Beckett would have been 100 last Thursday had he not died. It isn't really all that long ago that Beckett was merely alive - admittedly holding a Nobel prize, and ?thinking very prettily', and being famously intractable, and looking magnificent in photographs - but merely alive all the same, and consequently not being much talked about.

Anyway, it's assumed we all share a gluttonous appetite for observing anniversaries, so we've been force-fed Beckett all week.

No one will have room for the Easter Rising (which was actually on 24 April, if you want to be finicky). We've had Beckett's radio plays every evening, one of which clashed with an Artzone Beckett special on Lyric, and entire readings of his three novels from the early hours of Thursday morning, and a Rattlebag special on him on Thursday afternoon, which clashed with Mark Burgess's play about him on Radio 4, and then the Thomas Davis lecture on Thursday evening. You couldn't turn on the radio without hearing Beckett. I wouldn't mind but everyone knows the man was blessed with a face for television. Beckett himself might have appreciated the absurdity of it. "To have lived is not enough for them. . . They have to talk about it. . . To be dead is not enough for them, " as Vladimir and Estragon said.

Two weeks ago today was the first anniversary of the death of Pope John Paul II, an event that was reviewed every morning last week with bittersweet intelligence by playwright Michael Harding. Like Beckett, Harding is also a member of Aosdana, and we'll probably hear a lot more about him too when he turns his toes to the wind. Harding found himself glued, into the small hours, to the lingering death of the pope on Sky News, "a pageant worthy of Fellini". This is understandable. Being lamped in the dark of night by a 24-hour news channel can warp your perspective. A wiser course might have been to let the pope's death escape your notice altogether.

Avoiding the pope is an easier business these days than unionists would have you believe. You do have to be on your guard, though, against Pope Ratzinger's killer eyes, which seek you out maliciously from newspapers and the walls of old people's houses.

Today is also Ratzinger's birthday, so watch out for that.

John Paul II's death was bound to occasion a repeat of the time Princess Diana died, when some sensible people became unrecognisably mawkish, and others spent weeks with their hands in the air going, "What is this? What isthis?" Death is so good for the standing, you would nearly look forward to it. Some day, after they have prised the firearm from his cold, dead hands, they will even say Charlton Heston was a great actor.

Anyway, Harding took note of the unashamed revisionism and the unforeseen grief, but he could not throw his hands in the air, as he had carried philosophical encumbrances away from the spectacle. And no matter how you felt about the last pope there was great refinement in Harding's consideration of it all. The death made him uneasy, on his sofa in Leitrim with his cat. The pope reminded him of his dead father, whom he loved, realistically, "from the day he died". Thinking back on the early days of the papacy, he remembered his colleagues in Maynooth, "chubbycheeked little clerics. . . who were frightened of intellectual inquiry as if it was a virus", and liberal Catholics "bracing themselves for humiliation". His dispassionate recollections took in the pope's soft voice, which could suddenly sound harshly Slavic, and the way his glance "nailed the world with absurdly high expectations". But, he admitted, "his simple coffin took my breath away".