Deleting contacts

For me, there are only three reasons for deleting one's contacts. Here they are, in order of seriousness: being no longer in touch; having had a terminal falling-out; death. I have to face deleting my dead friend from my email and phone contacts, from my Christmas card and present list, and from my address book. The address book is the worst. What do you do? Tip-pex them out? But you have the nasty, lumpy white patch, like a scabby skin disease, to remind you that they were once there. Tear out the page? No, you'd lose all the other addresses, too. Stick a label over their details? That seems like disrespect, like pulling a sheet over their face. Maybe it's best to buy a new address book, though that means copying in several dozen addresses by hand - and at my time of life, what's the betting that before I get to the end, someone else will have fallen off their perch? Whichever way you do it, you suffer pangs of guilt and grief, and it seems so strange to see them no longer there, but stranger still to keep them. I know that if I don't delete the email address, I will be tempted to send one and see if I get a reply from Somewhere Out There. (Thinks: could this develop into a special service for the bereaved, an equivalent to kiddies writing letters, and receiving them, from a non-existent Santa? Perhaps I should call it Soul Mail.)

I sketched out a plot for a novel once and one of the characters, a sensitive and ruminative old chap, used to start a new address book whenever somebody died. The book was called OFF!, an acronym for Old Farts' Federation, which is what the old boys called themselves. Perhaps this is the right time to begin it and cock a snook at the Grim Reaper.