Many of our elderly will forgo an excess of compassion for Bingo and book club.

IF there’s one thing that has always struck me about old people, it is how sanguine they are about their own mortality.

Poem: The cannon was fired! The dogs barked!

Boom! The cannon was fired! The dogs barked!
The men and women stood around,
Stilled and pledged to make no sound,
A sombre silence there to tell,
Today they remembered the men who fell.

Poem: A bird in a graveyard

High up above I watch them,
Knelt on the ground below,
Some in calm and peacefulness,
Some with faces filled with woe.

Death: the great taboo

When I read the news on 4 June, I had a strange sense of déjà vu.

Now I know these things happen sometimes, but this sense wasn’t a mere figment of the imagination with all its irrational peculiarities and vagaries. “Will you die in the next 5 years?” The headlines challenged.