My current thoughts....

It is often said that it is better to leave too early rather than too late, whether that is your career, a party, or life itself, But the problem is to know when that might be.

The only certainties in life are death and taxes. We all try to avoid both.  Our NHS is collapsing and I fear one day will no longer exist and free at the point of need will be just a distant memory. In most countries the population is ageing and needs more medical attention, and high-tech modern medicine is ever more extravagant. We all want to see cancer cured, but this will only drive costs up and not down. Not just because the complex genetic and drug treatments involved are so costly but because more of us will then live longer, to die later from some other disease, or slowly from dementia, requiring constant and expensive care.

Rather than the discovery of new antibiotics, the human race, especially in the poorer countries, faces decimation within a few decades from bacterial antibiotic resistance.  The pharmaceutical companies concentrate on drugs for cancer and the diseases, such as diabetes and obesity, of affluence. So health care is becoming ever more expensive, but most governments fear that putting up taxes or insurance premiums will lose them the next election. So instead, in the West, a small fortune is spent on management consultants who subscribe to the ideology that marketization, computers and the profit motive will somehow solve the problem.

The talk is all of greater efficiency, reconfiguring, downsizing, outsourcing and better management. I see life as a game of musical chairs where here in the UK at least, the music is constantly being changed but not the number of chairs, and yet there are more and more of us running around the chairs.

The National Health Service, a triumph of decency and social justice, will be destroyed by this dishonesty. The wealthy will grab the chairs, and the poor will have to make do with the floor.

I realised a long time ago that possessions do not make me happier. It is actually a human urge that is rapidly degrading the planet: as we watch the forests felled, landfill sites grow acre on acre and the atmosphere is filled with greenhouse gases. Progress, is simply more movement and more rubbish.