It can't only have been me who found Jeremy Hunt so depressing on the television news the other night, giving us the oh so marvellous news that the government was capping care home costs in 2017. Grinning punchably as he always seems to regardless of what's coming out of his mouth, he told us all that we should make provision via insurance or savings in case we degenerate inexorably into a less than perfect old age. Well, Jeremy, can I just say that the unfortunate slip about your name made by Radio 4's Today programme last year is looking increasingly less unfortunate?
I'm talking about this whole crazy-ass issue of accelerating decrepitude with a friend and I say, Bugger care homes, I'm taking the precaution booking myself into Dignitas at 78, with an option to extend should I not be bonkers and a burden by that age, there being nothing like a deadline for a writer after all. And my friend says, absolutely, top idea, me too, book into Dignitas before one's lost one's marbles, say good-bye to nearest and dearest, all that kind of stuff. Have a wonderful last meal, even.
Last meal? I say, What kind of a last meal is one going to get in Switzerland for God's sake? I'm not going to do the decent thing and save the family fortunes from being spanked on a care home in Western Supernightmare for assisted suicide after a Cheese Fondue and half a toblerone. I have in mind a more elegant death: ideally one in which one can choose to discreetly expire in a velvet armchair somewhere not dissimilar to the Coburg Bar of the Connaught, at an elegant and still witty eighty, in exciting shoes and a mink coat, clutching a three-quarter's drunk glass of Krug, whilst a white haired yet still atttactive Daniel Craig reads softly to me from the collected works of Yeats.
What about you? If you could order the manner of your death, what would you choose?
at the top of some mountain, with the bottle of champagne finished having accomplished most of the life list and still in possession of my faculties. (But then, why would I want to go?) Well, maybe just before slipping over into dementia.....good thing we don't get to choose!
ReplyDeleteDaniel Craig and Yeats, oh yes please. Though I'd settle for Gabriel Byrne.
ReplyDeleteI'm currently mid being very worried about the finances for my parents in old age let alone myself. By the time we're old the entire NHS will have been sold off and it'll be like the trains- baffling expensive, without real competition (except for the Queen everyone I know who is seriously ill has to go to the NHS as private hospitals aren't interested in people with multiple serious illnesses) and still weighed down with issues. So sad.
ReplyDeleteWe will probably all be wearing bracelets saying how many calories, alchohol units and so on we've consumed and so on too.
Bleak me? never!
I think I'd like to end my days in a fabulous old fashioned hotel, they could humanely put me down with a last martini.