Things to do Before I Die

I seem to have stumbled on several of these lists recently, and it has made me think. There are things I intend to do one day, things I should like to do, things that I imagine would be worth doing, and things which, thinking about it carefully, I believe I will be glad I have done when I reflect on my life as it ends. The items on this list make up a collection of aspirations old and new that may be fitted haphazardly into these or other categories.

Some people seem to copy each other, rather than thinking how they themselves would respond to the experience in later life. And some of the things that regularly crop up are surprisingly mundane. Why does everybody want to swim with dolphins? Or eat at the world’s best restaurant, or stay at the world’s best hotel? Or appear as an extra in a film, or just appear once on the television? I expect all of those things are fun if you get the chance, but I don’t see them as justifying existence in the mind of the moribund. But on the whole they show how different we all are, how individual are our dreams and aspirations and fears, and that fact alone makes life a fascinating adventure. So here are my ideas:

Buy a microlight plane (and fly it, because I find the idea of moving around the country by air and seeing it from above very compelling)

Learn to ski jump (because it looks like tremendous fun and I want to feel it)

Cross Siberia by train (the journey must be very beautiful, and the sense of being lost in a place that is far more interesting than you yourself could ever be must be wonderful)

Travel in northern India (because I think there are things there worth seeing, things to learn about what people have been and can be)

Understand Sanskrit literature as well as I sometimes pretend to (a genuinely satisfying intellectual achievement)

Understand the origins of humanity and human consciousness (I rely on other people to provide the information that I will then try to understand, and at the moment they still have a lot of work to do)

Own a shark (not that I need great pick-up lines anymore, but that one takes some beating. And I like sharks)

Open the bowling for England (overtaken by events many years ago)

Have a passionate affair with Goldie Hawn (also overtaken by events many years ago)

Discover whether there is such a thing as spiritual enlightenment

If there is, achieve it (contingent on previous)

Win a Nobel Prize for (preferably) Literature (this is more something to work towards than to achieve. A kind of distant reference point for my little scribblings)

Learn to accept death (useful in itself)

Learn to play a mean game of chess (I used to be a mathematician, I’m supposed to be good at chess, but I have never got beyond not-quite-embarrassing)

Express something worthwhile by drawing (I would discover something about the world that I had not imagined)

Likewise through music/the guitar, for the same reason

Make a parachute jump (because it is the single most terrifying thing I can think off, and to overcome the irrational fear would be very satisfying and beneficial)

Walk around the world (if that is rather impractical, I would settle for walking across Africa from Port Said to Cape Town, or the Americas from The Magellan Strait to Alaska)

Nº 1 on any such list: Live. Many people forget to do this. They are too busy not dying, or doing other things of minor importance.

Comments, additions, ideas, other people’s lists, are very welcome.

This Story Needs a Title

My grandfather remembered the first moon landing. It wasn’t so long ago, you know. He died in a hospital bed, and my mother was with him. He didn’t know she was there, and it was only chance. It could have been any one of us. We took turns. The last one of us he knew was there was probably me. When my mother arrived he was already unconscious.

He never talked about the moon landing. Only a couple of times on New Year’s Eve when he’d been mixing his Guinness with my grandmother’s sherry. My mother said he used to talk about it a lot. When they thought it was a great moment in the history of the world. They thought the moon was the future. It wasn’t their fault. To them it was mysterious. And any mystery must be important. They thought you should die with your family around you. There used to be tribes that ate the bodies of their parents. They thought there was a reason for it.

Then we discovered what the moon was for. It’s hard. A part of you wants to say goodbye, and then, when it’s your turn, you don’t want to go. You cling to the old ways, the old ideas, the things our grandparents believed. It’s easy to understand why they believed them, but now we know they were wrong, and you have to accept it. It’s part of being a person of your time. We know what they didn’t. We know more about how things should be. To reject it is to belong to another time, to live with the dinosaurs. Oh, and to be wrong, of course.

The moon is dead. Geologically and biologically dead. No atmosphere, like a really bad party. It was obvious really. We just took a long time to realize. The Earth, on the contrary, is young. And the world belongs to the young. It’s obvious, really.

There are those who whisper that there’s been a misunderstanding, that the world belongs not to the young, but to the living. There was a time when it was like that, but as everyone knows, it was just a step on the way, a short period while the forces of reaction and sedition got used to the idea or were made to stop confusing the matter. Then it was the dying who were sent here as well as the dead. Then the old, over 80 they started with. But old age is a relative thing. A few people are still young at 90, some are old at 60. It was a matter of judgement. The people who did the judging were often criticised, so in the end they made it simpler. Over 60, because some are old at 60. Those who were still young at 60 had the chance to prove it, and it turned out that most of them were not as young as they thought. The world belongs to the young.

Some of those who came here were not even 60, but age is relative. When you have nothing to offer your family, and no friends to help you, and you’re more a hindrance than a help, and your company is boring, and you smell a bit and talk too much about the past, then you’re old, aren’t you, regardless of the years you’ve lived? And now it’s my turn.

I made it to 58 before they decided I had to go. Not bad really. I can’t complain. I had a good family, but my friends were sent off first, my wife never even made it here, and my children feel that I can’t make proper use of my property anymore, not as much as they could, so they asked the tribunal to review me. All fair and right, just as it should be. But it’s Hell here. Completely alone. The workers receive you, process you, then they put you in your cell and wait for the hunger and thirst to take you. They’re made of clear plastic, the cells, something incredibly strong and transparent. You can see the sky and the Earth. It makes you wish you were back there.

I didn’t know it was like that. On Earth we thought there must be some other way, quick and painless. It’s what they tell you, or what they let you believe, anyway. Now I think about it, I don’t know that I ever heard it mentioned. People don’t think about this place, and the people who come here. We don’t matter anymore, do we? The world isn’t like in my grandfather’s day, when they thought they could talk to the dead, and visit them, and ask them to watch over them. Now we know the truth. I’m not one of them anymore. I’m one of us.

But it’s hard when your time comes, it really is. You want to stay, you say that you’re still young, that you deserve to stay with the living. Old people are selfish, we used to say. And it’s true. Now I’m old I’m selfish myself. I’ll be gone soon. Dead. A few days more, and it will be over. I already feel weak, and tired, and my mouth is drier than I ever imagined it could be, and my head hurts terribly. Just a few days more.

The workers have a hard time here. Lonely and miserable, with no real comforts, and their families and friends, if they still have any, a quarter of a million miles away. They’re paid a pittance, but it doesn’t really matter as there’s nothing here they could spend it on. They can’t produce anything and what we send over from Earth is just the minimum required to keep them alive. They’re only allowed back occasionally, and briefly, under supervision, and permissions are often cancelled at the last minute. In fact hardly anyone on Earth has ever met a moon worker, not until they come here. It’s odd, in a way. At the time we discovered the purpose of the moon, we discovered the purpose of the Welsh.

If they knew I was writing this, they would make me lie here forever, instead of pushing me into space in the direction of Sirius. That’s what they promise to do, so that one day we’ll wake up on the ancestral home of man. You have to believe it, or you’d go mad. If you don’t believe it, if you don’t understand why it’s right, you don’t deserve to go to Sirius, and they just throw you out into the moondust. I can see a lot of bodies out there, there must be a lot of people who don’t believe. But I do. I know it’s right. It’s just a bit hard to take when it’s your turn. A few days more…

From the Guardian, an article about the things that dying people regret. In summary:

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
"This was the most common regret of all."
2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
"This came from every male patient that I nursed."
3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
"Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others"
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
"This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice"

 It amazes me how unaware most people are of what they will feel at the end of their lives. Much of what I do is done in the knowledge that life is short, there is only one of it, and most of the things we choose to think are important, do not in fact matter in the slightest. It is easy enough, it shouldn't require a greater than average imagination or intelligence, to use how you will look back on it as a criterion for making choices, but very few people do it, and so they reach the end of their lives with a sense of disappointment and waste.

Perhaps I shall also feel that sense of waste, perhaps I have not made the right decisions, despite thinking about them this way, perhaps I am wrong. I certainly haven't always done, and don't always succeed in doing,  what I decide I should do. But I do know that 'because it's Thursday', is a bad reason for polishing the floor, that work is for paying for life, that you are never as tired as you think you are, and that what other people think you should do is part of them, and means nothing to you.

There is much we have little choice in, even we lucky ones, but getting the rest of it wrong, through laziness, cowardice or lack of imagination, will cause us to suffer at the end of our lives. It can be avoided. I think.

Of Clocks and a Victim of Time

The Spanish Royal Clock Collection is one of the largest in the world, spread cross a number of palaces that have housed the king and court at various times. A representative selection is now on display at the Palacio Real, and it’s worth a look if you’re in Madrid.

Hildeyard's Clock of the Four Faces

There are two aspects to a clock, the technology and the art. Once the technology reaches a kind of plateau, as it has now, it is mainly the designers who make a difference, creating attractive and innovative pieces and giving the customers what they want, which is not necessarily the same thing.

After the perfection of the regulator in the early 18thC it was up to the artists, enamellists, sculptors, goldsmiths and jewellers to attract the attention of kings and other moneyed patrons. The result was a considerable amount of Baroque horror, whimsical allegory expressed in thick gold plate, but also some beautiful and original craftsmanship.

There was a long-case regulator clock with no face, and the clock on the pendulum itself, an elegant, striking piece by the Woolls brothers and the master Abraham Matthey, a beautiful skeleton clock with a helios pendulum and moon phases in blue ceramic, a curious clock on the end of a barrel carried by a negro, with too much gold for my taste, but the balance of the piece was perfect, almost like a Greek marble (this was by Michel Francois Piolaine).

The star of the show, at least in my judgement, is a four-faced clock by Thomas Hildeyard (a London clockmaker), quite magnificent, and a wonderful clock, as in a thing that ticks and tells you the right time, rather than a gallery piece. Every part of it has function, as well as beauty.

I blogged about the Viaduct of the Calle Segovia a couple of years ago. It’s just down the road from the Palace and, as we left, we saw an unnecessarily large number of police cars and ambulances, with more arriving. There was potential suicide on the viaduct, the latest aspirant to a large and growing association of the depressed, the disillusioned, the disappointed and the mad. He was between the plastic protective panelling and the parapet. There were policemen and paramedics everywhere and more arriving but no one seemed to know what to do. The police were instinctively keeping everybody back and the ambulance staff seemed to be giving each other moral support. You expected Denzil Washington to sweep in in an ostentatious but unmarked vehicle and for everyone to suddenly relax. We waited as was seemly, but in the end I don’t know whether he completed his final act of self-expression, or is lying in a hospital bed being talked at by experts and reflecting on where it all went wrong. Time, you see, changes everything, but it is responsible for nothing. It just passes, we take care of the rest.

I'm Going to Regret this, but...

There’s have been ripples in the blogosphere, and possibly in the country, about the possibility of bringing back the death penalty for murder, or some subset of murders.*

The death penalty was applied to a decreasing number of crimes from the early 18thC, when the black acts were sweeping and savage, and the end of the 19thC when attempted murder and rape both ceased to be capital crimes. Treason only applied in wartime at that stage. This was partly, or largely, because juries were refusing to convict on capital charges where they felt death was too harsh a sentence. The final abolition of the death penalty for murder was not a response to the actions of juries, and was against public opinion, which has always wanted to have the option of killing its killers. This is relevant to the later argument. (I haven’t checked any of these things, by the way, so I’m open to correction.)

The fact that a majority wants something doesn’t necessarily mean it is right, but it’s a good starting point if you have to decide whether it should exist or not. The EU finally forced all its members to abolish the death penalty completely a few years ago. As I pointed out at the time (to anyone who’d listen), an unelected, unaccountable body denying a society the freedom to protect itself from its murderers is not progress, it is tyranny.

None of which has any bearing on whether the death penalty per se is right or wrong, so let’s have a look.

I do not oppose the death penalty on principle. I see nothing wrong with society holding forfeit the life of someone who has killed one of its members. Therefore the facts that would lead me have an opinion on the matter of in England are practical matters.

Does it work as a deterrent? Despite the thousands of keys that have been worn to dust beneath the fingers of writers on both sides of the divide, no one seems to have a clue. It shouldn’t be too hard to look at figures from around the world, as the status of capital punishment has changed, and do some analysis. They would need to be corrected for any number of factors, and, in fact, it would be very hard, but it should also be worth doing. You could also talk to murderers, a lot of them, very carefully, and try to ascertain how they might have acted differently. It would require a great deal of work, but again, it is something very much worth knowing more about.

What do you do about the mistakes? Well, there’s not much you can do, except do your best to make sure they don’t happen. There’s a lot that can be done, and is done, to ensure that the innocent are not convicted and condemned, but sometimes they are. That’s a rather weak answer, but there isn’t a stronger one unless you start trying to weigh the value of innocent convicts hanged against those saved by the force of deterrent and lack of recidivism, and you can’t have that conversation until the point in the previous paragraph has been answered with some degree of accuracy. It is this question which inclines me against the death penalty in practice.

Who takes the life of the convicted murderer? Is it society as a whole, or is the state, an entity distinct from, and antagonistic to, society? In Britain we still have the sense that we, society, collectively, through the system of juries, on whom a guilty verdict cannot be imposed, and by having trials in public, so that justice can be seen to be done, and any inadequacies openly discussed, act in our own name, to protect ourselves from criminals. This may be why people generally are in favour of capital punishment. (In Spain the general public is very much against, because it is associated with a large number of less than perfect governments over the centuries, and perhaps because they don’t have juries.) Both jury trial and visible justice are under increasing threat (in the name of human rights and freedom, of course) and the sense that we ourselves punish criminals, rather than the state, may soon cease to be felt so strongly.

All the commentators I have read on the subject recently, both for and against, assume that the state would be giving itself the power to kill its citizens. There is another way of looking at it, as I say, and I think it is relevant to the argument.

*Usually those who kill children or policemen in the execution of their duty. These categories of murder may be considered different, incidentally, not because the lives of children and policemen are worth more than other lives, but because people who kill children, and policemen when they are protecting the rest of us, are probably more dangerous (and more evil) than other murderers. I don’t think I would want that distinction to be made, if execution were revived, but it’s a legitimate argument, I feel.

Of Prisoners and the ECHR

CLARIFICATION: This post is about a decision by the ECHR and its very poor coverage in the press. In preparing it I watched a couple of interviews with John Hirst in which he came across as a thoroughly unpleasant type, otherwise he would not even have got a mention here. Having a love of the truth, and not being entirely stupid, I checked the facts carefully; he was indeed convicted of manslaughter, not murder, as I made perfectly clear in the post. His complaint is, therefore, groundless. I also linked to his own blog, and to another article in which he talks about his crime, so that his own views, and not just mine, are available to those who may read the post. I regularly do this with people I criticise. The links are still there below, and I now add another, which, while not in his own voice, seems to provide background to his mental state.

However, I simply do not have the time to go to England and argue the toss about the meaning in common use of a term that has a powerful legal connotation with a judge who is unlikely to be sympathetic to such an argument. Also, while I haven't the least concern for the sensitivities of John Hirst, he is not important to the matter I was discussing. I have therefore removed the subtitle of the post, changed one word in the second paragraph of the first question, and edited question 4 very slightly.

I did not, and do not, accuse John Hirst of murder. I stated quite clearly that he was convicted of manslaughter. I then make a point about the meaning of the word murderer in general use, a point irrelevant to the subject of the post, but nevertheless a true one. Below is the original post, with the changes described above:

Media Studies 101- Mid-term exam

Qu.1

Compare and contrast:

Up next- Dull but worthy human rights lawyer explains why section 3 of the Representation of the People Act 1983, Articles 10 and 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and Article 3 of Protocol 1 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, are relevant to (Application no. 74025/01) CASE OF HIRST v. THE UNITED KINGDOM (No. 2) or...

Up next- Unrepentant axe-killer bangs on arrogantly and  inarticulately about how he’s got more rights than you and we all get to jump up and down frothing at the mouth.

Qu.2

Discuss:

Journalist with iffy syrup follows the finest of journalistic traditions and chooses the second option above. As a result he gets good viewing figures but we learn nothing about the case.

Qu.3

Should the government-

a)      arbitrarily ignore a decision based on a process to which it has been legally committed for 60 years, because said decision is unpopular or morally wrong

b)      question through the procedures of that court the grounds for the decision, which may well confuse human rights with civil rights, or for some other motive

c)      withdraw the UK from its commitment to the legal process and the treaties which set it up, so it is no longer bound by such decisions

d)     obey the order of the court, in accordance with the rule of law?

Qu.4

John Hirst  beat an old woman to death with an axe because she got on his nerves. This appears to have been an impulse but he remained in the house watching her die rather than help her (this was clearly established at the trial). Legally speaking, he was convicted of manslaughter. But murder is not just a legal term. As a term in common use it is frequently used to describe other situations in which one person kills, or is responsible for the death of, another, as well as in relatively trivial matters such as the eating of meat, the holding of bullfights or the practice of abortion. Murder as a word and a concept is ours to use and define, it does not belong exclusively to the courts.

Comments- The decision does not give prisoners the right to vote (something which doesn’t bother me very much, anyway). It enjoins the government to clarify how the removal of the franchise is applied in each case. Parliament can decide to deny the vote to prisoners serving a sentence longer than some lower bound, it could set out crimes which carry the loss of the franchise as an integral part of the punishment, it could instruct judges to pronounce on the retention or loss of the vote when sentencing a particular individual. There are many possibilities, some indistinguishable from the present state. I think we can be sure that, however Parliament clarifies the situation, Hirst will be in a group that is excluded. He can’t vote at the moment, by the way, because he hasn’t actually served his sentence, he is only out on licence.

The decision, btw, was made by the ECHR, which forms part of the network of the Council of Europe. It's nothing to do with the EU, and is in some ways not entirely useless. If it were the EU looking at the matter, the commission would simply have decreed that prisoners be allowed to vote. They don't go in for democracy, sovreignty, representation, the rule of law or legal process. (Discuss)

Of Lakes, The Dead, and Random Thoughts

A few thoughts on things, some bitter, some sweet, some whimsical, some mildly interesting, perhaps, some will never be written because it's nearly time for dinner, but, while some believe that a blog post should be a self-contained, internally consistent and coherent piece setting out and explaining an idea or series of ideas from start to finish (who are these people?) others say that if a post doesn't end like this... it isn't a blog post at all. Whether any of this this is relevant I couldn't say. I once met a chap in a pub in Hampstead High Street who believed he was Peter Cook*, so it's hard to say that belief tells us anything about what is, or what should be.

In any case, today is All Saints' Day, which is a holiday over here. It's a family day, there's nothing public about its observance (ie the government doesn't use it as an excuse to spend our money enjoying themselves or doing propaganda), and most people just use it to relax with their families and many take the chance to visit the cemetery and remember their dead.

Florists make a fortune on Valentine's Day, Mother's Day and All Saints' Day, opening all over the previous weekend and on the day itself, and by the cemetery there are stalls covering the entrance road with bright colours and the chatty banter which all market traders use to enliven the business of standing around for hours flogging plants. It's not a sad occasion, unless you've lost someone in the previous year. You meet everyone there, and can catch up with a bit of news, or arrange a dinner party over the hallowed ground containing the late Aunt Prado or whoever.

You have to fight your way along some of the paths, past the bored children who have turned into oblivious statues while they wait for their parents to stop yapping to someone they've met or gawping with artificially serious expressions at the tomb of a grandparent they never met; past the middle-aged spinsters diligently scrubbing down the marble and cutting all the flowers to exactly the same length because it's a way of looking and feeling useful; past the groups of gypsies crowding around a massive structure typically involving life-sized rococco angels with vacant faces, random religious symbols at odd points on the 10-foot high tombstone, giant photos of the deceased, and more flowers than you would have thought could be possibly be attached to the last resting place of cousin Eduardo without bringing the whole thing crashing to the ground. Gypsies have large familes, they take their late relatives very seriously indeed, and they have execrable taste in the paraphernalia of death. To an observer of human nature a cemetery on such a day is a fascinating place. It was warm and sunny as well.

To the farm this weekend. A bit damp, but the waterlands are greener than ever. The waterfall crashes as never before and the wind that plays with the surface of the lakes creates livelier and more interesting patters than usual, and the birds that live there are happier now that the people are gone. They don't care aboutr a bit of wind and rain, and they have the insects and the fish to themselves. The place has a different beauty in autumn, a rougher, tougher beauty, a manly attraction that the sun-worshippers don't know how to see.

On another note, I saw this at the EUObserver. I make no claim to be an economist, but I know bollocks when I hear it, and this struck me as A-grade whiffle designed to make us think it's more than blinkered political ranting. At the very least his assertion that George Osborne is 'emasculating the welfare state', by increasing its budget by slightly less than a Labour government would have done, is a hysterical exaggeration and not a good premise on which to build any kind of argument if you want to be taken seriously. I ran it by someone who does know about economics and he confirms that Irvin is essentially a Marxist, in the sense that he simply cannot understand the function of markets, and that nothing he says should be considered economics, only politics.

Addendum: This is from the Indie, a magnificent example of a vacuous space-filler column by a tedious woman who's been recycling the same stuff for many years, commented on by dozens of people, none of whom has a clue what they're talking about, but is going to give their opinion anyway, because they can. Q: How do you make politics out of drinking water? A: When you have newspaper columns to sell. That's all the rest of us need to know.**

*Oddly enough, he knew this belief to be false, despite his profound belief in its truth, and despite the fact that he really was Peter Cook. These statements are not logically incompatible, though they may not in fact be true...

**I'm something of an obsessive about water, in fact. I  am convinced that most people would feel better and their organs would last longer if they drank much more water than they do, but I tend to bore my friends with this, rather than writing columns in newspapers and accosting strangers in the street. And I know something about the subject, unlike the commenters at the Indie.***

***I'm rather disappointed in the Indie. The Telegraph is little more than a comic these days, the Times doesn't want anyone to read it, the FT requires you to pretend to be three different people to get to the interesting bits, and the Guardian is the Guardian, which leaves the Independent as the only paper worth reading. Rather disturbing, really. And then you discover it is also full of utter rubbish.

Deborah dearest, if you don't want to drink water at a particular moment, then don't. No one is going to force you. It isn't actually a problem. But of course, you have a column to write, and nothing to say...