Wastefulness

I sympathise fully with people who get frustrated with that wretched IKEA self-assembly furniture, but most of us can find someone cleverer than we are to help out.  However, one person decided to just dump the pieces, along with the huge cardboard box they were delivered in, outside our row of garages.  We know this has to be cleared away quickly, otherwise it's considered a dumping place and more arrives.  So I folded up the cardboard into a sizes suitable to be picked up with the recycling, and my neighbour sawed up the wood for my open fire.  What a terrible waste, though!  This isn't a prosperous area.  Everyone feels so poor.  How can this happen?  I think the thing must have cost about £150.  This is a road few people use.  Just leaving it there and hoping somebody would take it wouldn't work very quickly.  What should I have done with it?

How long do we want to live?

My 93-year-old friend at last died at 4.30 p.m. last Sunday, despite the best efforts of the NHS to keep her alive, against her will.  Of course they had the best of intentions.  Of course they are there to preserve life.  But: Thou Shalt not Kill, nor Shalt Thou Strive, Officiously to keep Alive.

On Friday she told a doctor who was going to launch on yet another course of anti-biotics that she did not want it.  She only needed to be kept comfortable, she wanted no further treatment.  The young doctor fetched a senior one, and he persuaded her to accept the medication.

On Saturday it was clear to her nephew that she was near death.  On Sunday it was clear to me.  Three hours before she died a nurse came in to give her not one, but two injections.  I don't think they were the anti-biotics, she had already had those.  No wonder the NHS is short of funds, pumping expensive drugs into dying people. 

My friend had made a living will.  She had made it clear to everybody she knew in the past two years, and more, that life had no more attraction for her.  What's more, she was a person who hated waste.  She saw it all around her, both in her nursing home and in the hospital.  She made me promise to campaign on these two issues, not prolonging life artificially, and not wasting our planet's resources.  I am going to pursue this on her account as well as my own as long as I have breath and finger-power to do so.

Is saving the planet more important than the financial crisis?

Lord Prescott sounded unexpectedly statesmanlike when, speaking from the meeting about global warming which is taking place in South Africa, with scant media attention, he said that if we do not take the health of the planet more seriously we shall, in a few years' time, think of the euro crisis as a pin-prick - or words to that effect, I only heard him on the radio and have not seen what he said in print.  But it is what I have been thinking.

No need to go on about wastefulness - we all know its extent - and the government wants us to go out at Christmas and buy more stuff for the sake of "growth" instead of, sensibly, saving for the rainy days which are on the way when the cuts bite more deeply.  (By the way, literal rainy days are to be wished for.  Is it global warming that is causing us to have a DROUGHT?  In England?  In winter?)

Well, one little example of daftness has just come home with my husband.  He is 79, all male, and not into glamorous underwear, but his last 2 pairs of underpants (£5, "Mega Value") come in a most beautiful box!  I am a collector of lovely boxes for re-use, and am grateful for this one.  It is made of strong cardboard and has an inner drawer which slides out as smoothly as one in an expensive bit of furniture.  But can we really justify cutting down trees to provide this bit of nonsense?  We are meant to be the rational beings on the planet, but we aren't thinking.