AS OLD AS METHUSELAH

According to the Book of Genesis, Methuselah lived to be 969 years old, which seems a bit unlikely. But perhaps that was a recording error, and what they meant to say was ninety-six years nine months. Or else every year in Methuselah's company just felt like ten.

I am now 78 (which is more than old enough) but so far I've been one of the lucky ones: I can still walk unaided, eat, drink and enjoy the company of family and friends. What I value most of all though - like my personal role models, Miss Piney Trigger and Mehitabel - is my independence. 

Mehitabel, in case you've forgotten, is the friend of Archy the cockroach, narrator of the humorous verse of Don Maquis. She's an alley cat on her 9th life whose favourite refrain is 'wotthehell'. And John Masefield's Piney Trigger, from The Midnight Folk, is a wicked old woman in a very gay dressing-gown, reading a sprightly story, at which she was laughing. Beside her, on a table, was a bottle of champagne: she sipped a glass of the wine from time to time. In her mouth was a long cigarette-holder containing a lighted cigarette. And if you'd tried to put Piney Trigger in some ghastly Home, she'd have drawn her pistol and booted you down the stairs.

I cannot for the life of me see what the point is of keeping people alive just so that they can linger on in some deeply depressing holding-centre. And please don't tell me the answer is better palliative care. I've seen far too many of my friends and family die long drawn-out deaths, and it doesn't matter how much kindness you're treated with, it can't begin to make up for the pain, the immobility, the loss of dignity and hope. Which is why I am so angry about the Assisted Dying bill being voted down, yet again. 

There's plenty of assisted dying for the elderly in books, of course, usually of the smother-Granny-to-speed-up-the-inheritance variety, but the people in Lyse Doucet's remarkable The Finest Hotel in Kabul (winner of the Women's Non Fiction prize in 2026) are just doing their best to stay alive. Seen through the eyes of the ordinary citizens who run and work in the hotel, it's a wonderful human history of modern Afghanistan, by a courageous and compassionate journalist.

The book I've enjoyed most though, in the past few weeks, is Ann Patchett's Whistler. I've read and liked all her books but this one might be my favourite. The story of Daphne's chance encounter with her former stepfather, Eddie Triplett (a dying old man, as it happens, but the most enjoyable, life-enhancing company you could hope to meet) is an absolute pleasure to read. 

Lastly, The Ballad of William Bloat. The Irish are masters of black humour and this old copy of mine, published by my own one-time publishers, Blackstaff Press, is illustrated by Hector McDonnell. For those of you who don't know it, it begins In a mean abode on the Shankhill Road lived a man called William Bloat. He had a wife, the curse of his life, who continually got his goat... So he cuts her throat and then hangs himself with her bedsheet - cursing, with his last breath, the Pope. And this is how it ends:

But the strangest turn to the whole concern is only just beginnin', 

He went to Hell but his wife got well, and she's still alive and sinnin',            

For the razor blade was foreign made, but the sheet was Irish linen.

I've been thinking about my own exit plans. You can of course get lucky: Aeschylus is said to have been killed by a tortoise dropped from on high by an eagle. Apparently the bird mistook his bald head for a rock. My own current favourite is to sit on top of a moonlit Irish mountain with a case of good wine and drink till I topple gently over the edge. Or it would be, if not for the difficulty of lugging a case of wine up a mountain, plus the near certainty of any moonlit Irish night turning before long to pouring rain and freezing temperatures. I think I might just try to read myself to death instead.