There was a time when we aspiring males would bond over stories of how many beers we could scull without falling over. Some sixty years later, the same but now expiring males bond over stories of the number of pills they take. Some of them even have those monthly pill organisers featuring 31 containers sitting in the centre of the lounge room table as a kind of status symbol.
This male bonding took an unexpected turn the other day when over a cup of coffee - of course! - and scones with jam and cream the almost unspellable and hitherto unpronouncable word "euthanasia" cropped up in the conversation, those Greek words "eu-" as in "well" and "thanatos" as in "death" both neatly packaged into an almost sweet-sounding word.
Even though another German had already dealt with it - "A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And a lot of poison at the end, for a pleasant death" (Friedrich Nietzsche) - I hadn't given it much thought; instead, I practise my own "youthanasia" with a steady diet of books which, if nothing else, keeps at least my mind young.
All I could offer to the discussion was to tell them to go to YouTube and watch Michael Caton (remember him in "The Castle"?) in "Last Cab to Darwin". Watch it before it's too late --- by which I mean, I swear it, before YouTube deletes this full-length movie for copyright reasons.
