Euthanasia - where do you stand?

I see that Tony Nicklinson, the right to die campaigner and sufferer of 'locked in syndrome', has passed away this week.

Mr Nicklinson has been in the news recently for trying to get parliament and the courts to give him permission to end his life, which he felt was degrading and useless after a debilitating and severe stroke he had five years ago left him paralysed from the neck down. Whilst fully conscious and able to hear and see, he could not talk, communicating via a computer using blinks of his eyes, and was unable to move or perform bodily functions without assistance.

I guess where you stand on this will to some degree be determined by your religious beliefs, partly by your compassion and I suppose that your views may alter depending who you were talking about. For instance, if I was talking about a complete stranger I ought to be able to look at the situation totally objectively and without emotion, if it was one of my nearest and dearest then it might be completely different.

Except it isn’t that simple; most human beings have a strong compassionate instinct, and an inbuilt abhorrence of taking the life of another living creature (unless it’s a wasp, of course!) and themselves have a fear of dying. When we are talking about another human being, that instinct becomes even stronger and very few of us can envisage what it must be like to want to welcome death with open arms. There seems to be, in most of us at least, an unspoken urge to prolong life by any means at our disposal and not extinguish it.

But surely the person best placed to determine whether their life is worth living in this sort of situation is the sufferer themselves? Particularly when they are able to communicate their wishes in a rational and considered way, which is what Mr Nicklinson has been doing, or at least trying to do, through a proper legal process. To have been an active, sporty and healthy adult as he was, successful in his job and with a growing family and then be cut down in your prime and not able to do anything which gives you pleasure or motivates you for the remainder of your days and then be told that you have to live like that is like the modern day equivalent of putting someone into purgatory, and could be seen as incredibly cruel.

What would I want if it was me? I think the same as Mr Nicklinson, to be able to live reasonably self sufficiently with self respect and a degree of independence, and to die in a humane way with dignity. So if I was in Mr Nicklinson’s situation, I would probably want to end my own life too, probably with the added thought that it would free up my loved ones to also have a life again themselves. It is interesting that his wife, who clearly adored him, also felt it would be best for him to die, as mentally he was deeply unhappy and it was tearing her apart to see it. She has aged twenty years in the last five, if her photos are anything to go by.

If it was my loved ones, well I don’t know. I am compassionate and I am very emotional (I cry easily) but I hate to see suffering and wouldn’t want anyone (or any creature) that I loved to suffer the indignities of total dependency or have no quality of life at all. You would have to weigh up medical advice and risk, and let your head rule your heart, not always easily done.

Euthanasia always divides people, but on one thing I am totally clear. It is not for anyone else to tell me how to live my life or, in certain situations, whether I should have to live my life at all. Whilst I have always believed that suicide because you have squandered your money, or can't cope with someone leaving you or for other depressing reasons is the ultimate selfish act, the ability to end your life if it has become unbearable for medical reasons should be available under strict guidelines and conditions.

I just hope that I am never in a situation where my beliefs are put to the test. And if I am, I hope I am not found wanting.

Still boistrous!

Second puppy class last night, and Coco was as boisterous as ever.

The slightly older Labrador that was there last week has now finished her classes, so she is now one of the larger dogs there and by far the most confident.

Almost the minute she arrived, she mugged a gorgeous fluffy golden retriever puppy that looked like it had come straight out of the tumble dryer and is about 10 weeks old (so slightly younger than her) causing it to pee on the floor with nerves, then set about a lovely little cocker spaniel puppy called Norman (great name!) batting him around the head with her paws as she has experienced our cats do to her. Norman didn’t like it, but fortunately his owner was very understanding!

On the plus side, I think we’ve pretty much got the hang of ‘sit’ and ‘down’ now and are well on the way to ‘stay’ and ‘leave’. In fact I’d venture to say that Coco was probably the fastest to learn ‘leave’ of all the puppies there (God, don’t I sound like a proud parent). But we are way behind with ‘heel’ and ‘come’, and it is clear that she is too free spirited to think they apply to her!

‘Heel’ and ‘come’ are two exercises the puppies have to learn off the lead, which I knew from the minute the trainer said “Now take off their leads” would be a recipe for disaster. On the lead Coco was fine with the ‘heel’ thing, but the minute I took it off she was racing around like a dervish distracting all the other puppies and trying to nick the treats from the hands of the other owners whose dogs were doing what they were told.

“Hold her in the calm position” suggested the trainer. The calm position is when you hold your puppy on your lap with its back to you and your arms firmly round its tummy, with the idea that if they feel close to you, their pack leader, and therefore secure they will calm down and behave. It works for about five seconds, then Coco gets restless, wriggles, squirms and tried to turn round and either bite your ear or lick your face. She also gets very hot in your arms and starts panting at an alarming rate, trying to get away and reach the water bowl in the middle of the floor (which in her boisterousness she overturned three times last evening) so she can gulp down gallons of water and cool down (then have a full bladder and pee on the floor or in the car if you are unlucky).

Despite all this, she is a sweetie and we are so glad we took the plunge and got her. She’ll learn, and part of the trouble with the classes is there are too many distractions and at 6.30pm it is right in the middle of her ‘frantic time’ when she has loads of energy that she wants to burn off because we have been busy or working all day. But there isn’t much choice if you work, as you have to do these things in the evening, so we’ll persevere.

So, this week’s homework is ‘stay’, ‘leave’ and ‘heel’. She clearly isn’t ready for ‘come’, which is when you let them go quite a distance away and then get them to return to you. Knowing my luck, she’d wander off to Godstone and be lost forever! We’ll work on all that over the next fortnight until the next class (nothing next week because of the bank holiday).

Then we’ll come home with a gold star! I hope!

Hungry - why do we sometimes get the munchies?

I had the serious munchies yesterday.

I had them all day, and it played hell with my will power and my ability to stick to my diet.

I have done very well over the past few weeks, and have lost around a stone in weight. I have roughly another stone to go, and I am feeling relatively confident that I can make it. Munchies aside of course.

What is it about some days that you simply feel starving all day regardless of the amount you eat? I blame my hormones (well I am the right age and I might as well, they have such a bad reputation any way) but surely other people feel like this and they can’t all be hormonal?

My chosen diet at the moment does as much as it can to help by providing a daily snack which you are supposed to save up for your ‘weak’ time of day and by permitting you two daily fruit snacks as well. Yesterday, I had my breakfast, my morning fruit, my lunch with permitted soup plus an allowed bread roll and a yoghurt, my afternoon fruit and my savoury snack and by late afternoon I was still starving! It was ages until dinner, and I am was in serious danger of buckling under the smell of the fast food as I entered Victoria station tonight. I almost had to go home with a peg on the end of my nose!

I am using a diet from a company called Diet Chef, which is essentially a fully catered diet using old fashioned calorie counting as its basis. And it works. You get an allowance of 1200 calories a day of which they provide approximately 800 in a pre prepared breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack. You make up the remainder by plenty of fruit and vegetables and a small amount of carbohydrate. There is plenty of choice (you get to pick your month’s meal selection yourself from a set of drop down choices) and without exception everything I have eaten so far has been tasty. The portions are smaller than you would cook yourself, but reasonably filling. You can have the odd night off (for instance if you are out with friends for dinner) as long as you don’t do it too regularly. All in all, I am quite impressed. It’s just as well, because I had to sign up for four months and it was expensive.

I have tried numerous other ways over the years from Atkins (which did make me lose weight but I got terrible wind, constipation and bad breath) to detoxing (which is just weird) through very odd pills which 'cleanse' your colon and stop you absorbing fat to Weight Watchers (where I was hungry ALL the time and which, judging from the lardy women that attend their meetings week after week, doesn’t work long term). None of them were terribly successful and all of them, in their own way, were unpleasant. I didn’t stick at anything longer than a month.

I have been doing this for almost seven weeks now, so my weight loss is averaging just over 2lb a week, which is the recommended amount if you want to keep the weight off long term. I have another two and a bit months to go (I can’t afford to do it for any longer) to get down to a goal weight I haven’t seen for about 15 years. If I can do it, I am promised a pair of Armani jeans by The Hubby.

Now that we have the dog of course, and now that she is old enough to go out for walks, I hope to accelerate the rate of loss by taking her out daily and for at least one long walk at the weekend. She is still a baby and can’t walk for hours, but an hour’s play in the field will be an hour longer than I would have done before. It should help me lose weight, tone up my thighs and calves, tighten up my belly muscles and improve my heart. A lot is riding on this, so it better bloody work!

Sit !!

On Monday evening (ie yesterday), we went to our first puppy training class.

I was prepared for an hour of humiliation, and it must be said that apart from another Labrador puppy that was slightly older than Coco she was the most confident and boisterous dog there, but actually it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought and I ended up thoroughly enjoying myself.

There were ten puppies there of varying ages between eight weeks and four months, so Coco was about middling. She was also middling size-wise, somewhere between the spaniels and one enormous Weimeramer (not sure if that is how you spell it, but anyway some bloody enormous Scandi hunting dog) that was only ten weeks old but already the size of a small pony.

There were three spaniels (two Cocker Spaniels and one King Charles), a Beagle, two Terriers, a Dalmatian, two Labs, this enormous thing and a few dogs which were either cross breed or something so pedigree I’d never heard of it, including one that looked like a teddy bear.

We learned ‘sit’, ‘down’ and had an attempt at ‘heel’. By and large, Coco didn’t do too badly although did get bored after a few attempts and when she discovered that once she got the hang of it all she was expected to do it without any meaty treats lost all interest and just rushed round the floor hoovering up the dropped bits of chicken breast that the other puppies had discarded.

The Hubby came along too, and if anything was a bit slower than the dog at learning, constantly forgetting all the verbal commands and being inconsistent with hand signals (he’s a bit like that when he’s driving the car, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised!). I think it was all a bit of a culture shock for him; after years of not having any animals at all and then in the last few acquiring a few cats through association with me, he suddenly has an energetic and strong minded, intelligent dog to deal with and has discovered a whole new world of things to do and buy.

All in all though, things went OK and at least Coco didn’t disgrace herself by peeing on the floor like a couple of the other, considerably more nervous puppies did. Considering she had never met another dog apart from her brothers and sisters (whom she has probably forgotten by now anyway) she was pretty well behaved and didn’t try to bite any other animal or person.

The lady running these classes has been recommended by the vets, and she is apparently an animal behaviourist as well as a puppy trainer. When she demonstrated the techniques on these infants, it all looked so easy but of course once the whole doggy class gets up and has a go there are so many distractions it makes it very difficult for the puppy to concentrate. So, we have homework! The exercises have to be repeated several times daily, firstly with treats then without. We have to take her out to meet other animals and get used to their presence so she is less easily distracted.

So there will be lots more trips out, which means, unfortunately for her, lots more trips in the car. Coco already dislikes the car and hates being shut behind her dog guard in the back and not able to join in with her human companions. It’s amazing how piercing a dog’s whine can be when you are enclosed with her inside four cubic metres of metal, but she has to get used to it because the car is a necessary evil of life today and what’s more, can take you to lots of good doggie places like the park. So somehow, she will have to at least learn to tolerate it, if not to like it.

We have plans to take her to the big agricultural show held locally over the August bank holiday weekend, so hopefully she will have learned to be in the car and to obey some basic commands by then. Otherwise it will be an interesting couple of days!

Wasn't it all rather a let down?

I only saw half the Olympics closing ceremony last night, until about 10.15pm, and then I’m afraid I got bored and went to bed. I have recorded the rest, really just so I can see the Spice Girls (which is rather sad) but perhaps it was inevitable after the wonderful opening ceremony and the drama of the last fortnight that last night fell rather short of my expectations.

I’m sure if you were there on the night, as 80,000 spectators were, that it was easy to get swept up in it all and enjoy the atmosphere, and I must say that the lighting effects were spectacular. The firework pictures in the newspapers this morning also looked rather good, but fancy lights and sparklers alone do not, for me, make a good night out.

If anything, I thought that the content of the ‘show’ lacked imagination. Yet again Madness were wheeled out (literally in this case) as was Annie Lennox plus a number of other famous musical faces and others not so famous (who on earth was that Emilie girl who opened the whole thing with that dreary song?).

What about celebrating other things British – not just focusing on London and music but broadening the horizon and looking at other famous landmarks and other artistic and athletic endeavours? Anyone watching around the world would

a)    Have trouble making out what it was all about what with taxis covered in newspaper and low loaders and

b)    Have come to the conclusion that London was all there is about Britain

I am conscious that this is all sounding rather churlish, particularly as I couldn’t be arsed to sit up until almost midnight to see it through, because it has been such a fabulous fortnight with not one duff note. The organisation has been superb, the sport has been spectacular (and that is coming from someone who doesn’t really like sport and never reads the back pages of the newspaper), the venues are world beating and the conduct and camaraderie of the competitors without fault.

Just imagine if this had been a fortnight festival of football – we would have had drunken louts ‘singing’ in the street, fights, bad sportsmanship on the pitch and obscene amounts of money being thrown at players just to turn up. We’ve had none of that, and even the most arrogant and hyped of competitors such as Usain Bolt have behaved impeccably (talking of 100 metre runners – don’t those guys have attitude?!)

Perhaps it is slightly unkind to moan, because artistic success is very much a subjective thing. I bet there are lots of you out there that loved last night’s ceremony, so maybe I just have to accept that it wasn’t my thing but agree that actually it was professionally staged and very well done, especially considering that services were either given for free or provided by volunteers.

And now we have to gear up for the Paralympics, which has been cheapened already by the fact it is on Channel Four, the home of Big Brother and Ice Road Truckers, and not the BBC.  Somehow, annoying as Claire Balding was fawning over the swimmers last week, C4 just won’t have the same amount of class. And it will be most annoying to have the viewing broken up by oversized opera singers trying to persuade me to ‘Go compare ‘ or by those f*****g meerkats (I used to quite like meerkats, now I feel like exterminating every last one of them!). But we’ll have to see.

I can tell by friends’ posts on Facebook that most of them have been tremendously excited by the Olympic extravaganza but personally, despite the success of Team GB and the heroic performances we have seen from some over the past fortnight, I can’t wait for it all to be over.

So roll on 9^th September, when the Paralympics finish, and let’s all get life back to normal.

Bored, bored, bored!

I am staggeringly bored.

I am working at home today and tomorrow, and I have a range of different things with me to do. I have made some progress this morning, but for the last two to three hours my brain has ground to a halt and I simply have got nothing done whatsoever.

The trouble is, what I have to do is mind numbingly dull and really doesn’t interest me at all. I am writing a Project Initiation Document for a project to refresh our web pages, rewriting a job description and pulling together a gannt chart for another project. I do quite like project management work, which appeals to my tidy ordered mind, but the subject matter bores me rigid.

I mean, IT, come on for goodness sake! I am a strategic, broad brush manager and I have staff to do things like that for me! The trouble is none of them could write a Project Brief or a PID if their lives depended on it and it would be twice the work and require numerous edits if I asked them to have a go. So it just seems simpler to do it myself.

It doesn’t help that the sun is shining today and it is pleasantly warm. The cats are basking on the lawn in a tight circle formation so that at least one of them can watch the puppy at all times, and she is running around them like a dervish with my old slippers and an old small squishy football, desperate for them to play with her. Very soon, one of them is going to reach out and lazily scratch her on the nose, I can see it coming.

There is a gentle buzzing of bees and garden strimmers (clearly not a lot of my neighbours are at work – I’ve never seen so much gardening activity in the middle of the day in the week) interspersed by the odd blaring car radio as one of the local Herberts drives up the road too fast, windows wide open and radio blasting out, in his customised Renault Clio that has speakers almost as large as the car itself. But apart from that, it’s a pretty peaceful summer’s day and a nice day to be sitting here looking up the garden.

This may come as no surprise to you, but I really don’t like my job. Oh, I can get on with it and when I’m in the office most of my colleagues are pleasant enough, but the work isn’t my cup of tea (I’ve sort of inherited quite a lot of it through various restructures etc and it was either that or be out of a job myself) and I’m really not sure what sort of difference it makes. Honestly, does it really matter that a load of super rich people in Kensington get their basement extension approved in eight weeks and a load of nimbys have access to a super duper web site so they can spy on and complain about their neighbours? I don’t think so!

I will have to get on in a minute, but I think after another half an hour or so I will pack it in for the day (I have been working since 8am, so that’s not too much of a skive) and come back to it hopefully refreshed and in a more IT type mood tomorrow.

But before I do, I’ll just see what Olympic sports are on the telly…..

It's like having another baby!

The new puppy is running us ragged. Already, after two weeks of her being in our home, she has wormed her way into our affections and become part of the family. It’s just like having a baby again.

She is settling into our routine well, and we only had the night time crying for two nights. For the first two weeks someone was almost always there during the day with her as well, and it is only this week that she has had to manage for one or two days on her own. The first day she cried pitifully when we went to work (so my daughter tells me, as she was trying to sleep upstairs after a heavy night). The second day she cried only a little, and this morning she didn’t at all.

She is getting used to it all, even the cats who she is desperate to play with. Needless to say, the enthusiasm is not for the moment being returned. However we haven’t actually had any rough weather as yet so the cats are able to live in the greenhouse and sneak in at night for food and water. All three have reacted with varying degrees of mistrust towards Coco, and one of them will now sleep in the lounge during the day as long as puppy leaves her alone. Another will come in quietly for a nibble of food and then leave, but the last one won’t come near unless she knows puppy is shut away. It will take some cold weather and lots of rain, when they want to be warm and dry inside, to force the issue but we’ll get there.

Toilet training is more problematic, as we aren’t there all the time. By and large the number twos are done on newspaper by the door, but she does have a tendency to stop and have a wee wherever she happens to be, which is a tad inconvenient especially when you step in it! There is going to be one very smelly dirty rug going to the tip when she is eventually trained, I suspect some time next spring when she is eight or nine months old.

Despite being a cutie, she is also a nipper and any unshod feet are treated as fair game. Boy, it hurts! We are trying to use the dog manual’s recommended solution of yelling loudly then turning our back,and she is starting to get the message that biting is not acceptable. But I think her teeth are hurting her, poor little soul (again, just like a baby) so we are doing our best to find teething toys to play with.

We have bought a very nice kennel which she will eventually live in outside (and no, it isn’t cruel – she is a working dog and already loves being outside) where she will have much more freedom when we are out at work, will be able to keep warm and dry  and where it won’t matter too much if she makes a mess. We have secured the garden with yards of wire fencing so she cannot escape. Like everything else it will take getting used to and some adjustment, but she is a fast little learner. She’ll be fine.

It is incredible and very touching how much she likes people, and when you are there with her she is never far from your side. I sit at the dining table and work, and she sleeps under my chair. I sit and watch the TV, and she is at my feet (usually trying to bite them – see above). I am cooking in the kitchen, and she is around me all the time. I am jobbing in the garden, and she is mooching round my feet. She’s always there, like a little shadow. Maybe that’s what we should have called her – shadow!

But Coco is a perfect name for her. Apart from it’s play on the word cocoa, which is exactly the colour she is, she is a very stylish little dog with a pale blue leather collar that is covered in diamante (yes, I have blinged her up) and is very pretty. Coco Chanel herself couldn’t have wished for a better pet, but seeing as she was French she would probably have gone for a stupid little handbag dog instead.  

But already we love her, and we wouldn’t be without her. And our lives have changed immeasurably for ever!

Gold, gold, gold. Keep 'em coming!

Well it just goes to show that you can be proud to be British, whilst still not liking that many things about the UK.

I’m talking, of course, about the wonderful collection of medals accumulated by Team GB this weekend. From tennis to various track and field events to those in wetter environments, we have done ourselves proud and even I found myself shouting encouragement at the TV despite not really being a sports fan. It’s so nice to see enthralling sport on the telly that isn’t football!

Even Andy Murray came up trumps and paraded round Centre Court wearing a Union Jack (I wouldn’t have put it past him to drape himself in the Saltire). Wimbledon lost its stuffiness and was a better place for it, and the Olympic stadium went wild with emotion; how Jessica Ennis kept calm in the face of such frenzied support I will never know. You could sense the atmosphere even through the TV screen and it must have been awe inspiring to be there during that hour when we bagged long jump, women’s heptathlon and 10,000 metre golds.

So it makes you proud to be British. I might even get out my own union flag and drape it across the front of my house and I am looking with greedy eyes at a very nice union Jack T-shirt in the local posh dress shop.

The French, of course, are carping and throwing around sour grapes like they’re going out of fashion, after having been shown up following their gloating last week when Francois Hollande stated that “wasn’t it good of us to put on a great show just to allow his French athletes to win medals”. Well who’s third in the medal table now then, garlic munchers? Oh, that would be good old GB! And if you pro rata the number of medals we’ve won against our population, and compare it to the same pro rata’d figure for the US and China who are above us in the table and have a vastly larger populace, I bet we’d come out top.

All this patriotic flag waving doesn’t mean, however, that I particularly like Great Britain or want to live here. Yes, there are lots of good things about the UK but there’s a hell of a lot wrong with it too, and no amount of sporting triumph can take them away. Where should I start – Ed Miliband seems a good place, although Jessie J, work shy and unworthy dole scroungers (yes, controversial statement I know, but there are some out there) , Eastenders and John Terry are also good starting points for a list of ‘Things That Are Bad About Britain’. And it could go on for ever, this list, but then that would be boring and we’d all have a different opinion.

Of course wherever you live in the world has it’s faults and I have no illusion that where I want to go is paradise (well, we all know it isn’t because I want to go to Crete, and the Greeks are further up shit creek than we are and they’ve lost their paddle to boot!). But you have to find the place where your soul feels at home, and for me that simply isn’t the UK.

But for now, let’s bask in the reflected glory of not only our superb athletes but what is, so far, an impeccably organised games as far as the sport and facilities go (we’ll not talk about Locog or the ticketing fiasco, or the greedy unions who from my experience last week are doing no more work than normal for their extortionate Olympic bonuses and in fact for much of the time are probably carrying less people than usual as lots of Londoners are working at home). Seb Coe and his team should be congratulated and I hope that the media, who led the carping club beforehand, have the grace to eat their words and say how well we’ve done.

As to legacy, well who knows? We now have some brand new, wonderful facilities and perhaps private sector companies will step in and make sure they continue to be maintained and run efficiently because God knows there isn’t the money in the public sector.

Rule Brittania!

It's going well!

It seems like after a rather shaky start, Team GB is doing rather well in the medal tables. At the time of writing, we are fourth overall with six golds, six silvers and six bronze. One ahead of France, who only have five silvers. Ha! Take that, garlic munchers!

It must be hoped that this medal count will increase further. The sports in the first week of competition have not really favoured us and they aren't generally speaking things we excel in. Tom Daley and Rebecca Adlington aside, we haven't had a decent swimmer in decades, cycling has only recently come to the fore and as for gymnastics, well the bronze medal the other night is the first in that discipline for 100 years. Badminton, table tennis etc? The odd success but nothing consistent. Not really our sort of thing. We got our first gold medal this time in shooting, which to me is more of a country pursuit that involves killing innocent animals for fun or food, rather than a sport. A sport is something that makes you hot and sweaty isn't it, usually involving something roughly spherical or a pair of trainers? As far as I can see, shooting does neither of those things. Need I say more?

Today, of course, sees the start of the track and field athletics and the water sports, in particular sailing, are only just coming to their final stages where we are in with a good shout. We must stand a good chance of several medals in athletics across a whole range of disciplines. Whilst we probably don't have a cat in hell's chance of beating the Yanks, who have such a massive population base with such broad ethnicity that they have runners, weight lifters, gymnasts and the lot, we ought to be able to catch up the Chinese who have walked it in week one but never do well in all the second week stuff and we definitely ought to be able to beat the French. Our lives won't be worth living if we don't, and they'll never let us forget it.

Not being a sporty sort, I haven't really been that interested in the Olympics in the run up and got heartily sick of it being rammed down my throat by the media, but now it's here and there is more of an atmosphere I am enjoying watching the odd hour or two. Last night I sat in front of it and designed my pantomime set! I couldn't sit and watch it all day, but a short burst now and then to keep in touch with what is happening is OK. And you don't actually need to watch it all day - there are such long gaps between heats and events that the Beeb have time to replay and revisit ad infinitum. With 24 channels of Olympic sport, there is a lot of filler being given airtime.

This week might, I suppose, be quite exciting and I have never been averse to a bit of patriotic flag waving. Just a bloody shame our national anthem isn't a little more stirring. Rule Brittania or Land of Hope and Glory would be much more satisfying to sing along to, don't you think?