For this week’s challenge, I invite you to breathe new life into the established genre of the end-of-year countdown list.

  . . . rank things and to build coherent narratives out of the chaos of loosely-related events . . . 

Well maybe not a coherent narrative!

Year after year, I keep making this list, but then it gets lost. I’ve tried everything, engraved on stone (wears off in time), golden tablet (stolen, melted down) and eventually into some folk songs (people get the words wrong). Past lives eh? Who’d have ’em? Still, it’s immortality, (no bad thing), coupled with recycling, well that’s a good thing isn’t it?
There’s not many of us around, lots tried, but didn’t have the patience to get the spells right. Plus they got it wrong… you can’t live forever as the same person. Stands to reason. People start to notice, next thing they’re banging on the castle door with their pitchforks and flaming torches. It’s messy, I can tell you.

I won’t do the full list of who I’ve been, can’t be bothered. Some of them were dull anyway. ‘Foot soldier in Napoleon’s army’, yeah right, cold, boring, not enough to eat. I’ll give you a few of my Greatest Hits though. I doubt if this internet thing will outlast a slab of marble, but no one’s going to nick it, are they?

Julius Caesar.
Not bad, had fun with an army, crossed the Rubicon, didn’t really conquer Britannia, did alright in Gaul. Downside, male pattern baldness and some ungrateful folk who stabbed me. I could’ve done without that. Oh yeah, Cleopatra ditched me for Marc-Antony.

Alfred The Great.
And didn’t I put the ‘Great’ into that one! One of my best, took an obscure Saxon prince and got him to found an entire nation. Beat the Vikings too, yeah, don’t believe that burnt cakes nonsense.

Geoffrey Chaucer.
That was fun, all the kings and that were taken, so I went for the writer job. I knocked off a few nice stories, nicked a few off Boccaccio, but what the hell? There I am ‘father of English literature’ and I even got to slip in a few fart jokes. Happy days.

Eleanor of The Acquitaine.
…and of about everywhere worth having as well. I blagged a French king AND an English one…. not too shabby on the CV. The kids were a pain though, always fighting. Richard the Lionheart? Don’t make me laugh… and John, ‘Bad King John’…. what a joke. I outlived most of them though.

Richard the Third.
There was lots of potential in this one, I think I could have taken it further. I got a bad rap though, none of it was true. Alright, there were a few murders, but hey, it’s a Plantagenet thing, OK?

No, you’re guessing right, I didn’t get to be Shakespeare. Nope, popped back as Guido Fawkes that time…. ’nuff said. Seemed a good idea at the time.

Jamie Boswell.
…wrote that one down. Had fun? Ooh yes, read all about it. The first blogger,  for sure.

Look, shush, I was so NOT Queen Victoria. That outfit, puhleez! No, I was Ada Lovelace… shoulda got more Likes for that one, not sure what went wrong. I was cute, clever, Lord Byron’s daughter….. invented programming. OK, so I got a Google Doodle…. bah, without me, no Google! How about ‘the face that launched a million nerds’?

Robert Johnson.
Well that was going real well till someone poisoned me. I had it all happening, just cut the first album. Blimey that Mick Jagger owes me a few bob, eh? I did put in a bid to come back as Jimi Hendrix after that, but I missed the cutoff date.

The Ambitious Drifter.
Oh well, not one of the biggies, but I haven’t been stabbed or poisoned. It’s good sometimes to have a quiet life, get a few moments to write it all down.

There’s a few more goodies in the list, but maybe next time huh?  I’ll tell you about the time I was Schrodinger’s Cat.

Postmortem Selfie –  Gloucester Cathedral. Wasn’t exactly a starring role, but the outfits were pretty nifty.