Perfect day ?

Here’s an odd question for you guys – what would a perfect day look like for you ? and if you were to attempt to design (plan) one what would it contain ?

Today’s musical reference is of course …..

Just recently in a post I gave a bit of a nod to the late Sir Terry Pratchett and specifically his character ‘Dave’ who of course runs Daves pins emporium, today i’d like to refer to two of Pratchetts other characters : Witches and Wizards and anyone whom has read any of the Discworld series will know that we meet many by name. It’s quite a trope that all Witches and Wizards are the only kind of human that know the day and hour of their death and thus can prepare for it : Wizards seem to arrange things so that they are comfortably ensconced in their favorite armchair and finishing off the last drop of their best brandy as death appears and gives a polite cough death, in the form of a 7 foot skeleton, and voiceovered, in the films by Ian Richardson he was always rather proper….just insistent.

How this post came about.

I have to think back quite a few years as I think it was the time when I was an avid follower and patron of Dr Jordan Peterson. If my memory serves correctly then it was in one of his lectures that he talked about the idea of designing the perfect, or at least ideal, day. I suspect that most of us can’t even begin the think that way and the best we can say is that somehow we got through it without killing anybody – my definition of a good day when I was an ICU nurse was that my patients were (mostly) still alive at the end o my watch.

Today, i’m revisiting Dr Peterson’s work once again as I am slowly working through his latest book ‘We Who Wrestle With God’ – my current reading is the 2 of them are making quite the match of it and I think that Joe Rogan might have to step in and act as ref !. Seriously though Dr Peterson has been through a lot, i’m glad to say that the Peterson Academy is up and running although i’m really struggling with some of the lectures. I have to admit that I don’t intrinsically have the knowledge or even the language to even begin to put across how Dr Peterson would frame that question or concept today. I think I can say that the ideal day wouldn’t just be about hedonism and self gratification but, knowing his work slightly, the ideal or perfect day would ride the wave between order and chaos…..helpful eh ?

The other and more obvious way that this post came to life is the more prosaic reason that iv’e had two clinically significant strokes already and i’m at the sort of age that health problems can turn into the slow down slope of inevitable descent towards death….there, no other way of saying it really. While young folks probably never have to think about planning their time such that it is used to the best effect and outcome at my age it is more true to say that each and every day counts and in a way has to be one well used. If that sounds a bit maudlin then lets dive straight in and have a good maudle !

I feel that I have to make every day count now, I wouldn’t say perfect because I think that’s an almost unachievable goal so instead i’ll settle for days where, at the end, I feel that iv’e done some productive work – that breaks down into project work and, this time of year, productive work around the place : an ideal day would then include my hobby ‘job’ which is blogging and writing alongside listening to one or other lectures. I should also say that I need at least one session of exercise per day and in a Petersonian kind of way do at least one thing that improves someone else’s day – in my case that’s the simple act of having a hot meal ready for my partner when she comes home from a tough day at the hospital.

Iv’e given hedonism a try by the way so I know, from experience, that it only works for a while : readers may remember that I sailed my little cruising boat across the Channel and spent 110 days cruising around Brittany. I might well have described my perfect day then of waking up early in one anchorage, quietly leaving it under sail and then maybe having a more challenging passage around to another bay where I would anchor and maybe finish my ‘perfect day’ with a cool dip in the sea and a good meal cooked on board. It works…..but only for a while – I found that my limit was around the three months that I spent there, after that I was hankering for a longer and harder passage home followed by at least a month of refit work.

Iv’e had close experience with the world of leisure cruising in the Caribbean – in my case from the deck of a charter yacht on which I was deckhand and then mate. If I were to sum up that experience and that time of life in just a few words then it would be the line sung by the former Pogues frontman Shane Mc Gowan “it’s such fun” – it has the same darkly cynical edge as the rest of Lou Reed’s Perfect Day. The sailors dream seems to be to be able to make enough money to ditch the job, buy as large a yacht as possible and then bunk off around the Caribbean while drinking rum and having as carefree life as possible It’s such fun…..

I once heavily criticized an ex work colleague who’d done that although in the Mediterranean rather than the Caribbean and she had started to blog about it and boasted about writing a book about the whole lifestyle. Having read a few of her blogs I can sum up her entire schtick in one sentence – we bought a villa and a cruising yacht, kept in a ‘nice’ marina and we sail (motor mostly) from marina to marina where we go and find a ‘nice’ restaurant and have a ‘nice’ meal. Yes i’m being super cynical but it does kind-of sum up that whole rather pointless and aimless existence.

I did also once try to defend sailing against the usual ‘charge’ of being mere hedonism and not much more than an entirely trivial pastime. I’d like to add though that going to sea in a genuinely small boat is never fully just a trivial exercise, it seems to me that, a bit like rock climbing it can have as much or as little difficulty, adventure and exposure as you feel up to taking on.

Today when it comes to thinking and talking about leisure yachting iv’e had to change my mind significantly . I think now that while there is a small adventurous ‘Corinthian’ element in sailing -largely to be found among the racing types at one end and the dinghy cruisers at the other it’s common opposite (leisure yachting) has slowly declined and degraded towards greater comfort and convenience hence yachts that have got larger according to their existing fashion while their owners do less and less with them that is in any way challenging or adventuresome.

Now…..I have to apologize because, in this post, iv’e got very side tracked away from the important subject that I intended to discuss today immediately after my references to the late Sir Terry Pratchett’s characters (Witches and Wizards) whom in his novels are the only ones to know beforehand the day and hour of their death.

As iv’e said before, one of my duties as a senior/specialist nurse was to visit wards, when called, and perform a short procedure called verification of expected death. Given that many elderly people die in hospital or are admitted in the expectation of being at the end of life then you would realize that it’s a sad but commonplace thing to have to do. Having spent most of this post so far discussing what is and what isn’t trivial it’s all a bit trivial when I think about running from medical emergeny to medical emergency and finishing up with a verification to complete – my record for a single night was five I seem to remember.

I know, I know, suddenly my post takes an uncomfortable swerve into a very non trivial subject and where it’s going, in case you hadn’t guessed already is M.AI.D or medical assistance in dying – lets be blunt and call it what it is – Euthanasia. For those that don’t follow these things then a bill has been passed in the UK parliament to allow for MAID and here’s the kicker : it has been stated as that it can only be applied in terminal illness – which would be a bad enough backward step but the evidence so far is that all progressively liberal states start with a show of compassion and always degrade from there (Canada is a good or bad example).

I want to make my points as carefully as I can because i’m only slowly navigating my way through an area that I have, in the past, had direct experience of and where feelings run high : it might be argued that by not going along with state sponsored euthanasia I am not displaying a sufficient level of care and compassion but then iv’e actually had to deal with death and dying up close and personal and I strongly believe that a state inspired drive towards euthanasia should take a very back seat to an actual improvement in palliative care. My first argument is that care at the end of life should only extend to care and not to a final solution and that fundamentally the state, especially liberal/social (quasi communist) states like ours shouldn’t get involved at all because history and current practice shows us how badly and how quickly it all goes wrong.

I am directly one of those ‘white middle class males’ – far right as our PM likes to state over and over, who has read and likes to read, 20th century history seriously – seriously enough to point out what has happened before. Some say that history doesn’t repeat and others counter that, no it doesn’t but it does have a certain rythym’.

The immediate thing i’m referring to is the action of another socialist (National Socialist) recorded as Aktion T4 – hands up if you’ve never been taught about or never read about this. Those whom already have will immediately realize that I am talking about the German National Socialist (Nazi) state under Adolf Hitler and Aktion T4 refers to state controlled and mandated euthanasia of those individuals that were judged by the state as having lives not worth living. Again, for those that don’t know this one Aktion, started behind a thin mask of compassion resulted in the murder of some 10.000 children – just let that sink in.

While today what we see is certain white, middle class liberal females, earnestly campaigning for ‘death with dignity’ I would say that, once again, it’s the same or similar people manipulating words to make a stark reality more palatable : I have to add that the first example is abortion – my body my choice is the usual parroted chant. Lets just say that it isn’t the unborn child’s choice and often not the fathers choice either to be terminated…..abortion always involves an uncomfortable truth which is the death of an unborn and completely viable human being…..in other words murder.

I can well imagine the howls of outrage from feminists right now and if this post was to be widely seen then it would probably have the end result of a knock on the door and an invitation ok, lets call it an attempt at coercion, to attend a police interview. I don’t offer any apology or wiggle room though so it’s likely that I would get insta-labelled as anti feminist, sexist and far right.

While I won’t apologize for my personal opinions I would like to say that they are only that as I have no power or authority whatsoever : I have to add a very medical caveat though – that opinions are basically like ar*eholes – everybody has one or starts out with one.

I would though like to immediately correct myself and that is by offering an apology for engaging with two separate subjects in the same post : highly charged and emotive subjects too. I was going to finish with a thin attempt at humor in trying to link my opening paragraph with the last : that the ultimate trajectory of a progressive approach to MAID might be to make an appointment with your friendly local GP and are offered something nice that will end your life – it might even be convenient to let you know the date and hour ……….

To finish seriously though I don’t think it’s best practice for me to heavily criticize a government that I utterly despise and not offer an intelligent solution to end of life care, so here goes.

The final frontier that we all face isn’t some cheesy science fiction show but is our own deaths – and often the deaths of our loved ones too. Iv’e witnessed many deaths because of my jobs in healthcare and, as I said previously, often had to be up close and personal with the difficult decisions that have to be made at that time. Some deaths, I would say, went easy for the person dying – often a slow slide into loss of consciousness – and some deaths went very hard indeed. I would offer, as a personally difficult example the death of my own late mother, whom I know was actively in pain until I requested that a palliative care team intervene. I’m sad to say that end of life pain and other distress is something that can and does happen, and then of course the thought of that possible end causes fear, anxiety and depression.

I would like to suggest that instead of MAID we should be actively supporting (locally) any of the systems or organizations that offer palliative care and to that with a personal and local involvement rather than handing the problem off to the state via the over stretched NHS. If there is a principle in mind here its the RC (Roman Catholic) one of subsidiarity : note that it can be stated in a religious or non religious way so if the whole idea of a Papal encyclical really gets up your skirt then here is the start of the Wikipedia entry …..

“Subsidiarity is a principle of social organization that holds that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level that is consistent with their resolution. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as “the principle that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed at a more local level”.^[1] The concept is applicable in the fields of government, political science, neuropsychology, cybernetics, management and in military command (mission command). The OED adds that the term “subsidiarity” in English follows the early German usage of “Subsidiarität”.^[2] “

For completion the RC take on this appears in the papal encyclical ‘quadragesimo anno’ (pope Pius X1) here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadragesimo_anno

My own quick and dirty take on that – what I often refer to nowadays as the TLDR (internet speak for ‘too long,didn’t read’) is that quadragesimo anno – all it means is fortieth year – is the part of Catholic thought and teaching that focuses on Social Justice and that’s not something you would regularly see me talk about. The Papal version of that though is a lot more carefully considered than the placard waving pink, blue and green haired social robots we see (and unfortunately hear) chanting meaningless garbage about social justice. What that side of the great divide always seem to be spouting off about is their own resentments and inadequacy. The Papal version is quite worth the read even if it’s something that you might not normally consider worthwhile. In ‘fortieth year’ the then Pope (Pius) sets out some strong arguments against rampant capitalism and equally strong arguments about Communism, especially, at that time, the then current Soviet version.

He did also set out the case for fair labor and that meant fairness on both sides of employer and employed. Today it immediately brings to mind what I see as modern serfdom in the form of zero hour contracts and specifically Amazon (and other) delivery drivers having to work to an almost impossible schedule for low wage while the former CEO (Jeff Bezos) sits pretty on his superyacht and lives a carefree hedonistic lifestyle.

As our man Forrest Gump once said…….that’s all I have to say about that