A Full Life

And after a while – with my mother tearing out the hair I’m surprised didn’t fall of its own accord years ago, and my auntie and I playing good cop / bad cop to the duty Doctor’s idea of palliative care – my Nan is finally on morphine.

If it wasn’t for the wonderfully compassionate carers at the home, I’m pretty sure we’d be utterly lost.

There’s little point in ranting on here (he said, before ranting on.) We treat dying animals better than we do dying people. I haven’t yet met a person of faith to convince me that any of their holy books are worth the paper I wipe my arse with, but it seems that as wonderful as science is, technology is torture without morality.

I’m not talking about the morals some guy brings down a mountain, or whatever, but of the ideas and ideals we must take a firm hold of and shake when medicine prolongs the body, but not the mind.

We live in a great age of understanding and wonder. The need for the crutch of religion is more distant even, than the American spacecraft accelerating out of the barrier beyond our solar system.

And yet we cling with our petty morals and beliefs to the feeling that the essence of life itself is more precious than an absence of suffering. Because of this nobody will take a chance or act emphatically for fear of the ambulance chasers and the twisted rhetoric of the tabloids.

The woman who was in the news the other day, screaming at the health secretary – she’s my hero. Because if people that believe that deeply about something that doesn’t involve a deity can hold their ground, speak their mind, and not blow that whole squabble and all its paparazzi to kingdom come, then there’s still hope for us all.

It’s midnight, it doesn’t look like we’re going to run out of whisky any time soon, and we’re waiting for that phonecall.

I prayed last night. My Nan is still alive in that bed. Fuck you, God.

Let’s end on a happy note. I was larking about with my cousin and a kind person filmed this:

My cousin and I, performing an impromptu acoustic rendition of our smash hit ‘Johnny Depp’ in front of a raucous audience of one.

I’ve heard rumour of Depp cashing in on the success of our tune by acting in movies. I don’t condone that.