Thursday 5th March

Flying out to Eymet again today but I have just finished reading this and it is really not that good at all.  The reason for the blog is not to recommend you buying it but to explain the title and the idea behind it.  The Fixed Term is an idea which becomes a law in a small English speaking colony in the future.  Well, Trollope’s future, which as he was writing in 1880 would be the 1980’s as he perceived they might be a hundred years earlier.  The story is quite poor by Trollope’s standards; he should have stuck to romances and gossipy books about the clergy.  Anyway the fixed term is the policy that mankind should be limited to just so many years on earth, in this case 68 years.  Then they would all, the healthy and the sick, the rich and the poor, be euthanased.  I won’t tell you any more of the plot, daft as it is.  Suffice to say that all visions, my own included, of the future are wrong.  Trollope had no electricity, no computers, no radio or TV or cinema; Lords still ruled Britain and there was no social progression at all.  The book is largely a philosophical exercise on the idea of mankind choosing the length of their lives, or more specifically having this fixed term imposed on them.

What possible advantage would pertain from everyone being dispatched at a certain same-for-all age?  You only have to go, as I did yesterday to any Outpatients Clinic in your local Hospital.  It is literally full of old people in various stages of decay.  Many appeared to be in real pain, some could barely walk, many were in wheelchairs or on crutches and some were almost bent double.  This by the way was a Glaucoma clinic; the suffering I saw was not even what they were there for.  And the thought came to me “Is this what we have come to.”  Many of us simply do not see these people in our everyday lives.  Some may be looked after by long-suffering relatives or in Care Homes.   The expense of keeping them alive, treating their various ailments and paying for care must be horrendous.  So, on purely economic terms the idea of a “Fixed Term” certainly has something going for it.  Then there is the actual suffering; how many old people might actually welcome the idea of no more pain.  We often hear relatives saying “It was a release” when their loved one eventually dies, when medical science finally gives in.  And ones finances could be arranged so much smarter if we knew just how long we had left.  We could spend it all.

Ah, but when it comes to it – how many of us would be brave enough, unless suffering greatly, to voluntarily call it a day.  In my book “2066 – a personal memoir” there is euthanasia available for those for whom it is too expensive to carry on treating.  And though in my book this is sort-of voluntary, it is so common as to be accepted by everyone that this is the best way to go.  Mind you, it only applies to the sick.

And of course although it isn’t spoken of we all suspect that many Doctors help some patients out at the end.  But we all fight desperately for our Mum’s and Dad’s to be kept alive as long as possible – how could we live with ourselves if we didn’t.   The thought of voluntarily submitting to euthanasia is very alien to us, but maybe if it were legal and we got used to it we might actually welcome it. Even if Trollope’s book was pretty poor it did at least get me thinking.…