My Dentist

So, there I was, with the all-too-familiar sensation of something kicking around in my mouth that, by design, should have been anchored to my gum, made memorable only by the knowledge that, on this particular occasion, it did not appear to feel the need for any kind of mastication before upping sticks and disassociating itself from the rest of my teeth. I did not sense it go, I just felt it enjoying its moment of freedom before I caught it between thumb and forefinger and, for what I feel may well have been the hundredth time, cursed my luck. Only a couple of weeks had passed since my six-monthly check-up when everything seemed fine. My teeth enjoy this little game. My dentist is not so sure.

I was fortunate enough to find myself back with my usual dentist. (This does not always happen with ‘emergency’ appointments. I remember a particularly jarring visit to an unfamiliar dentist at the practice in such circumstances – to be fair, on this occasion I was suffering with an abscess that refused to succumb to antibiotics and, instead, amused itself by making me consider the relative merits of death – who had a needle up my gum before my arse had hit the chair and the tooth in a bowl before I could ask why. “You were in bad pain?” she asked. I nodded; I dare not open my mouth again. “Tomorrow you will not be.” Fair enough, I didn’t seem to have much of an argument against it.

Any-old-way-up, today, as I said, I saw my usual dentist which came as a great relief. She calls me ‘My Lovely’ and when I get particularly nervous she pats my hand. Her grasp of English is improving by the visit. She smiled. I sense she likes a challenge. “What can I do for you today?” she asked. I explained that I would like her to do something with the crater-sized hole in my gum where my demi-tooth used to be, and she said “Upper right?” I nodded. “I thought so,” she said. “I will charge you for the emergency appointment, but not the filling. Ok?” I did not ask why. I do not wish to fully understand the workings of the dentist. “I do not think you will need an injection,” she said, “but raise your left hand if the pain gets too much.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, “this is a small room. You will definitely hear me scream.”

The chair went back and the light was moved over my face. I was desperate to confess – if only I knew my name, rank and number – but my mouth was full of fingers. Breathing has always been a bit of a problem for me: I can rely on only a single nostril at any one point in time, but whenever I am laid backwards with a mouth full of dental implements, my nose completely refuses to inhale. I try to breathe through the mouth, but the combination of gloved hands, spiky metal apparatus and a mouth-sized Hoover makes the whole thing quite impossible. I try to open my mouth wider – surely that will allow more oxygen in – but it just makes a noise like an ancient crypt opening. “Are you alright, my lovely?” asks the dentist. I nod, vaguely aware that my face is beetroot red and my head is the size of a Second World War barrage balloon. I know that I am being overtaken by panic.

“All done,” she says. I am…

“There is water there to rinse,” she says. (‘Why is it no longer pink?’ I wonder, ‘Why does it no longer have bubbles?’) “We’ll see you next time.” I think she meant for my next regular check-up, but I really wouldn’t put any money on it…

My Teeth

Despite the general decline of all bodily accoutrements: eyes, ears, nails, joints, I remain intrinsically happy, which I am forced to take as a certain sign of onrushing senility. My teeth are falling out, not en masse you understand, not even one at a time, but bit by crumbling bit. Whatever I chew, however soft, I get the tell-tale ‘crunch’ inside my head and the chunk of tooth in my food. I count myself lucky if the broken pieces don’t manage to break something else. Generally they try. This is the most dispiriting of all age-related degradations.

I’m not certain if it is a normal feature of ageing, or merely a symptom of somebody who should have known better than to open beer bottles with his molars in his teens, but either way, I fear I may be all gum before I reach 70. I picture Spinal Tap playing a concert in the wreckage of my mouth. It would seem that teeth were not designed to last as long as we need them for. Perhaps having your food pureed is an evolutionary marker.

When I was a child, I do not remember anything much in the way of ‘dental hygiene’: we all brushed twice a day and seldom ate sweets or ice creams because our parents were ‘not bloody millionaires’, yet we all had a mouthful of fillings. Why? Well obviously nothing to do with a NHS dental service that paid per filling and, to my recollection, rewarded good behaviour in the waiting room with a lollipop. I do not remember ever having a toothache of any sort as a child, but nor do I remember ever visiting the school dentist without emerging with at least one excavated molar and sufficient mercury filling to raise the top of my head when the sun shone.

Amalgam fillings degrade and, as they do, fail to support the thin bone-china casing left surrounding them. These days I dare not even chew my lip with worry. In an earlier life I had to be familiar with the Moh’s Scale of Hardness. On this scale Diamond is 10, Sapphire 9, Topaz 8… whilst at the bottom end we have Gypsum (2), Talc (1) and my teeth (not even worth the effort of giving a number to).

After I left school I continued with my regular dental check-ups, but went probably forty years without needing any kind of work whatsoever – these days I don’t seem to be able to go forty minutes without losing some fragment (either big or small) of tooth. If the Tooth Fairy operated in adult circles – particularly if she made part-payments – I would be able to buy dentures.

As things stand, my teeth are still up to smiling, although probably not grinning. I can chew most things, providing they do not have a hardness that is greater than my teeth (see Moh’s Scale above) I believe that an uncooked carrot has a hardness of 2; mashed potato has a hardness that almost exactly matches my molars, and a Curly Wurly (judging purely by the havoc it wreaks within my mouth) a reading of 12,000.

Of all the bits of me that are queuing up to fail, my teeth cause me the greatest angst. Each time some foodstuff or another partially extracts one of my pearlies I vow never to eat it again. With the exception of dry roasted peanuts, I succeed. I do not want to be all gum; I do not want false teeth; I do not want to be one of those people who hisses with every word and most of all I do not want to have to endure the bewildered expression on the face of my dispirited dentist ever again. She does her best. She apologises when she gives me the bill. And I just have to grin and bear it…

N.B. Sorry this is so late – real life impinged…

The Friday Post

These days the Friday Post can drop onto my doormat as early as Saturday afternoon…

You see how things go? A couple of posts whingeing about whingeing posts: a couple of days with nothing to say before it occurs to me that a) the actual physical post has just been delivered and, for once, it includes something that is not advertising material. It is a bill. It is for somebody else. They live in Somerset, and b) other than it is not what it once was, I know very little about the British Postal system. So I had a little dig…

It would appear that Henry VIII was the founder of the Postal Service in 1516 and declared himself Master of the Posts. However it is not clear who might have used this service and it may well have been simply for the use of the King himself, who found himself sending out so many Christmas cards by the time he had tied himself to his sixth tribe of in-laws, that members of his own court could no longer cope.

In 1635, Charles I made the system available to the public for the first time. The postage was, at this time paid for by the recipient, which led to a mini financial crisis as nobody ever had the change required to pay the postage on Final Demands. The state Monopoly was farmed out first to Thomas Witherings and later Edmund Prideux who, despite the fact that the vast majority of the country was illiterate, managed to make himself very rich, presumably by allowing men to mistakenly send pencil sketches of their genitalia to every woman in the village who hadn’t already seen them e.g. the cobbler’s blind daughter and the blacksmith’s tattooed assistant who, it was rumoured, performed satanistic rituals with a variety of root vegetables.

In 1660, following the Restoration of the Monarchy, Charles II re-branded the service as the General Post Office and the British love of queuing was born.

1784 saw the introduction of the first Mail Coach followed, later that year, by the first bag of post being ‘eaten by the horse’.

1830 saw the introduction of the first Mail Train, between Manchester and Liverpool and is, incidentally the first recorded instance of all of yesterday’s mail being redirected through Crewe.

Rowland Hill proposed (1840) that mail should be paid for by the sender rather than the recipient – meaning that no-one ever again could be accused of being ignorant of the Co-op’s latest BOGOF offer. The uniform fee was one penny (approximately thirty eight million pounds in today’s currency) and in May of that year the first stamp, the Penny Black, was introduced to show that the fee had been paid. An early example of this system has just been found at the bottom of our local postman’s bag.

As Britain was the first country to issue postage stamps, it is the only country that does not show the country name on its stamps, which rather leaves me wondering why I have to specify ‘English (UK)’ on every Microsoft product I attempt to use, in order to stop the spellcheck facility automatically changing ‘aubergine’ to ‘eggplant’.

Britain’s first Post Box was erected in 1852 and went almost a week before somebody ‘posted’ dog shit in it.

A two-tier postal system was introduced in 1968 which meant that the Royal Family and members of the aristocracy could have their mail delivered the next day, whilst the rest of the country, paying for the Second Class, might as well deliver it themselves quite frankly.

2004 the Second Daily Delivery was abolished meaning that anything not delivered in the morning post would not arrive until a week next Tuesday, having been redirected through the Falkland Islands.

2007 saw the end of post box collections on Sunday so that postal workers would be able to observe the Sabbath by watching the football with a curry and half a dozen tins of lukewarm Stella.

2010 Royal Mail was privatised, at which time it signed a Universal Service Guarantee that expired in 2021 – the last time it was known for any mail to be delivered on time.

The current Postmaster General (now known as Chairman) is Simon Thompson, who was also managing director of the NHS Test and Trace programme in the UK, which offers me great assurance every time I drop something precious into the post box…

The Wednesday Post

I do not know, although I would like to, how most of you go about writing your posts. I have a routine – I would never go as far as to lay claim to ‘method’ – which varies little from post to post.

On Monday I usually sit down with a fuzzy idea of what I want to say which, by some miracle, coalesces into something vaguely logical by the end of the page. Or not… I seldom know where I am heading with it, or how I intend to get there. I know that I am going to push the trolley over the brow of the hill and I know that it is going to go downhill fast, but I have no idea of the route it will take nor where it will stop. Sometimes it ploughs on down to a natural halt at the bottom; sometimes it hits a rock and turns over on the way. Mostly the dodgy wheel takes control and it veers off on a route of its own choosing, stopping only when it runs out of steam, still carrying somebody else’s kipper fillets. Wednesday is normally about pushing the trolley back to where I found it.

My fuzzy idea for Monday, for instance was ‘just get something down on paper for God’s sake (yes, I did say paper) you can tit around with it later’. Sadly it is Wednesday and I remain trapped at the pen gnawing stage. I suppose, in a blog about growing old, written by a man who is, himself, getting on, you might expect a little fuzziness of purpose. I must be honest: had I been writing during the great age of satire, I would have been the daft one who was never allocated his own desk, who contributed a decent line from time to time but wasn’t allowed within a nautical mile of ‘plotting’. As a journalist, I would have been the one who suggested an interview with Richard Nixon would only really work if David Frost ended it with a custard pie to his face. Trying to please everyone is all very well, as long as they want pleasing. I am the soft underbelly. I am a walking ‘but…’ I try very hard to understand and respect the views of others, but it does make decision-making very awkward. My super-power is probably vacillation. I have always felt myself to be supremely unqualified to express opinion. I do have opinions, of course, but I really can’t believe that anybody else wants to hear them. Most of the time I’m not too bothered about listening to them myself…

By the time I get to this stage on Wednesday I am usually – like untreated slurry through an Anglian Water sewage outlet – in full flow. I have picked up the feeds that I gave myself on Monday and started to run with them. Well, I say ‘run’… None-the-less Wednesday remains the most challenging of post days, picking up the baton from Monday and dropping it on my toe before I reach Friday. It is all about finding my ducks (plastic, I am not an animal) and lining them up, so that I can shoot them back down on Friday. Or hook ‘em… By Friday I do not have to worry about having nowhere left to go, because wherever I was heading, I am usually already there – generally, I must admit, in the middle of nowhere – but I can at least enjoy the ride, fuzzy as it is, not worrying about painting myself into a corner before Monday.

Because Monday is a whole new day…

The Monday Post

My first post of each week usually sets the tone for the other two, and those that do not fit neatly into my weekly triptych tend to find themselves plunged into the abyss that is my ‘Holiday Posts’ file, where they sit and wait for me to not be around for a few days. Generally I like these Holiday Posts because we both share the experience of sitting outside the fence, and also because they tend to be written as a consequence of not having to think about what I am about to write. Thinking things through is the bane of my life.

Today being Monday I should be writing the post from which, like ringworm, the other two will develop, but I am instead chewing the end off a cheap biro and staring at the unused face of a previously employed sheet of paper. I never actually write with the cheap biro: I have a tub full of decent pens (e.g. ball point is not hemispherical, plastic case is not broken into razor-sharp shards, end cap has not been masticated) for that. The cheap one is just for gnawing. It comes into use only when the others – even the most powerful green rollerball – have failed. I used to have pencils for chewing, but I kept swallowing the rubbers*. It can often take me quite a while to find the right pen for the day, but as soon as I do find it, things generally fall into place. Some days, though, none of my pens seem to fit and then cometh the hour of the plastic Bic and jaw exercises.

…And just in case you are thinking that my handwriting is some kind of Calligraphers wet-dream, it is not. It is at best a scrawl and at worst a scruffy sub-decipherable mess that I generally have to wrestle into some form of sense before it hits the computer. I do own, and occasionally use, fountain pens with which I stain my fingers, but most of my ‘special pens’ are ballpoints. From time to time they are ‘the right pens’ but mostly they are not: they are frustrating obstacles to my muse.

And should you be thinking ‘It’s a bad workman that blames his tools’ then you might well be right – although, to be fair, I do not blame my pens, the fault is all mine. I have a myriad of tools to use: laptops, iphone, fountain pens, ballpoint pens, rollerballs, pencils and when none of the above are able to meet my aspirations, bags of ten-for-a-pound biros on which to nag. They are all good, solid, workman-like pens. I, on the other hand, am a rubbish writer – except for the times when I am no writer at all, when I become a man who dines on thickened ink. Inspiration, when it does arrive, more often than not does so in the form of a giant block of Cadbury’s and a tumbler full of Scotland’s finest.

And if it doesn’t come until Tuesday? Well, maybe it’s time for another holiday…

*I’m not sure whether this is a purely British colloquialism for the titchy little pencil-borne erasers that sit, metal-encased, at the blunt end of the graphite rod: ‘rubbers’ because they rub things out. They will not prevent pregnancy or STD, but they might mean that you get an extra attempt at spelling colloquialism.

Outward Looking

I concluded that a few of my most recent posts had been too introspective, so I decided that it was time to look out…

…Summer in England. Bright sunshine that could last for several minutes before the clouds develop and lightning rents the darkling skies. The entire village is out and about, walking the dog, running, cycling, turning crinkly red before the giant orb dissolves away and the rain starts to lap around the first floor window sills. The council mowers are butchering the communal grass areas, distributing the grass cuttings together with a thousand different kinds of litter and dog shit across pathways, roads and front gardens from where the gales that precede the coming storm will drive it all into my doorway.

The village is a-hum with serried hedge-trimmers and flashing lights as electric cables are clipped, oaths are muttered and manual clippers are rushed out of the shed, soaked in WD40 and pressed into emergency service. The village could be back in the 1950’s – if it had ever left them. Within the hour most hedges are neatly, occasionally precision trimmed and anybody unfortunate enough to have missed this fleeting window of opportunity will find themselves shamed by having something that resembles Miriam Margolyes’ uncoiffed bush surrounding the house. Sadly, the right weather for future trims may well not occur again until the autumn, by which time wet rot will have beaten you to it. (In the UK, autumn – the season in which the leaves fall off – can occur anywhere between March and November.)

Across the road the man in the corner bungalow takes the opportunity to dead-head his roses. He does this at root level as it stops the spiky little buggers from coming back again this year.

The bin wagon (or garbage truck as it is known by my grandchildren who watch far too much American YouTube) is meandering along the street collecting the carefully sorted recyclables (glass, tin, paper, certain plastics, soap-opera plots) garden waste (leaves, branches – below the diameter of a thumb – thumbs, cat crap, semi-digested bird, rodents, dead cats) and general trash (everything else, with the one specific exception of anything you really want to get rid of) and depositing them – along with an immovable oil slick – in a single ragged pile in the middle of the road. If I put the wrong stuff in the wrong bin, they put a label on and refuse to empty it. If I put the right stuff in the bin, I get to sweep it back up as soon as the truck has gone.

Middle-aged men who previously would have utilized this time by buffing their cars to the kind of finish with which Snow White’s step-mother was best acquainted are now throwing open the doors of the camper van, hoovering out the wildlife, mopping long-forgotten pork pie from the floor of the fridge, airing mildewed sleeping bags over the washing line and chiselling fossilized sausage from the bars of the Calor Gas barbecue. By mid afternoon they will be ready to go. It will be snowing.

The woman from next door begins to spray her fence, and I am happy that one side, at least, of my car will not suffer from woodworm for at least twelve months…

My Greatest Strengths

Questioning my own ability is often fruitful when writing this blog, because, let’s face it, there is so much for me to question. There is so little in this world that somebody could not do better, but just as nobody can be ‘all bad’, I must conclude that nobody can be ‘all crap’ and so, in a move that fully justifies my decision to write in a shorter format, I have decided to search for some of my good points, which I lay below for no better reason than I feel that somebody else ought to know about them.

I am very good at doing the right thing. It is, I would say, my best attribute. Unfortunately, picking the wrong time is probably – along with my inability to open jars – my biggest weakness, so the right thing tends to get overlooked. How quickly the right thing eg streamers, balloons, stripping policewomen, can become the wrong thing simply due to bad timing eg it is granddad’s funeral.

I am loyal, which providing I do not enter politics must be a good thing as long as I manage to find the right person/cause to be loyal to: choose the wrong one and I am ‘misguided’, choose it twice and I will be forever cleaning the dog shit off the front door…

I am reliable – although even as I write this I am not certain that it is always a laudable trait. When people say “Well, you can always rely on him to do that…” with a roll of the eyes, it’s not always meant fondly is it?

I am not competitive – with a distinct leaning towards the over-conciliatory: put me in a competitive environment and I do alright for myself until I realise that this is in any way upsetting my opponents, at which time I cease to be feisty and become, instead, a liability. There is no joy to be had from winning if your opponent is sobbing and telling their mum that “Grandad cheated”.

I can be amusing company – except when I’m not – but I do sometimes lack the filter to say ‘not now’. I do suffer fools gladly because I am one* – but I have very little time for bigots of any kind – especially those who rail against short, ginger geeks who don’t know when to shut up – because that’s what nerves do to me: put me in a room full of strangers and I stand, mute and unmoving in a corner, pretending to be some kind of art instillation with gin, or I gabble. About what? No-one can say. I am on autopilot, I do not know what is coming out of my mouth even as I say it and – presuming that they are not idiots – the people to whom I chat will almost certainly have not heard a single word I have said either.

But I don’t mind – it’s probably one of my greatest strengths…

*With thanks to the great Harry Secombe

Sorry, My Mistake

You must know the feeling (I hope it’s not just me) when you make the kind of mistake that leaves you wondering ‘Am I losing it, or is this the kind of mistake I could have always made?’ For me this is, more or less, an annual thing. Generally I do not make, I am happy to report – I do still manage to spot them coming over the hill – the same mistake twice, but what if that all changes? What if I start to screw up more often, more catastrophically or on a repeat cycle? What if the blunder becomes the norm? What if I can no longer trust myself? I cannot face a lifetime in politics…

Don’t get me wrong here when I say ‘catastrophic’, nobody actually dies and for me, at least, the occasional ricket is, and always has been, ‘par for the course’, but each one comes with the kind of jolt that leads me to question whether it is time to distance myself completely from decision-making duties: just put the whisky in my hand and turn the chair towards the TV with the Remote inches out of reach. I do, of course, ‘get it right’ thousands of times a year, but I am aware that if these two properties were to become inversely related I would become a liability of the Liz Truss magnitude.

In a world full of questions, I question myself far more than anybody else and so, despite the paucity of my responses, I am at least sufficiently conscious of my own fallibility to view everybody else’s mistakes as such: unintentional errors – but I’ve never quite managed to view my own lapses in the same light. Cock-ups generally arise from not following my normal procedures, rushing or leap-frogging the ‘safeguards’ to which I am usually accused of being too wedded. Every now and then, for reasons I am totally unable to fathom, I see the gaping hole that lies in front of me, but walk straight into it anyway and I am forced to admit that not even BoJo or Trump could find grounds to blame anybody else on such an occasion. God has the CCTV. Conscience will be getting the full report by the morning.

I have discovered that there is only one way to react to the giant balls-up scenario and that is to hold up my hands and take it on the chin. There is no point in trying to deflect blame as everybody knows exactly where it actually lies. I own up, apologise and try, as far as is possible, to put it right. If pride is at stake, I swallow it. Contrition is great, but never promise that it will never happen again – everybody knows that it will. Such words are wasted when you’re a walking f*ck-up, but do remember that everybody messes it up from time to time: somebody must have thought that Birmingham was a good idea.

Anyway, I will now away and get back on with my life, happy in the knowledge that the next boo-boo should be some time away (unless, of course, I choose to believe the theory that bad things always come in threes) and for the time being I can do no wrong…

Fitbit

Back in The Good Olde Covid days of yore I started to run because it was one of the few acceptable ways of getting out of the house. Soon after that – Amazon being one of the few ‘essential service’ suppliers permitted to operate in such benighted times – I bought a Fitbit as a running helpmate. These days we are seldom parted. I was told that I needed to monitor my heart rate immediately after a run, to ensure that it returned to normal in a reasonable period of time – for a man of my age, about three weeks – so I bought a little wrist-borne companion that would give me that information, and all was well, despite how it felt, I was not killing myself.

Now, the fascination with heart rate soon dims. It goes up when you’re busy, exercising or stressed; it comes down when you are not. There are (thankfully) no great dramas. I have learned that my heart rate goes up when the weather is hot – apparently the heart pumps up to four times as much blood around the body when the temperature goes up, although I’m not sure where it gets it from – when I catch a glimpse of Piers Morgan’s smug face and every time somebody insists that it is everybody else’s fault apart from their own. It goes down when I sit on my big, fat arse with a book, some music and a drink – although I have yet to persuade my wife of the health benefits. Otherwise it has little to tell me.

My steps, however, have become an obsession. How many steps have I taken today? I average somewhere around 75,000 to 80,000 per week, but within that I have days where I barely move, which are usually associated with inclement weather or mood. There are ‘good’ sides to this – I seldom drive when I can as easily walk – but also ‘bad’ sides – when my wife asks me to ‘pop around to the shops’ for something, it takes an hour and by the time I get back the dinner has burned. It might not be quite enough to save the planet, but at least it feels as though I am making an effort.

I am intrigued by the steps feature because I don’t have to do anything in order to make it work. If I want the watch to monitor my diet, my water intake or my weight, I have to input information which is just far too much effort – and would, incidentally, almost certainly put my heart rate up. I thought these things were meant to be intelligent, can’t they see for themselves? I don’t wear it when I sleep because, although I do like to know how much I have slept, I know that wearing the Fitbit will keep me awake worrying about how much sleep I am getting – not to mention waking up with a watch-head embossed onto my cheek. I know that it is waterproof, but where does it stand on dribble?

I realise that it – or one of its future heirs – will one day record that it has ceased to receive input of any kind: I will be dead or Britain’s Got Talent will have just come on the TV. I hope it can tell the difference…

Happy Hunting

Well, as I mentioned on Monday, my post for the day – as well as its little envoi – had originally found themselves, due (I was going to say “in no small part”, but I’ve thought it through and will now say) due entirely to my own incompetence, in the stifling limbo of the WordPress Drafts folder, where I found them, quite by accident and thought “Oh what the hell, they’re written now…” and so posted them. I wouldn’t say that this is an entirely ideal way of working – although, to be fair, I doubt that there is one – but I don’t care for waste…

Anyway, I read them through and they reminded me that what I was really concerned with at the time was that I was about to fly off on holiday with a blocked ear and something inside my brain was telling me that it wasn’t necessarily an entirely good idea, but if you really want to know, in reality I forgot all about it almost immediately afterwards and in the event I didn’t feel a thing. My ear didn’t ‘pop’, my brain didn’t seep out, I heard when the steward asked me if I wanted anything from the bar and, more importantly, he heard me when I said “Yes”. Like so many things that seem massively important for a short time, they cease to be so when the worst doesn’t happen and, let’s face it, there are so many worst that could happens that I will soon have to rank them: what is the worst, worst that could happen, that could happen? Is there a fate worse than death? Is it worse to be deaf, blind or David Icke? Is it worse to be the person who can’t remember where they buried the dinner, or that person’s spouse? Like everyone, I hope to avoid all of the above scenarios (especially the David Icke one) but sooner or later I know that the man with the black hoodie and the scythe is going to come knocking, and he doesn’t always do it nicely.

Is it better to greet him with no idea of who he is, who you are and where he is taking you, or is it best to be prepared? What if being prepared involves enduring the kind of pain and discomfort that means that you actually welcome his appearance? If I knew he was coming, could I ever welcome him in? Would I be able to let myself go? I have always imagined myself drifting away in my sleep, but even that is not ideal, is it? No chance to say goodbye. Perhaps I would prefer the big deathbed scene, my own “Bugger Bognor” moment, but I’ve never really been one for making a scene and it’s difficult to avoid being the centre of attention when you’re drawing your last breath. The great Spike Milligan said “I don’t mind dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” I thought he was joking then, but now I think I know exactly what he meant, and I share the aspiration…

“You live and learn. Then you die and forget it all.” – Noel Coward.