We oldies can’t help but think of death

I used to think a lot about Switzerland and how to accrue enough morphine to top myself when the time comes. But yay, at last, an assisted dying law seems likely and I can stop plotting.

No one talks about death. But oldies think about it all the time, not deliberately – it just inserts itself into everything. I’d like to write another trilogy, but will I finish it? Doubt if I’ll last through novel 1, never mind 2 and 3. When the garden centre chap tells me to buy tiny saplings and avoid 15-foot trees which will likely die, I know I’ll be dead before the three-footers look anything like a copse. But he quotes the ancient Greek proverb, ‘Society thrives where wise men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit’. So, now we now have a young orchard, a mini-copse and lots of trees mostly hidden by their tree-guards.