LOCKDOWN UK CITIZEN NO. 63,567,109 writes:

Covid-19 is not alone.
This deadly virus emerged in 2012
from melting Arctic permafrost.

Update 7 April 2020

UK LOCKDOWN - FUEL SAVED		07/04/2020		NCH Oxford
01-Jan-20	FROM
07-Apr-20	TO
97	lockdown days
7	days per week
14	weeks
5	usual weekly commute
69	commute days lockdown
65	average journey time of 65 minutes each day
57%	commute by car
27,000,000	workers
33,600,000	drivers
7,900	average miles p.a. (assume energy for all travellers)
42	average mpg (assume energy for all travellers)
4.5	litres per UK gallon
365	driving days. Assume distance equally spread
22	miles per day
4.8	litres per day
161,607,306	all drivers litres per day
15,675,908,676	litres all drivers - all lockdown days
112	pence per litre - pump price
£        17,557,017,717	Cash saved by travellers		£          17.56	Billion
180	Exhaust multiple as fuel burns
2,821,663,561,644	Exhaust litres saved		28,217	Billion litres
£                           33.50	BRENT CRUDE per barrel			07/04/2020
159	litres per barrel
98,590,621	Barrels
£     3,302,785,790.18	Saved - imported?		£            3.30	Billion

Update 3 April 2020 
Trump keeps the gun-shops open. Americans will seek out and shoot the virus. Or, shoot the unemployed. Or, shoot all the 10M infected. Civil War will fix Covid-19. 

CNBC - April 2nd

Initial jobless claims surged to more 6.6 million last week, the Labor Department said Thursday. That brings the two-week total to about 10 million due to the coronavirus-induced economic shutdown.

_________________________

The Guardian.

Americans have responded to the coronavirus epidemic with a record-breaking number of gun purchases, according to new government data on the number of background checks conducted in March.

More than 3.7m total firearm background checks were conducted through the FBI’s background check system in March, the highest number on record in more than 20 years. An estimated 2.4m of those background checks were conducted for gun sales, according to adjusted statistics from a leading firearms industry trade group. That’s an 80% increase compared with the same month last year, the trade group said.

________________________________

TESTING TIMES - update 2nd April 2020
Nothing new under the sun.

THE BLACK DEATH - 200 YEARS OF PLAGUE
The beak contained herb filters to protect medics.
2/3rds of the population died.

From the Spectator

Dr John Lee

How deadly is the coronavirus? It’s still far from clear

There is room for different interpretations of the data

(READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE) From magazine issue: 28 March 2020

In announcing the most far-reaching restrictions on personal freedom in the history of our nation, (UNITED KINGDOM) Boris Johnson resolutely followed the scientific advice that he had been given. The advisers to the government seem calm and collected, with a solid consensus among them. In the face of a new viral threat, with numbers of cases surging daily, I’m not sure that any prime minister would have acted very differently.

But I’d like to raise some perspectives that have hardly been aired in the past weeks, and which point to an interpretation of the figures rather different from that which the government is acting on. I’m a recently-retired Professor of Pathology and NHS consultant pathologist, and have spent most of my adult life in healthcare and science – fields which, all too often, are characterised by doubt rather than certainty. There is room for different interpretations of the current data. If some of these other interpretations are correct, or at least nearer to the truth, then conclusions about the actions required will change correspondingly.

The simplest way to judge whether we have an exceptionally lethal disease is to look at the death rates. Are more people dying than we would expect to die anyway in a given week or month? Statistically, we would expect about 51,000 to die in Britain this month. At the time of writing, 422 deaths are linked to Covid-19 — so 0.8 per cent of that expected total. On a global basis, we’d expect 14 million to die over the first three months of the year. The world’s 18,944 coronavirus deaths represent 0.14 per cent of that total. These figures might shoot up but they are, right now, lower than other infectious diseases that we live with (such as flu). Not figures that would, in and of themselves, cause drastic global reactions.

______________________________________________________________

1st April 2020

APRIL FOOLS

London’s “Nightingale” 4,000 bed new hospital in a Conference Centre by The Thames, is not ready. It’s reassuring that our traditional CAN’T- DO managers are still empowered to cull thousands of the sick and elderly by simply applying inertia. If we wait long enough, problems solve themselves.

Ditto, the massive funding package to rescue our small businesses. HM Gov have (tongue in cheek) announced immense grants/loans. The banks are blocking it by insisting on mortgaging the business owners’ homes. “You will not only lose your business and livelihood, you and your feckless family will also be homeless.” 

This morning the BBC say that 800,000 of our SMEs will rapidly go bust. SMEs employ 60% of our workforce. The medics and MPs need a lot more justification than Covid-19 for the redundant millions who will die in despair, due to the lock-down.

NOW is the time to develop a better national strategy. 1^st – ditch this dopey useless government and the NHS senior managers. It is significant that both Boris and his strange familiar, Dominic Cummings, have disappeared; hoping to re-enter, blameless, after the current cock-ups, conspiracies and gross-stupidities have run their course.

Noel Hodson, Business Expansion Expert,

_____________________________________________________________

27th March 2020 - 3 pm - London.

Subject: DAILY EXPRESS - DOMINIC CUMMINGS NOT TO TAKE OVER GOVERNMENT

Dominic Cummings 'does a runner' from No10 as Boris Johnson says he has coronavirus

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1261272/Dominic-Cummings-coronavirus-uk-boris-johnson-latest-video-covid-19-update-death-toll

DOMINIC CUMMINGS has "done a runner" from Downing Street after both Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced they have tested positive for coronavirus.

By CLAIRE ANDERSON

PUBLISHED: 14:26, Fri, Mar 27, 2020 | UPDATED: 14:26, Fri, Mar 27, 2020

___________________________________________________________________

26th March 2020

“Do we need food?”

My body type - until I hit 60..
by Alberto Giacometti

Locked-down under Coronavirus-home-arrest, aged 77 and a quarter, I find that when I crouch down and bend to tie my shoelaces (I spurn Velcro fasteners and Trainers), I can no longer breathe easily. In-depth critical-analysis has tracked this disability, having dismissed dozens of blame-worthy external culprits, to the fact that I am simply too fat. 

Not noticeably overweight, viewed from the front or back, I don’t yet need two airline seats, but my profile reveals a distinct and persistent paunch. A layer of quite solid fat on my belly. It is this unsightly, useless, heavy, stubborn lump that as I bend double presses upwards into the territory of my lungs – and makes me breathless. I have never before been fat. For much of my younger life I was distinctly a Giacometti figure; unfailingly gaunt rather than tubby. This has changed. 

Further analysis, recently informed by our listing and stock-piling 2020 Coronavirus food supplies, demonstrates that what is causing these unwanted deposits of strangely firm blubber, is food! My dear wife speculates that it might come from an excess of alcohol in my now regular glasses of evening wine; and urges urgent, Puritan and total temperance. However, three of my brothers considerably shortened their lives with vast excesses of alcohol – which had the reverse effect; they each wasted away with each drink, losing body-mass month by month, until they were thin enough to pass through The Eye of a Needle, and Meet our Maker in the realm of the Heavenly Jerusalem. No; the paunch is definitely caused by excess, unabsorbed foodstuffs.

Which leads me to the Big-Question: Do we, hi-tech 21^st century mankind and womankind, person-kind, politically-correct “guys” need food?

We spend vast amounts of energy, money, anticipation, preparation, pleasure and risk ill-health consuming food. All of us, or our agents, grow, breed, shepherd, harvest, cull, seek, kill and cook food. Half of the food never makes it from farm to plate. It is prodigiously wasted. The half that we do eat is disassembled and dissolved in our hundred metres of guts; inner-tubes that extract trace chemicals to refresh our cells and power our needs and desires. 

Ninety-percent of what we consume is excreted as waste – that revolts us and has to be washed away in sewers. The sewers, blocked with fatbergs, need constant cleaning and maintenance – that takes human energy – that requires food – that creates waste – and requires endless amounts of work to repetitively replace. We are slaves to the thrice daily process of creation, consumption, extraction and excretion of – food! Pause the process and our active battery-life is at best 20 days, before we start eating each-other. But we rarely pause. Then, as the body balancing mechanisms start to malfunction, as we age, we, many of us, get fat.

Including children, there are seven-billion folk, averaging 10 stones, 140 pounds, wobbling around on the Earth’s surface – 70 billion stones of humanity – three-and-a-half billion tons of flesh. If we all congregated on say, the Isle of Wight, or Manhattan, would our combined mass give the Earth a wobble, create an imbalance that could distort the planet’s orbit round the Sun – and plunge us into that fiery orb? It doesn’t bear thinking about. It is too awful.

We spend, arguably we waste, a lot of our short lives, our three-score-years-and-ten on this business of feeding. Farming, shopping, mealtimes, abluting, cleaning up, gyms, jogging, visiting the dentist, going to the doctor. Do we really need it?

Let’s get down to basics. We now have the capability of creating and mass-producing a single daily pill that would feed us all the nutrients we require. A pill that we would absorb and burn-off entirely as energy, without waste. No more toilet-breaks. Think of the impact on GDP (gross-domestic-product). In fact, we probably don’t even need a pill. Science can calculate the precise amount, the quantum, and form of electromagnetic energy needed to replenish the chemicals of our cells. We could plug into the central electricity generating board supply while we sleep – and recharge our cellular-batteries.

The daily Pill or E-Charge would do away the need for teeth, most internal plumbing, bowels, spare-tyres, paunches, subcutaneous-fat, and a whole mess of troublesome inter-testine organs. I mean, who needs them? Where airlines now squeeze three overweight paying passengers in a cramped row – they could cram in six guys. Think of the profits.

We don’t need to wait for Darwinian Evolution to adapt our bodies to the new regime; the super-rich can immediately have super-rich-person-surgery to remove all the stuff we no longer need or want. The middle-class and struggling-poor will have to wait – and weight – for nature to confer on them fashionable Giacometti figures.

“You can never be too rich or too thin.” Said Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, wife of Edward the Eighth. And it didn’t do her, or her career, any harm.    

Duchess & Duke of Windsor.
"You can never be too rich or too thin."

THE DEATH OF BROTHER JEREMY

I don't recall ever having a one-to-one conversation with Jeremy. Born in 1953 at the local Nursing Home on Bonfire Night, he was ten years younger than me. I was married and away from home when Jeremy began at secondary school, St Ambrose College, Hale Barns, which he often missed due to transport difficulties from the hill farm Father had moved to - where Jeremy acquired the skills of horse-bareback-riding, tug-of-war with the local farm lads and heavy drinking. My knowledge of him is largely from our sister Stephanie, with whom he wrote plays and pantomimes for schools and old peoples' homes, and from Mother, who lamented Jeremy's drinking and lack of discipline. Father, I imagine, approved of and indulged Jeremy's hill-billy life on the 1,500 foot high moors above Macclesfield. 

Mother was correct, as it happens, it was the demon drink that killed Jeremy, who was the youngest of us and the first to die. Last in - first out. 

He appears in my book "The Haunting of a Favourite Son" in the chapter, The Last Family Christmas; which relates that aged 15, not licensed, drunk and six-feet-four tall, he drove the farm Land Rover in a blizzard across country, at night, abandoning it miles from home, and, wearing jeans and a white shirt, walked home across the hills, very drunk - triggering a police hunt. He was a worry to his parents. But Jeremy survived that adventure. 

From riding his horse, Jonty, and from getting superbly fit by often loping several miles on foot from the main road, up the hills to the farm, he somehow met a wandering troupe of stuntmen and women who earned a living giving displays of Jousting and mock battles as Knights of the Round Table. Thus, as a young under-educated man he wrote plays, sometimes scripts for TV, and learned to be a stunt-man. I guess it was a precarious life. Throughout, he drank heavily. His Catholic religion had no place in his world. 

My only near contact with Jeremy, after that Family Christmas in 1967 was a time when brother Martin, who was an AA Rescuer, kidnapped Jeremy in 1980, from his flat in Cambridge, and dumped him in a rehab clinic, somewhere in Oxfordshire. Jeremy escaped the kind and well intended ministrations of his guards - hiked and hitched lifts to my house (we were abroad on holiday), got our house key from our next-door neighbour, lived in the house for a couple of weeks - and made off with my wife's car. He was however a gentleman not a rogue, and a few weeks later he returned and abandoned the car, unharmed, a few miles from our home - complete with the keys. I think he was essentially a kind, creative, considerate soul. We didn't meet or talk of his raid on our home. 

Technically and medically, it was not the alcohol that killed Jeremy, but the lack of alcohol at a crucial time. He lived in Cambridge with his wife /partner, who was a nurse and an alcoholic. Martin said that he lived a life very close to being a derelict - but not quite in the gutter. They were not homeless. One weekend, his wife went to see her parents, leaving Jeremy alone. He drank himself into a stupor and when he came round, in desperate need of refueling with strong drink - there was none. Jeremy had lost the ability to care for himself - he had a seizure or a fit, and died alone - in 1995, just 43 years old. What a tragic waste of a good-looking, basically intelligent, super-fit, talented man. 

Martin organized the funeral in Stoke-on-Trent, with the help of a business friend, who owned an undertakers. There were few mourners - but we did learn that Jeremy probably had a son - somewhere in Canada. Jeremy's legacy to the world. 

THE DEATH OF BROTHER RICHARD

THE DEATH OF BROTHER MARTIN

THE DEATH OF BROTHER PETER

THE DEATH OF BROTHER RICHARD

"I'll bet.." said Richard with his familiar triumphant smirk when he knew he was on a winner, and had something to tease me about "that the national health has never spent as much on you, as this hospital has spent on me." I was visiting my nearly dead brother so despite the inevitability of me losing yet again, I was drawn into being taunted and belittled. I felt that I should allow him his Right of Kings and Superiority once more before he croaked. But I needed more information from my older brother. "Why, how much have they spent on you." I asked, consciously walking into the sucker punch.

"Guess" he said. I groaned inwardly. I had only just arrived a minute ago from London. How on earth could I guess what the Aix-en-Provence Hospital had (a) done to him (b) charged for (c) paid for hi-tech equipment. I wasn't remotely interested in guessing. They had clearly cut his chest open to get at his heart - which I'd been told had been failing fast, and he was clearly recuperating in an immaculate private room, with the very best of care. And I knew he'd been there for at least two weeks. At what cost? 

It immediately took me back to tedious tiring hours of playing Monopoly with this consummate games player, two and a half years my senior; and just as I thought I could finally go bust and escape the humiliating boring game, Richard would find some convoluted way of re-financing me;  and keep me in the damn game - which he would never fail to win. He won so often at cards and on horse-racing that aged 22 he was banned from three betting shops in central Manchester. His winning of games at home - and my constant losing to him - put me off games for life. It transpired that he had a natural, effortless talent for card-counting. He knew what was in your hand. 

The hospital total, Richard claimed, including the very latest heart-pacemaker, his operation, his two - yes two - top consultant surgeons, his fine room, for which he only contributed ten euros a day - a peppercorn - and dedicated nursing by sexy, pretty French nurses who, he knew, doted on him; was over half-a-million euros. I could not beat that. I had lost again. 

It was Richard's betting that had made him twice win and lose a million in Britain, move to Cote-D'Ivoire with his wife, Sylvia, seven children two dogs and a cat, win then lose an oil equipment supply business, win then lose an agency supplying currencies, passports and other security printing to the whole Gold Coast, which he serviced from his own small plane - and had him swim in disease infested waters, catching a liver-fluke that would have killed him but for The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine curing him. 

He had also bet that when playing golf with his son-in-law in Australia - warned to wear boots but triumphantly wore flip-flops, that he would not be bitten by a white-tailed-spider. He was bitten, of course, and nearly died of suppurating wounds in transit through Heathrow; and nearly lost the poisoned leg. During twenty years in Abidjan, Cote D'Ivoire, he insisted against all advice on running every day in tropical heat to keep fit for rugby, and insisted on drinking beer all day and whisky all night. This drove up his blood-pressure to the highest level ever recorded in any mammal. We will skirt round the dumb risks he probably took in romantic African liaisons. He risked remaining in Abidjan as civil war broke out, on the false-logic that people liked him and would do him no harm. It was only when his "friends" shot at him in the streets, that he fled to join his wife in Aix-en-Provence. But, they hadn't killed him, he had won again. 

He had won - except that he had become an addict to alcohol, which he continued to drink in large quantities when he moved to France. It was this consumption that had recently buggered up his heart - and sent him to hospital, not once but several times. 

It is a longish journey from London to Aix, and I only made it for weddings, funerals and near-death events - such as Richard's. When I went into his hospital room we had not met for months, maybe years, but, as I've explained elsewhere, we never touched in our family - not even to shake hands. So there was no chummy, brotherly hugging - Ugh! We had however spent 17 familial years together, sharing a room until Richard left home, to get married aged 20. You need to start early to sire seven children. More bets, more risks - in this case - all worthwhile. 

Now in the grip of alcohol, he was not capable of doing business, jogging or playing rugby - a sport at which he excelled. He did clear the woodland around their home - about five acres; toiling hard in the midday sun - as do Mad-dogs and Englishmen. Eventually even Richard's constitution could take no more and he had several heart attacks, leading to the hospital. The problem with the best heart pacemaker in the world - courtesy of the French and UK national-health service, was that the damn thing wouldn't let him die. He collapsed dramatically and often - nearly dead; then the machine would kick-start his heart and he'd be off again; but growing infinitely weary and depressed. 

Richard had never had dreams. He didn't dream and he didn't imagine stuff. But during a major attack, as he lay unconscious, when the ambulance took half-an-hour to arrive (they lived 40 km from Aix), he did have a near-death-experience. In this dream, or visit to the other side, all of Richard's friends who had died were on a pebble beach; it was half dark and half light. The departed souls were on the light side; and they all urged him to join them. Richard said no-thanks and opted to stay on the dark side - and continue living here. He lived another few months. This removed any fear of death - and he told me it was more real, more vivid than real life. 

He did in fact have one dream in his life. As an infant, say two years old, he had a recurring nightmare that he was in an igloo, in the middle of a limitless dark flat plain. Alone and frightened. It was his only link to the unconscious. He never expressed any religious beliefs; never prayed; never saw ghosts; hardly ever talked of spiritual matters, an exception being once joining in a Jehovah's Witness Kingdom Hall meeting and enquiring about the afterlife.

Richard's biography

When he died, a service was held in a large local French Catholic church, packed with several hundred people - and friends came from around the world. I think he was sober by the time he was cremated - as there was no spirited fiery reaction. 

THE DEATH OF BROTHER MARTIN

THE DEATH OF BROTHER PETER

THE DEATH OF BROTHER JEREMY

THE DEATH OF BROTHER PETER

We all loved brother Peter, he was the nicest of us all, and those that could turned up for his funeral at Stockport Crematorium, conveniently located just a few hundred yards from Stepping Hill Hospital, which boasted two rival Undertakers' premises, displaying their coffins, urns and funeral and burial services on either side of the wide entrance to that factory of healing. 

It wasn't raining, which was odd. It always rains in Stockport. But we were glad of our coats. Stephanie, our sister, with Peter's son, had opted for one of the practically sited hospital burial businesses, who did their duty with suitably blank faces, conveying Peter's coffin to its bier in one of the several chapels in the large cemetery. This chapel was Roman Catholic. We forbore to mention that Peter had abandoned his Catholic religion a couple of decades ago; which would have been a breach of good manners as the aging priest shuffled his papers and prepared to bring comfort to the allegedly stricken mourners.  The priest of course had never met Peter, nor his two now grown-up children, nor either of his two very pretty wives - one an ex-wife. And the priest had not met any of us, the brothers. 

Of the brothers, the youngest, Jeremy, had died a few years earlier, and Richard didn't do funerals - he was at his home in Provence or Cote D'Ivoire, probably drowning his sorrow in a few bottles of wine. His wife, Sylvia came over from France. Martin and I attended. Martin was still well-enough to travel the thirty-miles or so to Stockport. And of course Stephanie was with us. Our parents were dead. They were mercifully spared the sadness of burying any of their children - but they were undoubtedly with us in spirit. The chapel was surprisingly full. Peter had spent his last years in a flat in the centre of Stockport and as a friendly soul he had many local friends and acquaintances. His wives and family all came and Peter's colleagues from his past accountancy practice were there. Stephanie, Sylvia, Martin, my wife and I sat on the same bench, with  one or two strangers.

This was not a congregation from which skilled speakers volunteered homilies, odes and orations. Peter was a simple soul, which the silent gathering reflected. The priest, tired but experienced, rose to the occasion. He would smooth Peter's path to heaven and bring us solace. In one hand he held the Funeral Service Prayer Book and in the other a note of relevant names and dates supplied by Stephanie and Peter's son. 

Unfortunately, the priest had no knowledge of our Mother - or our family relationships.

"...and so we pray for the soul of our dear departed ...er ...Peter who will enter heaven to be with all the holy angels and blessed saints (we drew comfort from that thought). And will be re-united with his father ...er ...Edwin; and with his mother ...er ...um ...Winifred, who departed this life in ...1963 and in ...1966, who wait for ...er ...Peter to join them. And his brother ...er ...er ... Jeremy who tragically died before his time in ...1995. His dear mother ...Winifred, will welcome and embrace him to spend Eternity, in bliss, with her and ...er ...Edwin. Forever, in the bosom of Christ and his Holy Father (our bench was vibrating along its length in rhythm with our quaking shoulders  and we dared not look at each other. Eternity with Mother was not compatible with anyone's vision of heaven. But the priest felt he had not comforted enough and pressed on in a sing-song cadence, in a quietly compassionate voice). And ...Peter will be held forever, in the loving kindness of his mother ...Winifred, forever, for eternity, (our bench was now quaking; would it shake and split at the seams. We stared straight ahead, very, very hard and rigidly did not dare to glance at each other. Forever? With Mother? Even leavened by Father and his bumper-fun-book of bad puns, it would be Dante's Seventh Level)."

The priest was now gazing up to heaven, raising his weary but kindly eyes in transcendence, contemplating his own eternal conjoining with the heavenly hosts and his loving  and beloved mother. He glanced at his notes in-between  his raptures. "And so, ...Peter and ...Jeremy and ...Edwin and ...Winifred, will be forever, eternally joined in joy..."

We imagined that our facial muscles could take no more, and feared our shoulders would lock up in deadly cramps as we suppressed our manic giggling. This Minister of The Lord, clearly had never met Mother. 

Peter died of cancer, caused by life-long cigarette smoking. After he lost his small, business, split up from his wife and children and moved in with his second wife, he worked as a chauffeur, driving to and from the airport with wealthy travellers. He had been a steady and reliable soul, but gradually increased his pub and drinking habits to the point where it interfered with his career; having inherited Father's wealthy thriving central Manchester accountancy firm - which I guess Peter did not have the capacity to manage. We recognized that he was less bright than his parents and siblings - due, Mother told us, to a difficult birth that deprived him of oxygen. "Peter had been born blue - with the cord around his neck." In compensation, he was by far the best looking in the family, six-feet tall with a taut Greek god physique and blond hair. And he was affable; popular with the ladies and with many friends. Everybody liked him. 

Peter's main fault, obvious from early childhood, was obstinacy and stubbornness. He was difficult to persuade, dissuade or reason with. Peter was hampered by fixed-ideas. It was this trait that finished him off. Although he had several symptoms of lung cancer - he could still stubbornly function and drive his taxi. It was only when the cancer blocked his throat and stopped him swallowing that he consulted a doctor. Within a few weeks he was admitted to Stepping Hill Hospital, where it was decided his cancer could not be treated. On my few visits, it was obvious that even at 63 years old, he was the nurses' favorite. His good looks and good nature stayed with him to the end. His two wives and children moved him to a hospice in Heald-Green where he had great palliative care - and retained his good-humour; like his father, trotting out really bad puns in place of deep conversation. 

His most regular visitor was brother Martin, just one year younger, with whom as children he had shared a bedroom. Martin always looked after him. Peter and I had a few conversations at the hospice, which made it clear to me that he had no religious or overtly philosophical thoughts. The next world did not preoccupy him. He approached death without fear or heightened emotions. It was inevitable, we are all going to die, he accepted it. He died quietly, on 26th April 2008, aged 63, surrounded by his family, including both wives. How very civilized. 

When Peter arrived in heaven - he was undoubtedly eternally reconciled with Mother - and lived happily ever after.

THE DEATH OF BROTHER MARTIN

THE DEATH OF BROTHER RICHARD

THE DEATH OF BROTHER JEREMY

THE DEATH OF BROTHER MARTIN

Martin, six-foot three, weightlifting champion, heavyweight boxer, blond, handsome and exceptionally intelligent was dying before his allotted time. 

God had bequeathed him the standard three-score-years-and-ten but at the tender age of sixty he had multiple illnesses, any one of which would have dispatched a lesser man a decade earlier. He had overcome chronic alcoholism at forty, after that addiction had ruined his fifty-man, sorry, person, Lincoln's Inn law practice, ruined his central London gymnasiums, ruined his family lives (Martin had several families) and ruined his health. 

To become a champion weightlifter by the time he started at Manchester University, Martin had trained hard from the age of fifteen and dined on body-building proteins and compounds, which, even in those unconscious and innocent days, were suspected to bugger up your heart, liver, kidneys, nervous system and other vital organs; as indeed they did. In his fifties, after a stint of working for Slumberger in Texas, then moving to Brussels, Martin hurried home to England for a heart-bypass operation. It wasn't one of the major bypasses. I had a sporting friend who boasted a quadruple by-pass - which left little of his original heart intact, but beating - and didn't President Bill Clinton survive a triple? Martin's was by comparison mere tinkering. But it foreshadowed his mortality. We brothers knew with certainty that we were blessed with immortality, with infinite lives in perfect health. Father had had intensive medical check-ups every half-year that always announced him to be in tip-top condition - right up to the moment of his surprising death, sprinting for a train. His five sons naturally and unthinkingly cleaved to that immortal tradition for most of their lives. 

The first, merest indication that Martin's health was less than perfect, a sign of weakness, was him needing reading glasses. We brothers should have guessed then that he was destined to decline like an ordinary humble person. His heroic victory over alcohol, when he often defended clients in Court, having imbibed a bottle of whisky and five pints of bitter, without the slightest sign of inebriation, was followed by a sinister tremor in his limbs. Over a decade this slight tremor developed into full-blown Parkinson's Disease, which in his last years, without medication, would twist his entire upper body, neck and head, distorting his face into a dreadful grimace - before lapsing into "Stillness" a paralyzed state. At best, heavily medicated, the Parkinson's caused him to stagger when he walked. Still a big man, with a deeply cynical disposition and a wicked way with words delivering ego-piercing, unforgivable insults; still looking like an angry heavyweight boxer you would cross the street to avoid, Martin decided that God had a good sense of humour. Having for years escaped undetected as a serial drunkard in London's central courts - under the sharp, beady eyes of other lawyers and judges, now as a seasoned AA Helper - sober as a judge for twenty years - when he walked along a train, bus, platform or pavement he staggered. Gentlefolk scattered as he approached, with loud stage-whispers fearing and accusing him of being drunk.

The Parkinson's was the worst of his conditions - and the most disabling. 

But, in addition to the weakened, bypassed heart, and the insidious escalating Parkinson's, As the icing on his vengeful God's cake, Martin also developed prostate cancer. This rather mild, unseen deterioration; of which medics reassure patients "Nobody dies of prostate cancer, they die with it. Not of it" most upset Martin. It made him incontinent. He wanted to pee and couldn't always control it. At this stage, between sixty and dying aged sixty-six, though he had many friends locally and globally, he lived alone in a town-centre flat. He couldn't drive. Bus and train journeys needed careful planning and were exhausting. His leisure, entertainment, shopping and medical appointments were all local - on foot; moving as slowly as the Parkinson's dictated. If needing a lavatory, he couldn't sprint to one - or quickly pop into a bar or restaurant - in time. His greatest fear was peeing in his pants in public. So he isolated himself in his home. Treatments offered for the cancer included drugs or scalpels that would reduce his manhood - fill him with oestrogen and make him effeminate. One of Martin's businesses had been in the anti-terrorist world; working with ex-Marines, mercenaries, bodyguards, GBH criminals (Grievous-Bodily-Harm), and the like - who could "kill with one blow". Real tough guys. The idea of chemical castration and embracing his "feminine-side" was intolerable; utterly insupportable. He would not and did not do it. 

In his modest 17th century apartment in a pedestrianized area above a nail-bar and beauty parlour; in the middle of his living room Martin suspended a heavyweight boxer's punch bag. I tried it a couple of times. I hit it, it didn't move and the tough canvas skinned my office-honed knuckles. I avoided it thereafter. But Martin, after his medication, pummeled away at the dead weight, with the vigour and moves of a professional. The bag suffered serious assault. He was a tough guy. He would die a tough guy.

The medication was fearful. He had one of those plastic trays with boxes for each half-day. In each compartment were five or six pills - of many colours and sizes. All he had to do was to remember to swallow them - and remember that he had remembered. Taking a double dose of these powerful drugs was not recommended. It was around this time that we started to discuss religion and the next world - and to reminisce. It was also about this time that Martin started to hallucinate. He confided in me, on one of my monthly or so visits, that in his living room - with us, were three men. He knew that  I couldn't see them, but they were there; and they were made of paper. Not papier-mache but made of random sheets of paper that fill an office waste-bin. When he went to bed, they moved into his bedroom. One-day when I visited, Martin wasn't there. After some anxious hours I tracked him to a rural rest-home, where one of his doctors had sent him for a break. Martin's paper-men were with him - he told me. Then he pointed to the ridge tiles of the next building and asked if I could see the line of Russian Hussars, riding along the ridge of the roof. That was a few minutes before he attempted to leave his room, which had a wide and wide open door, a door that he couldn't find. I strongly suggested that he throw his medicines away. Which he did.

Within two weeks, Martin was as clever, cutting and as obnoxious, cynical and deeply insulting as ever. He had got his mind back. He reverted to correcting my English and providing me with accurate quotes from his wide range of literature, utilizing his photographic memory. In a lifetime of business Martin never had an address book - he remembered them all. 

What had caused the halluciantions is that his medical advisers kept moving jobs. He didn't have a doctor - he was blessed or cursed with a "medical team". When one or another of his symptoms threatened his life, Martin would stagger to the doctor's surgery, the Health-Centre or the local hospital, and whoever it was on duty would pile another pill onto his plastic tray - write a prescription to the chemist - and see him stagger off home; out of their hair. Nobody took responsibility for balanced medication. He was subject to the equivalent of what, in mental hospitals, was once called The Liquid Cosh. As long as he went away and kept quiet, "they" had done their duty. After that week of the Russian Hussars, his eldest daughter took charge of the medical prescriptions, drove up from London, sat with A Doctor until the drugs were rationalized - extracted promises of consultation and reviews, and Martin thereafter had a far better patient's life. 

By that time, 2011 to 2013, our other three brothers had died. Our parents were long gone, so I was the last male member, driving a hundred odd miles to visit. Our sister Stephanie, lived nearer, in the Pennine Hills above Manchester, but her visits were limited by work and transport. She was a dedicated religious person, thoroughly schooled in Bible Studies. Like Martin she had a powerful memory and often quoted appropriate passages from the holy book, in an attempt to lead Martin to God and Salvation, before he died. Uncharacteristically, Martin nodded polite assent to her barrage of good intentions. But he moved no closer to God, the Angels, The Heavenly Saints or any Holy Prophets. He remained, as we all were, a lapsed Catholic, and in his case an avowed Atheist and Humanist. He and I discussed psychiatry, psychotherapy and philosophy - as far as my limited repertoire allowed. And we focused on our shared, mostly unhappy and troubled childhood. We agreed that our sessions be limited to a few hours as neither of us could bear the emotional strain of being together for longer. We both needed a few weeks to recover from our encounters. Our family didn't do closeness; or friendship; and definitely not brotherly love. We six siblings had been driven apart from birth - and in our adult lives had met only once - at The Cat & Fiddle pub, atop the bleak treeless moorland between Buxton and Macclesfield, in the Pennines. Hence, Martin and I agreed, our strange family culture had driven the curse of alcoholism and our innate underlying social paranoia and churlishness. 

So, rejecting religion, as he approached his last weeks, Martin had no God to comfort him - or to fear. 

His six grown-up children and two of his four ex-wives rallied round and found him a place in a hospice; for which he was grateful. He had learned some manners in sixty-six years. Being a wandering peripatetic parent, he was little known to his nearest and dearest - and so it was that as he fell into a coma and was obviously in his last hours, as I left his bedside and his six children gathered round him, Martin's Number-Two daughter came charging along the corridor, triumphantly towing a fresh-faced, innocent priest who clutched a new Bible and wore an optimistic and suitably religious expression, as he hurried to give the Last Rites. It mattered little that the cleric was from the wrong religion - the enthusiastic daughter had found him somewhere in the hospice, looking clean, eager, Godly and presumably Christian - but I knew at a glance that the man was not Catholic, and that he was new at the job. I guessed that this Vicar of Christ had read and understood a small fraction of Martin's digested knowledge of comparative religions - and I realized that if Martin was to waken as this black-garbed usher-into-the-next-world prayed over him and sprinkled him with Holy Water, he was in grave danger (forgive the pun) of Martin responding to his ministrations with a vitriolic, biting, comic comment that might destroy the man's faith - forever. 

I watched from some distance down the corridor as the priest bent over brother Martin, amidst the family; and with relief I saw, praise the Lord, that Martin did not open his eyes or his mouth. 

At his funeral on 14th May 2013, Martin had the last word and underlined his own beliefs. As we left the chapel, the funeral service played the Monty Python song, loaded with Martin's ironic humour, denying God and Eternity: "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." 

THE DEATH OF BROTHER PETER

THE DEATH OF BROTHER JEREMY

THE DEATH OF BROTHER RICHARD