Of course the BBC, other television companies and newspapers have obits for all major figures ready and update them regularly. Lots of publishers also have books almost ready to go to the printers barring the last page. I was asked to write one about the Queen Mother – in the past tense – several years before she died. All it needed was a couple of paragraphs about her final few months and the date. Of course, people were caught on the hop with the late Princess of Wales unlike all the guff coming out now about Baroness Thatcher. That's probably been lined up and regularly updated since the 1980s.