IT HAS BEEN said that the only certainties in life are death and taxes. That's the trouble with immortality: you'd still get stuck paying taxes.

This rather glum thought occurred to me on my recent 66th birthday, an occasion otherwise marked with an additional slice of apple pie while parked in front of a roaring fire with my asthmatic cat, Currant Bun, wheezing away on my lap. (If you have to get older, this is the way to do it.)

Anyway, the glum bit was only about the taxes. Death is simply Nature's way of telling you to slow down, and whether you accept it gracefully or by throwing a hissy-fit matters not. You still end up pushing up petunias or adding to air pollution, your choice.

But age 66 is about as good a time as any to ponder one's mortality. It's also probably a good time to start limiting your magazine subscriptions to six months or less, use up those air miles and don't get too involved in long-running TV soap operas.

Immortality is something we've all thought about at one time or another with greater or lesser degrees of abject terror, generally during our feckless youth (when we were totally lacking in feck). And of course, scientists are forever tinkering with the idea as part of their ongoing crusade to avoid getting a proper job.

The latest fad is genetics. The same techniques that can give us everything from tomatoes that never rot to growing six toes and a ring finger on our butts may hold the key to that Philosopher's Stone of the eternal optimist, life everlasting.

Scientists claim human genes already contain the seeds of immortality, albeit in an inactive form. But Terence Kealey, a vice-chancellor at Britain's Buckingham University and something of an authority on the research, chimes in thus:

"One day - one day soon - genetic engineers will learn how to activate those genes ubiquitously, and, hey presto, we'll all live forever!"

But as the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for - you just might get it. So before you cancel the premiums on your life insurance policy, throw away the blood pressure pills and stock up on long-life light bulbs, ponder the consequences of life without end, amen.

Think of an eternity's supply of tax bills, each going up in line with annual inflation. Consider eon upon hopeless eon as a Chicago Cubs fan. If yours is not exactly wedded bliss, imagine waking up next to the Creature from the Black Lagoon every morning from now to beyond the year dot.

Death perhaps isn't the ideal solution, but its timely intervention would seem to be a welcome option to the alternative. Mind you, there's no real hurry.

Still, however dubious the quest for endless life might seem, says Terence Kealey, "my suspicion is that we probably will" want it. Certainly, if it becomes available over the counter in convenient packets and the price is reasonable and no sales tax.

"People have sought immortality since the beginning of recorded history," he says. There was King David, his business with the slingshot and Goliath many years behind him, who "lay with young virgins and inhaled the scent of their breasts."

The lesson here is that, even if you don't stand a chance in green hell, make it interesting and something folks will talk about for millennia to come. Breathing virgin's scent would appear to fit the criteria, provided baths were provided and the scentees didn't have beans or pickled onions for dinner.

Before they got their hands inside our genes, scientists on the immortality front toyed around with injecting ground-up monkey glands into the bodies of wrinklies back in Al Capone's day. Alas, the geriatrics still kept popping their clogs, and the monkeys weren't too happy about it, either.

Then someone discovered that Bulgarians seemed to live for an uncommonly long time - and that they ate a hell of a lot of yogurt. The food police put two and two together, got about 5.78, and we've been stuck with this glop as a "health food" ever since.

(A great to-do is made in TV ads here about the fact that the "good stuff" in yogurt is the live bacteria that it contains. I don't want live things wandering around in my food. I'm not particularly keen on dead ones, either.)

Another wheeze that some folks are pursing to avoid the Grim Reaper, or at least to make sure they are somewhere else when he hangs on the doorbell, is to have their bodies frozen cryogenically, in something like liquid hydrogen, to be thawed out someday in the future when science has developed a cure for what ails them.

I don't think so. Somehow I have visions of waking up in Limbo with no clothes on and no one around to provide a blanket and earmuffs, or at least a fur-lined jockstrap. Also, what happens if someone forgets to pay the electric bill?

In the meantime, others can be seen every morning and/or evening, trying to keep age, facial lines and possibly hemorrhoids, at bay in a most dangerous fashion. Yes, I mean jogging.

Jogging was popularized a couple of decades ago by a chap named Jim Fixx. Sunny Jim was a habitue on the roads of New England, jogging his heart out, which is precisely what he did. He dropped dead of a heart attack while pounding the asphalt.

I rest my case.

I suggest instead that you accept the wisdom of England's King George V, who eschewed exercise and concentrated on cigars: "Never run when you can walk, never walk when you can stand, never stand when you can sit, never sit when you can lie down."

He lived to be 71 and never once used a nicotine patch.

Now if you don't mind, I think I'll just have a little lie-down.

Thought for the Week: Statistics show that 95 percent of people think they are above average.

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