've ever played? Suppose you were only doing it to keep your friend Augustus company? Supposed you'd just at that moment finished a brilliant poem or something? Wouldn't it be annoying to be commemorated as a dice player? Sometimes I look at my shop (...), and at my regular Saturday punters, and I know exactly how those inhabitants of Pompeii must feel, if they could feel anything. (...) I'm stuck in this pose, this shop-managing pose, for ever (...). I feel as though I made a face and the wind changed, and now I have to go through life grimacing in this horrible way.

Nick Hornby