Coffee Anyone?
This morning I got up as usual and switched on our coffee machine. It’s a Gaggia Classic.
Apart from a couple of times I’ve descaled the thing, and cleaned its accessible innards-not many- it’s not been through the machine’s equivalent of the M.O.T. No annual service. Despite my lack of care, it must have produced pints of wonderful espresso without complaint in the three years since it arrived. My lack of attention caught up with me this morning.
A few drops of water fell from what I think is called the “brew head”, the pump made an unusual groaning noise and the water flow stopped abruptly. It was clear none of that unctuous brown, caffeine-laden liquid, was destined to lubricate the Rambler’s tonsils this day.
So it’s to the telephone- first-stop the shop where it was purchased. Anyone agree that one of the most irritating of today’s inventions is the automated telephone answering system? After ten minutes pressing various keys and being assured my business was valuable, down went the phone. Second stop, and I have now little difficulty in a bit of boosting here, was Fenwick Limited , one of the oldest department stores in Newcastle.
A real operator on the phone and a transfer to someone who seemed to know what she was talking about. “ Yes sir we can send it back to Gaggia for you” and “yes, they will give you an estimate before they carry out any work”. And the most surprising offer of all “ yes we have a machine we can lend you whilst yours is away”! On a roll like this, I wondered whether I should break the habit of a lifetime and buy a lottery ticket this week!
Within the hour a steaming espresso had dribbled into a cup, mingled with a large amount of granulated and the caffeine in the resulting mixture was undergoing separation within my inaccessible innards!
Cheers
t
The Final Exit
In “ On Liberty”, John Stuart Mill wrote “ The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral is not a sufficient warrant.”
Mill’s quote is particularly relevant when you examine the dreadfully sad case of Brian Blackburn.
Mr Blackburn was given a suspended sentence after pleading guilty to an offence of the unlawful killing of his wife Margaret. She was terminally ill and clearly in great and unrelieved pain. Rather than seek their own doctor’s help they decided on a suicide pact. Mr Blackburn agreed to cut his wife’s wrists and then as part of a suicide pact, tried to kill himself by the same gory, and in his case unsuccessful, means.
You can read a report at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/4174155.stm.
Blackburn was very lucky that the prosecution accepted his plea to manslaughter.
In recent months courts have refused to stop people flying off to Swiss clinics where they can be helped to kill themselves. And no doubt in time the Netherlands will become the destination of choice for those who wish to ensure their unbearable suffering is ended.
It’s about time some sense was injected into this area. There are patients who cannot be given sufficient opiates to keep them pain free. In those circumstances some doctors are forced into the fiction of giving a fatal dose of morphine they know will end their patient’s life, but it is given, and written up, to relieve pain. In a recent poll, nurses have confirmed that euthanasia is being carried out in many hospitals.
Although euthanasia is still, I think, not lawful in the Netherlands, a protocol has been established under which doctors report medical decisions resulting in euthanasia to the public prosecutor who will examine each case. No prosecution will follow if the prosecutor is satisfied that the killing was carried out following the patient’s express wish.
The Royal Dutch Medical Association considers euthanasia permissible under the following conditions.
- Only a medical practitioner should carry out euthanasia.
- There should be an explicit request from the patient which leaves no room for doubt about the patient’s desire to die.
- The patient’s decision should be well informed, free and persistent.
- The patient must be in a situation of unbearable pain and suffering without hope of improvement.
- There must be no other measures to make the patient’s suffering bearable.
- The doctor must be very careful in reaching the decision and should seek the opinion from another independent doctor.
The patient does not need to be in a terminal condition, merely that his pain unbearable with no hope of improvement.
At the moment Lord Joffe’s Bill “To enable a competent adult who is suffering unbearably as a result of a terminal illness to receive medical assistance to die at his own considered and persistent request; and to make provision for a person suffering from a terminal illness to receive pain relief medication.” is before the House of Lords.
You can download an Adobe Acrobat version of the bill from http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200405/ldbills/004/2005004.pdf
and read Lord Joffe’s speech introducing his Bill at http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/ld199900/ldhansrd/pdvn/lds03/text/30606-01.htm
t
Windsor in the Soup
On the front page of today’s Sun is a rather grainy photograph of someone described as “Harry the Nazi". "Harry" is third in a queue to acquire one of the largest fortunes in the world. Yet the photograph shows him wearing an armband displaying the swastika. We are told “Harry” was at a private party where guests were expected to arrive in fancy dress. He decided, one can only presume befuddled by drink, to dress up as a member of Rommel’s Africa Corps. The uniform included the optional ceremonial armband.
Another party guest took the picture. Though we are not told what fancy dress clothed the snapper.
“Harry’s” media advisers were quick to draft an apology. And it seems that they consider the matter closed.
Sections 98 to 112 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003- the so-called “bad character provisions” now click in. So it’s fair to point out that “Harry’s” got form. He’s been caught smoking dope, underage boozing, and seems to have what my mother would call “ a bit of a short fuse”. He has recently tried to thump a photographer plying his trade outside a London nightclub from which the lad was exiting looking a tad worse for drink.
What must give him the pip is that he’s been caught out. Does anyone really imagine him going to his dad and confessing? And is it believable that the first in line to the Windsor fortune would tell the boy to get a photographer round at the double, get a picture of “Harry” in the uniform, and fire it off to the Press Association for publication?
God alone knows what else is going on within this family.
Cheers
t
Dr Pangloss reporting
Voltaire wrote this letter shortly after the Lisbon earthquake. This “Act of God” killed an estimated 70,000 out of a population of 185,000, many of whom were attending the mass. It occurred on All Saints Day 1755.
Les Délices, November 24, 1755
This is indeed a cruel piece of natural philosophy! We shall find it difficult to discover how the laws of movement operate in such fearful disasters in the best of all possible worlds-- where a hundred thousand ants, our neighbours, are crushed in a second on our ant-heaps, half, dying undoubtedly in inexpressible agonies, beneath débris from which it was impossible to extricate them, families all over Europe reduced to beggary, and the fortunes of a hundred merchants -- Swiss, like yourself -- swallowed up in the ruins of Lisbon. What a game of chance human life is! What will the preachers say -- especially if the Palace of the Inquisition is left standing! I flatter myself that those reverend fathers, the Inquisitors, will have been crushed just like other people. That ought to teach men not to persecute men: for, while a few sanctimonious humbugs are burning a few fanatics, the earth opens and swallows up all alike. I believe it is our mountains which save us from earthquakes.
This is a extract from his “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster; Or an examination of the Axiom, All is well.”
But how conceive a God supremely good,
Who heaps his favours on the sons he loves,
Yet scatters evil with as large a hand?
What eye can pierce the depth of his designs?
From that all-perfect Being came not ill:
And came it from no other, for he ’s lord:
Yet it exists. O stern and numbing truth!
O wondrous mingling of diversities!
A God came down to lift our stricken race:
He visited the earth, and changed it not!
One sophist says he had not power to change;
“He had,” another cries, “but willed it not:
In time he will, no doubt.” And, while they prate,
The hidden thunders, belched from underground,
Fling wide the ruins of a hundred towns
Across the smiling face of Portugal.
God either smites the inborn guilt of man,
Or, arbitrary lord of space and time,
Devoid alike of pity and of wrath,
Pursues the cold designs he has conceived.
Or else this formless stuff, recalcitrant,
Bears in itself inalienable faults;
Or else God tries us, and this mortal life
Is but the passage to eternal spheres.
’T is transitory pain we suffer here,
And death its merciful deliverance.
Yet, when this dreadful passage has been made,
Who will contend he has deserved the crown?
Whatever side we take we needs must groan;
We nothing know, and everything must fear.
Nature is dumb, in vain appeal to it;
The human race demands a word of God.
’T is his alone to illustrate his work,
Console the weary, and illume the wise.
Without him man, to doubt and error doomed,
Finds not a reed that he may lean upon.
t
