Come on, let's have a blast before breathing our last

MAXIMS for modern life: Live each day as if it were thy last.

This is capital advice, this is precisely the way we should be approaching the distinguished things that our lives are.

Taking today, Monday, and living it as advised, we shall rise as early as possible. Conscious as we are of the brevity of our last day, we shall wring significance out of our lives with the vigour of a housewife wringing out a bath towel.

We shall spend as long as we can (about 20 minutes) in intense prayer to make contact with the universal springs of energy. Become one with the sun twinkling in the colonies of leaves in the imperial trees. Make confession to the street beneath the flat, and to the neighbours beside the flat and to the sanitation engineers taking rubbish away from the flat.

Rejoice, and so forth.

Repent of the things we have done and wonder about the things we have left undone. Consider the biblical instruction: 'Whatsoever thou doest, do with thy might' - that's very important.

Wonder if we can face the extinction without experiencing cocktails at the Ritz with an actress in lip gloss and split skirt and with a mouth like Isabelle Adjani's.

In the absence of a tomorrow, there are more loose ends to be tied up. So let us take immediate delivery of an American Express card with no credit limit and book a limo with satellite dish and minibar to take us to work, where we spend a half-hour sending cheques to all our debtors and invoices to all our creditors.

As time is moving smartly along, let us interrupt our employer, who now appears a fat little berk profiteering from the waste of our days.

Summarising our feelings for him, we fork our fingers into his eyes and snap them under his nose, and this surprises the bankers he is meeting with but has a benevolent effect on the general level of karma.

Back in the limo, we pray in order to make contact with the rhythms of the universe. During a moment's meditation, we might see with hallucinogenic clarity the light in the plane trees beckoning to the light in the back of our minds.

Buy a million shares in a British industrial fund and sell them savagely short. Buy 10 million shares on margin within the account in an Asian telecommunications fund and use them as leverage to buy a provincial property company and order it to replant Wiltshire in druidic forests. Have a bottle of brandy (we've got to get drunk - at least we won't have to worry about a hangover).

Check the time. It is getting on, but we have accomplished much under our new philosophy that would have taken many years under our previous regime of procrastination and prevarication. Yes, we've changed jobs and replanted Wiltshire for a start.

What other things have we left undone? Sent a wrecking ball round to Jeremy Beadle's house, kidnapped certain members of the Cabinet and kept them in a cellar with bags over their heads, and now it's time for lunch.

At San Lorenzo, pray intensely for as long as we're able (about 12 minutes), confess and so forth, establish contact with the mega- rhythms of the cosmos and make a proposal to a lunching princess in lip gloss and with a mouth like Isabelle Adjani's. (Tried living each day as if it were your last? Come on, darling, you know you'd love it.) As she demurs, flash your credit card.

After the business of the day, we use the afternoon for pleasure. Write poems. A novel. Or, as the day is wearing on, a publishing synopsis of a novel. Or, as we want to be free by teatime, dictate a novelisation of a television drama series involving socially decrepit police officers and then do the proper thing and throw it in the fire.

Come to the evening lamenting the physical restrictions of bodies. (See you, Princess]) Revile the gates of perception that lock out so much of the universe's information. Cleanse the gates with a multi-dose of psychoactive chemicals. Feel the pleasure of God rushing through our arteries in divine effervescence.

Then let us run naked in the street repudiating our past life. Stand outside an ex-lover's window and denounce her to the world because she ran off with someone younger and better looking than ourselves merely because he had a Maserati and a million pounds invested in Asian telecommunications companies.

Denounce our friends to the Inquisition for their sins of pride, sloth, lust, etc, and call the police to our house with megaphones and a thematic laser display illuminating how the world will end in fire, and make phone calls in an Irish accent to the House of Lords to alert them to the fact and then go to sleep in a police cell, bruised but happy.

Having lived Monday as if it were our last, everything's perfect - as long as we are dead on Tuesday.

Miles Kington is on holiday.