Don't smoke or drink! Eat a healthy diet! get regular exercise and you will live longer. But why? I spent yesterday visiting an old folks home; one of the better ones as it happens, a beautiful building in a lovely location with huge accessible gardens and a high staff to resident ratio. The carers seemed to actually care and the place was spotlessly clean, brightly lit and so very quiet.
However they are presented, these institutions are waiting rooms and the sad spectres that sit around in corners, or are wheeled from place to place without blinking, exist from day to day in their own worlds if they are lucky, or in some terrible nightmare if they are not.
Talk to most people and they would rather be put down than consigned to such a place, and yet the number of homes is increasing all of the time. They are big business and each person brings in around seven hundred pounds a week. For that they get a room, they get 24 hour care and they get fed and kept warm if not happy.
When our pets get old and unable to live independently, we do the kind thing and kill them. People say - put them to sleep, but of course that is just a euphemism. People die, they do not pass on or go to meet their maker, they die and the atoms that make them are recycled. Death is sentimentalised, largely because we are incapable of imagining not existing. It is hard enough to imagine the world before we were born, let alone the world after we are no longer in it, and so primitive man envisaged some other place, a better place that we all go to after we die. This gives comfort to many and fair enough if that is what they need. For some, they believe that if they die a glorious death, usually involving some insane act of suicide, there will be many virgins waiting to satisfy their every need. I wonder what incentive there is for female suicide bombers.
Everyone dies, it is just a matter of when and how? I do not fear death, though I am not so keen on the process of dying, especially if it means sitting around in a sterile room, gazing vacantly at ancient decrepit bodies, incapable of wiping my own bottom.
Life is rather like an escalator, and I am of an age when the top is coming into view and I see others toppling off. There is no emergency stop and no possibility of running back down. A healthy lifestyle is well and good but it just means that more time can be spent on the last few steps, and that those years gained may not be all that one hoped for.
However they are presented, these institutions are waiting rooms and the sad spectres that sit around in corners, or are wheeled from place to place without blinking, exist from day to day in their own worlds if they are lucky, or in some terrible nightmare if they are not.
Talk to most people and they would rather be put down than consigned to such a place, and yet the number of homes is increasing all of the time. They are big business and each person brings in around seven hundred pounds a week. For that they get a room, they get 24 hour care and they get fed and kept warm if not happy.
When our pets get old and unable to live independently, we do the kind thing and kill them. People say - put them to sleep, but of course that is just a euphemism. People die, they do not pass on or go to meet their maker, they die and the atoms that make them are recycled. Death is sentimentalised, largely because we are incapable of imagining not existing. It is hard enough to imagine the world before we were born, let alone the world after we are no longer in it, and so primitive man envisaged some other place, a better place that we all go to after we die. This gives comfort to many and fair enough if that is what they need. For some, they believe that if they die a glorious death, usually involving some insane act of suicide, there will be many virgins waiting to satisfy their every need. I wonder what incentive there is for female suicide bombers.
Everyone dies, it is just a matter of when and how? I do not fear death, though I am not so keen on the process of dying, especially if it means sitting around in a sterile room, gazing vacantly at ancient decrepit bodies, incapable of wiping my own bottom.
Life is rather like an escalator, and I am of an age when the top is coming into view and I see others toppling off. There is no emergency stop and no possibility of running back down. A healthy lifestyle is well and good but it just means that more time can be spent on the last few steps, and that those years gained may not be all that one hoped for.
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