THE END OF LIFE

What it says on the tin...

Most people may have got the idea that I despise our Prime Minister and most of what he stands for because he makes it blatantly obvious that he’s a self-serving piece of work who went to the most prestigious public school in the country where he learned to waffle in classical dead languages and hate everyone who didn’t go there.

But occasionally I suppose one of those accidents of fate might arrange some of his seemingly mindless ramblings into an order that makes some kind of sense. Like when he looks reality squarely in its face and recognises it.

When I was a sprog and a sweet little gem of a lad with twinkling eyes and a hatred for anything remotely girly I was taught that we humans have a life-expectancy of three score years and ten. Or seventy if you want the sum neatly worked out.

The glory of such a snippet of wisdom is that it isn’t actually true. Once upon a time a member of our species would have been accounted as fortunate if he managed two score and ten, or fifty. The average life expectancy was allegedly around thirty-odd a couple of centuries back. I do know that you can wander round old graveyards and see memorials to so and so, clergyman of this parish who passed away peacefully in his sleep and now rests with the angels, aged eighty-three, but he was very much an exception. He was a clergyman, he was nurtured by parishioner fillies, fed best steak and port, and he was allowed plenty of time to snooze. The cowman who had been born on the same day was thirty seven when he wandered off to meet his maker, exhausted, and I guess that besides dying he showed his age.

So a handy three-score and ten calculation isn’t true, but we are, like all other living creatures, time-limited, much as we’d like to believe there might be a potion or spell of something that makes nature redundant. But there simply isn’t.

So when a scholar like the prime minister suggests that old people die I suppose he’s right. I’m approaching the age he would like me to curl up and turn to dust (there’s no maker waiting for me, I don’t believe there’s any truth in fairy stories older than the long deceased bronze age philosophers whose wisdom is still being preached around the world). And if it’s his opinion that eighty’s a good age at which we should shuffle off this mortal coil then he might be right, though I plan going on a bit longer than that. But, like in all things espoused by politicians there’s got to be a context.

Even eighteen-inch tall little green men on Mars must have noticed that at the moment we’re in the middle of an attack by micro-organisms that have created a pandemic, and that’s the context. Our Prime Minister has noted that those most likely to be greeted by the grim reaper as a consequence of said pandemic are probably in their eighties and ready to pop their clogs anyway. Not a nice way to go, on oxygen and gasping for breath, but death’s death, isn’t it, and nice or otherwise it’s pretty final.

So apparently the Prime Minister made his policies a year or so ago based on the reality that old people die and Covid’s as certain as anything to cause it.

Now look at what he’s balancing. The nation’s economy is damaged by a cease in economic activity, which is what lockdown causes, on the one hand, and old people doing what old people must do, and dying, on the other.

My main problem is that the economy is an artificial construct. As a child of simple bartering in ye good old days, it’s just a way of comparing differences so that they make sense. One cross-eyed pullet equals a loaf of bread baked lovingly by the missus, or one cow on its last legs might be worth a bowl of rabbit stew, with turnips. That sort of thing. Whereas Auntie Philomena is a well rounded human being with a life-time of wisdom stored in her eighty year-old brain, and still making meaningful pronouncements on which the future of life on Earth might depend. In the balance, if the economy is more precious than Auntie Philomena, then I’d suggest there’s something wrong with priorities.

And the wretched prime minister (someone once said he could think, but I’ve yet to see evidence of it) wants to save the economy from the ravages of a pandemic because… well, Auntie Philomena’s old, isn’t she?

At the end of the day, the big question is about ten minutes.

Of what value is ten minutes to an eighteen year old lad or lass if he/she is going to spend it luxuriating in a lie-in and dreaming of nice things like sex, or what value is that ten minutes to an old man/woman who’s going to spend it coming to terms with the Meaning of Life and finding a solution after a life-time of worrying, and stumbling on a final answer before dying at the end of that ten minutes? It’s a hard one, isn’t it?

A lie in, or a nice philosophical conundrum?

© Peter Rogerson 20.07.21