On Being An Orphan

On Sunday 6 July I became an orphan - at the age of 58.

My 95-year old dad (that's him in the photo taken sometime during the late 1960s in his local) finally gave in to the inevitability of growing older around tea-time, sitting by his bed in a residential home. I spoke to his GP after his death who said he would be putting "frailty of old age" as the cause of death. For the past few weeks he had been surviving on nothing more than ice cream, ensure - and beer. Sounds about right to me.

In a way, this is fitting as the only real interest he had in life was playing darts which, of course, involved spending a lot of time in pubs. He was a very good darts player in his time and won many awards but in the process also retained his love of the amber nectar - and who could blame him as he was the product of his generation I guess.

So long dad. And cheers!
telum ludus victor

Living Dangerously

Well, since my last post I have come across a lovely little book that shows how we can live dangerously, despite the growing number of stupid rules, regulations and risk assessments that seem to have taken over our lives.

In his funny but thought-provoking little book " How To Live Dangerously: Why we should all stop worrying and start living" Warwick Cairns tells us that if you are worried about someone abducting one of your kids you would need to lock them out of your house every day for 200,000 years before they were taken (and even then you would get them back within 24 hours). And if you are afraid of flying you would have to fly every day for the next 26,000 years to die in a crash - during which time you were more likely to die 20 times over just driving to the airport!

It's also interesting to note that more people were killed on the road in the US a year after 9/11 as a direct consequence of deciding not to fly after the tragedy. OK, these are just statistics. But we need to take notice of them if we are not to spend the rest of our lives staying in bed because we are frightened (and that ain't safe either by all accounts!). Warwick's message is that the world is full of risks and we can't avoid them. We imagine fears where there aren't any and take unnecessary risks when we should know better.

This is Warwick's final piece of advice:

"If you really want to live your life to the full, and if you want to do and see and feel all that it has to offer, then you need to push at your fear, to see how far it will let you go, and when and why and how it will let you do what you want. In return, it will push back on you, and you need to be prepared to give, and to bend to its will. And when it says, "this far and no further" and means it, sometimes you just have to stop, no matter how much you might want to do otherwise. If you do that, in the end you and fear will get to know and trust each other and learn how to rub along together just fine: and at that point you will know what it means to really live - and to live dangerously."

Apparently, 53 people die whilst posting on the internet every year in the UK so I need to get out of here!

How To Live Dangerously: Why We Should All Stop Worrying and Start Living
Warwick Cairns (2008)
Pan Macmillan