We had lots and lots of gin and beers and a few bottles of wine with a curry.
We talked of friends past and friends passed.
And we laughed.
We laughed a lot.
We’d already made plans to meet up next month and have a house booked in Warwick for a few days next month.
He got enormously pissed and was apparently making boop, boop noises in bed, after waking his wife up after he crashed to the floor in a heap.
It’s the drunkest he’s been for twenty five years apparently
I’m very proud.
And as I sort of mentioned a while ago, I’m making changes at work although I’m not telling them til January and I plan to spend a lot more time seeing friends next year.
I’ve been working at the same place for just over six years now and I’ve scrupulously avoided the most senior roles, mostly because politics bores me.
My boss resigned in July and I made it clear that I wouldn’t be applying for his job, work-life balance and a new international team that I’d created being the two main reasons.
The third and unwritten reason being that I didn’t want to deal with all the crap that comes with being in charge.
Still.
Along with one of my best friends in the whole world, I shared the role until a suitable successor could be found.
Said successor hasn’t been in post for a month yet and I have to say, he’s made some decisions really easy for me.
My little Milo developed a really bad cough that I’m hoping will just be a consequence of aging and asthma – the drugs that he’s been on since Thursday have worked actual wonders and he seems better than he’s been for ages.
I’m fortunate in that I don’t need money, my pension pot is good, I have a previous pension that’s paying out and would cover most monthly bills.
And
I have no mortgage or debts.
Which is a quantum leap from my early life.
My parents lived in one of those third floor flats for some of my childhood.
From Hackney to Shropshire isn’t far but it’s more than a lifetime away for me, I’ve been to places that I never dreamed, seen wonders and horrors and lived what seems like multiple lives.
So it’s been an interesting feeling over the past few days as I’ve looked at emails from the new boss and seen the reactions from my colleagues.
He’s a disaster waiting to happen.
We can’t stop anything, corporations don’t work like that.
But I can do something.
We have our first in-person leadership meeting next week.
I have a plan and many, many years of experience of working with people like this.
I’m going to have a little fun.
And.
By April, I’ll be doing something else.
Something that gives me some more time to do the things that actually matter.
When you’re very young, you don’t think about your own mortality, or if you do imagine your own death it’s probably tied in with some sort of romanticism, with a heroic ending.
That’s not the case for ninety nine point something of us, our time probably won’t be decided by us even if we’d like to think it will.
Just to make something clear here.
I’m not afraid to die.
At all.
I can say that from a position of having had my heart reset a number of times, the first time was a bit scary as you’re giving yourself over to the possibility of death and lying down to do it.
It was easier each time after that.
An internal flight from Edinburgh to Stansted was once so turbulent that the stewardesses were crying. I surprised myself by just relaxing and thinking that I’d had a good life if that was the end.
It wasn’t though. I’ve been all over the world since then, seen ancient wonders and glittering cities, played games with a Hindu God and dared the elements to take me while I stood in the sea off Thailand during a monsoon lightning storm.
I’ve also seen banal, low level Evil close up and tried to ensure that it didn’t win ( I think it was a draw).
In the past few years, I’ve adopted a couple of dogs and they’ve given me a more simplistic, live for today worldview and I try not to worry too much about the outside world.
But, fuck me, the outside world makes it difficult.
This week, the UK Government made assisted dying legal.
Or, they made assisted suicide and assisted killing legal.
This was something that had huge amounts of funding and support, along with ads showing a woman dancing for joy, more like an ad for feminine care products than actually killing yourself.
Our wonderful MPs had five hours of debate and passed this thing through.
Any concerns have been dismissed and anyone showing concern on social media has seen the same sort of attacks from seemingly coordinated low follower, almost dormant accounts that are designed to suppress dissent – as used during Covid.
This country has followed the same path as the Netherlands, Belgium and Canada.
‘But there’ll be safeguards’ say the people behind the bill.
Yeah right.
Unless you’re a proxy – the below is from the act as passed at second reading this week
So a proxy can be somebody who has power of attorney over a vulnerable person, is named in their will and can now legally FUCKING KILL THEM.
None of our social services systems are linked up and crimes can and will be left uninvestigated by a police force if the perpetrator doesn’t live in their area.
That’s if anybody investigates an assisted death at all. It’ll all be legal.
I’ve watched a couple of friends die recently, they wanted more time even though they were so frail and the system tried to give them that time.
What if the finances don’t stack up for that? How much pressure will be applied to the already broken down and vulnerable ‘terminal’ patients? How many people will sign something they don’t understand?
How many poor bastards are going to have a last moment of lucidity as somebody kills them?
It’s a problem though.
We all want to die with dignity, perhaps heroically or romantically- just not in a chair or bed covered in our own shit.
So I want to hang on as long as I can, maybe Musk’s Neuralink will help with some of the problems of aging and dementia so that our minds don’t go and the decision will be truly our own.
Maybe the science fiction of Altered Carbon will be realised in our lifetime and death will be a pause in between bodies.
What happens to our souls – if we have them is an issue for that time.
What I do know is that killing people for convenience or finance reasons will erode whatever souls the medical people who do this have, that they’ll be indistinguishable from concentration camp doctors.
So – what can you do?
Make sure you have a will and that it’s difficult to change should you fall into the hands of those parasitic scum who’d wish you harm or those of ‘Health Professionals’ – make it clear that you have a codeword or phrase captured elsewhere that must be correct before anything can happen.
For me, I hope that if and when I do choose to die, it’ll truly be my choice and that I’ll hold true to the things that I believe deep down.
That I’ll remember that I once believed this by Tecumseh to be the model for my own death.
When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.
That I’ll go with the question of ‘what’s next? on my lips and that I’ll be ready for whatever that is.
smallthunderdog 