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Terry heeft, naar aanleiding van het debat over "assisted suicide" zoals dat momenteel woedt in GB, een duidelijk standpunt laten horen:

I'll die before the endgame, says Terry Pratchett in call for law to allow assisted suicides in UK

By Terry Pratchett
Last updated at 1:29 AM on 03rd August 2009


_{Pledge: Terry Pratchett revealed his views on 'assisted death' by saying he hopes to be 'helped across the step'}

Sir Terry Pratchett has made an emotional plea for the right to take his own life, saying: 'I live in hope I can jump before I am pushed.'

The fantasy novelist gave his views following last week's landmark House of Lords controversial judgment in the case of Debbie Purdy.

'I believe that if the burden gets too great, those who wish should be allowed to be shown the door,' he said. 'In my case, in the fullness of time, I hope it will be in the garden under an English sky. Or, if wet, the library.'

Sir Terry, 61, author of the hugely successful Discworld books, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's diseasein 2007.

He said that no one has a duty to suffer the extremes of terminal illness and set down his admiration for the sick and dying who have travelled to Switzerland to die in legal suicide clinics. They have displayed ' furious sanity', he said.

The Lords ruled on Thursday that the Director of Public Prosecutions must give Mrs Purdy, who has multiple sclerosis, guidance on whether her husband will face prosecution - and a possible 14-year prison sentence - if he helps her travel to the Dignitas clinic in Zurich to die.

The judgment means the DPP is likely to set down rules which will clear those who do not have selfish motives from the threat of prosecution - a major step towards legalisation.

Sir Terry, who was knighted in the 2009 New Year Honours, said in an article in the Mail on Sunday: 'I intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod.

'Oh, and since this is England, I had better add, "If wet, in the library". Who could say that this is bad?'

Sir Terry said he would be happy to accept help from the medical profession. He said he had no doubt that there were people with a 'passion for caring', but asked them to accept there are people 'who have a burning passion not to need to be cared for'.

The author rejected the idea that allowing assisted suicide would amount to legalising euthanasia, in which those unwilling to die would be killed off.

He said some ways of looking after those with chronic illnesses, including forcible or 'peg' feeding of Alzheimer's sufferers, were degradpulsorying and painful. 'I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.'

Sir Terry added: 'I have seen people profess to fear that the existence of a formalised approach to assisted dying could lead to it somehow becoming part of national health policy.

'I very much doubt this could be the case. We are a democracy and no democratic government is going to get anywhere with a policy of comor even recommended euthanasia.

'If we were ever to end up with such a government, we would be in so much trouble that the problem would become the least of our worries. But neither do I believe in a duty to suffer the worst ravages of terminal illness.'

Peers voted heavily against a parliamentary move to allow assisted suicide last month. Sir Terry backed the reform, put forward by former Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer, which would have allowed relatives or friends to escort dying relatives to a suicide in Switzerland with the approval of two doctors.

However since then the main nursing union, the Royal College of Nursing, has withdrawn its opposition to assisted suicide.

More than 100 Britons have died at the Dignitas clinic, taking advantage of Swiss tolerance of suicide. Most recently conductor Sir Edward Downes and his wife Joan died in Zurich, in the presence of their two children.

Lady Downes was dying of cancer but Sir Edward, while frail, was not suffering from a terminal illness.

Point me to heaven when the final chapter comes...
Terry Pratchett's deeply personal plea

We are being stupid. We have been so successful in the past century at the art of living longer and staying alive that we have forgotten how to die. Too often we learn the hard way. As soon as the baby boomers pass pensionable age, their lesson will be harsher still. At least, that is what I thought until last week.

Now, however, I live in hope - hope that before the disease in my brain finally wipes it clean, I can jump before I am pushed and drag my evil Nemesis to its doom, like Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty locked in combat as they go over the waterfall.

In any case, such thinking bestows a wonderful feeling of power; the enemy might win but it won't triumph.


_{Plea: Things like pride, self-respect and human dignity are worthy of preservation, says Discworld author Terry Pratchett}


Last week a poll revealed that more than three-quarters of people in Britain approve of assisted suicide for the terminally ill.

On Thursday, the Law Lords delivered the landmark judgment in a case brought by multiple sclerosis sufferer Debbie Purdy, who feared her husband would be prosecuted if he accompanied her to die abroad.

She wanted the law on assisted dying to be clarified and the Law Lords have now ordered the Director of Public Prosecutions to draw up policy spelling out when prosecutions would and would not be pursued.

It looks as though the baby boomers have spoken and some of them, at least, hope they die before they get old - well, too old. Some have seen what happened to their parents or grandparents, and they don't like it. Every day I remember my own father's death. The nurses were kind, but there was something very wrong about it.

The poll result arrived at about the same time as the Royal College of Nursing announced that it was ending its opposition to assisted dying. Other signs indicate that the medical profession as a whole is at least prepared to face the issue.

I hate the term 'assisted suicide'. I have witnessed the aftermath of two suicides, and as a journalist I attended far too many coroners' inquests, where I was amazed and appalled at the many ways that desperate people find to end their lives.

Suicide is fear, shame, despair and grief. It is madness.

Those brave souls lately seeking death abroad seem to me, on the other hand, to be gifted with a furious sanity. They have seen their future, and they don't want to be part of it.

But for me, the scandal has not been solely that innocent people have had the threat of murder hanging over their heads for committing a clear act of mercy. It is that people are having to go to another country to die; it should be possible to die with benign assistance here.

You do not have to read much social history, or move in medical circles, to reach the conclusion that the profession has long seen it as part of its remit to help the dying die more comfortably.

Victorians expected to die at home, undoubtedly assisted by the medical profession.

In those days there was no such thing as drug control - just as there was no gun control. Laudanum and opiates were widespread and everyone knew you could get your hands on them. Sherlock Holmes was one of them!

As a young journalist I once listened in awe as a 90-year-old former nurse told me how she helped a dying cancer patient into the great beyond with the help of a pillow.


_{Consolation: Terry in his Wiltshire garden with a brandy - the way he would like to be able to spend his final conscious moments}

In the absence of any better medication in that time and place, and with his wife in hysterics at the pain he was forced to endure, death was going to be a friend; it was life, life gone wild, that was killing him.

'We called it "pointing them to Heaven",' she told me.

Decades later, I mentioned this to another, younger nurse, who gave me a blank look, and then said: 'We used to call it "showing them the way".'

Then she walked off quickly, aware that she had left a hostage to fortune.

I have been told that doctors do not like patients to worry that, theoretically, their GP has the expertise to kill them. Really?

I suspect that even my dentist has the means to kill me. It does not worry me in the slightest, and I imagine that, like many other people, I would be very happy for the medical profession to help me over the step.

I have written a living will to that effect, and indeed this article in The Mail on Sunday will be evidence of my determination in this matter. I cannot make the laws but you have no idea how much I hope those in a position to do so will listen.

In the course of the past few years, I have met some delightful people who say they have a passion for caring and I have no reason whatsoever to doubt them. Can they accept, however, that there are some people who have a burning passion not to need to be cared for?

It appears to be an item of faith with many people I have spoken to that both doctors and nurses, at least in hospital, still have 'things they can do' when the patient is in extremis.

I certainly hope this is true, but I wish we could blow away the clouds obscuring the issue and embrace the idea of ending, at their request, the life of a terminally ill person at a time and, if possible, a place of their choosing.

I write this as someone who has, regrettably, become famous for having Alzheimer's. Although being famous is all the rage these days, it's fame I could do without.

I know enough to realise there will not be a cure within my lifetime and I know the later stages of the disease can be very unpleasant. Indeed, it's the most feared disease among the over-65s.

Naturally, I turn my attention to the future. There used to be a term known as 'mercy killing'. I cannot believe it ever had any force in law but it did, and still does, persist in the public consciousness, and in general the public consciousness gets it right.

We would not walk away from a man being attacked by a monster, and if we couldn't get the ravening beast off him we might well conclude that some instant means of less painful death would be preferable before the monster ate him alive.


_{Family man: Terry Pratchett with his daughter Rhianna in 1998}

And certainly we wouldn't tuck it up in bed with him and try to carry on the fight from there, which is a pretty good metaphor for what we do now, particularly with 'old-timers' disease.

(My speech-to-text programme persists in transcribing Alzheimer's as 'old-timers'. In fact, I've heard many people absent-mindedly doing the same thing, and as a writer, I cannot help wondering if the perception of the disease might be a little kinder without that sharp, Germanic intonation.)

My father was a man well tuned to the public consciousness. The day before he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer he told me: 'If you ever see me in a hospital bed with tubes and pipes all over me, then tell them to turn me off.'

There was no chance of that a year later, when medicine's defences had been used up and he was becoming a battleground between the cancer and the morphine.

I have no idea what might have been going through his head, but why did we have to go through with this? He had been told he had a year to live, the year was up, and he was a practical man; he knew why he had been taken to the hospice.

Why could we not have had the Victorian finale, perhaps just a week or so earlier, with time for words of love and good advice, and tears just before the end?

It would have made something human and understandable out of what instead became surreal. It was not the fault of the staff; they were, like us, prisoners of a system.

At least my father's problem was pain, and pain can be controlled right until the end.

But I do not know how you control a sense of loss and the slow slipping of the mind away from the living body - the kind that old-timer's disease causes.

I know my father was the sort of man who didn't make a fuss, and perhaps I would not, either, if pain were the only issue for me. But it isn't.

I am enjoying my life to the full, and hope to continue for quite some time. But I also intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod - the latter because Thomas's music could lift even an atheist a little bit closer to Heaven - and perhaps a second brandy if there is time.

Oh, and since this is England I had better add: 'If wet, in the library.'

Who could say that is bad? Where is the evil here?

But, of course, important points are being made in this debate. Currently, people say they are worried about the possibility of old people being 'urged' by greedy relatives into taking an early death.

If we cannot come up with a means of identifying this, I would be very surprised.


_{Legal first: MS victim Debbie Purdy, pictured with husband Omar Puente, has persuaded the Law Lords to call for clarification of the law on assisted suicide}

In any case, in my experience it is pretty impossible to get an elderly person to do something they do not wish to do. They tend to know their own mind like the back of their hand, and quite probably would object to this being questioned.

There needs to be, for the safety of all concerned, some kind of gentle tribunal, to make certain that requests for assisted death are bona fide and not perhaps due to gentle persuasion.

It is the sort of thing, in my opinion, coroners could handle well. All the ones I have met have been former lawyers with much experience of the world and of the ways of human nature, people with wisdom, in fact, and that means middle-aged at the very least, and old enough to have some grasp of the world's realities.

I have no way of knowing whether any of them would wish to be involved; this is breaking new ground and we won't know unless we try.

In my early journalistic years, I watched such men deal with the deaths of thalidomide babies and the results of terrible accidents with calm and compassion. If their successors are as caring in their deliberations, I feel this may go some way to meeting the objections that people have.

And I would suggest, too, that Social Services be kept well away from any such arrangement. I don't think they would have much to offer.

In this country we have rather lost faith in the wisdom of ordinary people, among whom my father was a shining example. And it is ordinary people, ultimately, who must make such decisions.

There are those who will object that the care industry can cope. Even if we accept that they are coping now, which most of us will take on trust, in the coming decades they certainly will not be able to without a major reordering of our society.

The numbers tell us this. We already have a situation where elderly people are being cared for at home by people who themselves are of pensionable age. The healthcare system will become messy, and the NHS will struggle to cope.

There are care homes, of course, and they are subject to inspection, and we must take it on trust that the inspection system has teeth, but would you know how to choose one? Would you know what questions to ask?

Would you know, if you suffer from Alzheimer's disease or are representing someone who is, whether the place you would be choosing resorts to 'peg feeding'?

Peg feeding is the forcible feeding of patients who refuse food. I found out about this only recently, and I'm afraid it has entirely coloured my views.

These are, after all, innocent people who are on the road to death, and yet someone thinks it is right to subject them to this degrading and painful business.

The Alzheimer's Society says peg feeding is 'not best practice', a rather diplomatic statement.


_{A kindly angel: Death, as portrayed in a scene from the Sky TV adaptation of Pratchett's Discworld novel The Hogfather}

People there that I trust tell me the main problem with the treatment of acute Alzheimer's cases is not a lack of care and goodwill as such, but insufficient numbers of people who are skilled in the special needs of the terminally-ill Alzheimer's patient.

I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it.

As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of 'life at any cost'. Apparently there is already such a thing as an official 'quality of life index': I don't know whether the fact that we have one frightens me more than the possibility that we don't.

In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this - death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.

But the Death of the Discworld is a little more unusual. He has become popular - after all, as he patiently explains, it is not he who kills. Guns and knives and starvation kill; Death turns up afterwards, to reassure the puzzled arrivals as they begin their journey.

He is kind; after all, he is an angel. And he is fascinated with us, in the way in which we make our little lives so complicated, and our strivings. So am I.

Within a year or two, I started to get letters about Death. They came from people in hospices, and from their relatives and from bereaved individuals, and from young children in leukaemia wards, and the parents of boys who had crashed their motorbikes.

I recall one letter where the writer said the books were of great help to his mother when she was in a hospice. Frequently, the bereaved asked to be allowed to quote some part of the Discworld books in a memorial service.

They all tried to say, in some way, 'thank you', and until I got used to it, the arrival of one of these letters would move me sufficiently to give up writing for the day.

The bravest person I've ever met was a young boy going through massive amounts of treatment for a very rare, complex and unpleasant disease. I last saw him at a Discworld convention, where he chose to take part in a game as an assassin. He died not long afterwards, and I wish I had his fortitude and sense of style.

I would like to think my refusal to go into care towards the end of my life might free up the resources for people such as him.

Let me make this very clear: I do not believe there is any such thing as a 'duty to die'; we should treasure great age as the tangible presence of the past, and honour it as such.

I know that last September Baroness Warnock was quoted, or possibly misquoted, as saying the very elderly sick had a 'duty to die', and I have seen people profess to fear that the existence of a formalised approach to assisted dying could lead to it somehow becoming part of national health policy.

I very much doubt this could be the case. We are a democracy and no democratic government is going to get anywhere with a policy of compulsory or even recommended euthanasia. If we were ever to end up with such a government, we would be in so much trouble that the problem would become the least of our worries.

But neither do I believe in a duty to suffer the worst ravages of terminal illness.

As an author, I've always tended to be known only to a circle of people - quite a large one, I must admit - who read books. I was not prepared for what happened after I 'came out' about having Alzheimer's in December 2007, and appeared on television.

People would stop me in the street to tell me their mother had it, or their father had it. Sometimes, it's both parents, and I look into their eyes and I see a flash of fear.

In London the other day, a beefy man grabbed my arm, smiled at me and said, 'Thanks a lot for what you're doing, my mum died from it,' and disappeared into the crowd.

And, of course, there have been the vast numbers of letters and emails, some of which, I'm ashamed to say, will perhaps never be answered.

People do fear, and not because fear is whipped up, but because they've recalled an unpleasant death in their family history.

Sometimes I find myself involved in strange conversations, because I am an amiable-looking person who people think they know and, importantly, I am not an authority figure - quite the reverse.

I have met Alzheimer's sufferers who are hoping that another illness takes them away first. Little old ladies confide in me, saying: 'I've been saving up my pills for the end, dear.'

What they are doing, in fact, is buying themselves a feeling of control. I have met retired nurses who have made their own provisions for the future with rather more knowledgeable deliberation.

From personal experience, I believe the recent poll reflects the views of the people in this country. They don't dread death; it's what happens beforehand that worries them.

Life is easy and cheap to make. But the things we add to it, such as pride, self-respect and human dignity, are worthy of preservation, too, and these can be lost in a fetish for life at any cost.

I believe that if the burden gets too great, those who wish to should be allowed to be shown the door.

In my case, in the fullness of time, I hope it will be the one to the garden under an English sky. Or, if wet, the library.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.u(...)K.html#ixzz0N9DEl0Mt

--------------------------------------

On a happier note:

Volgens de Discworld Newsletter is men bezig met Going Postal en wordt deze volgend jaar uitgezonden op Sky1.

Going Postal adaptation SKY1 Easter 2010
Sky1 will be showing Going Postal in Easter 2010. The latest cast list is as follows:

* Richard Coyle - Moist Von Lipwig
* David Suchet - Reacher Gilt
* Charles Dance - Lord Vetinari
* Claire Foy - Adora Belle Dearheart
* Andrew Sachs - Tolliver Groat
* Tamsin Greig - Miss Cripslock
* Steve Pemberton - Rufus Drumknott
* John Henshaw - Mr Pony
* Madhav Sharma - Horsefry
* Jimmy Yuill - Mr Spools
* Ian Bonar - Stanley
* Paul Barber - Dave
* Adrian Schiller - Gryle
* Daniel Cerquiera - Trooper
* Ingrid Bolso Berdal - Sergeant Angua
* Kerry Shale - Mr Pump (voice)
* Ben Crompton - Mad Al
* Asif Khan - Sane Alex
* Alex Parks - Roger
* Sheila Shand Ginns - Old Lady

Alstublieft

Ik zie overigens nu pas dat ik klakkeloos een slordige fout van de Daily Mail heb overgenomen. In de caption onder het plaatje van Death wordt gesproken over 'The Hogfather', terwijl boek en film gewoon 'Hogfather' heten

Hier een video-interview van de BBC met Terry over hoe hij wil sterven.

En op een conferentie van de Liberal-Democrats heeft Terry eveneens over zijn ziekte gesproken.

En een fake-trailer voor een niet bestaande Guards! Guards! film

Een bericht van Terry in de Discworld Monthly:

quote:

DIGNITY IN DYING

Folks,

I expect that most of you know that I am determined to die
peacefully in my own garden before my Alzheimer's has reached its
most unpleasant stage, which might still be quite some time away.
That is why I am now a patron of Dignity in Dying and my new
friends there have asked me to pass on this link to a petition to
properly legalise well regulated assisted dying in the UK. It has
been put together by people who know their stuff and have some
political awareness; if it had been written by me the paper would
have burst into flames because I believe the religious right,
having lost the original suicide debate in the 60s/70s and the
abortion debate in the 60s are really getting behind this one and
are portraying what could be a carefully and sympathetically
delivered service to people with serious, debilitating and
untreatable diseases as if it's an open door to a nationwide cull
of old people. Their arguments are frequently pernicious and
highly objectionable and must be combated.

Click HERE to sign the petition.

Many thanks.

Terry Pratchett

En een wat luchtiger stukje:

quote:

Folks,

I had a lovely letter the other day from very religious lady
concerned about my health. She said that I should consider my
Alzheimer's a gift from God. Frankly, I would have preferred a
sweater...

Coming back from the North American Discworld Convention has
hardly been a rest and so my own personal con report and
additional thanks has had to be delayed. More on that later.

On the up side, the progress on I Shall Wear Midnight is rapid,
thanks to Dragon Dictate and rather more to the guys at
TalkingPoint - the front end that makes it much easier to use -
who made contact with me through this very page. I'm so impressed
by it, that if my typing ability came back overnight, I would
continue to use it. I have no hesitation in praising the product
as I have already paid for two licenses and a year's maintenance.
Anyway, we have to do this stuff otherwise what was the point of
Star Trek?

The next few weeks are pretty well stuffed with things to do
regarding Unseen Academicals and the celebration football match in
Wincanton at which I shall break my life long vow of never
watching a game of football.

The next big public thing in our diary is the Irish Discworld
convention, which takes in the Falls Hotel in Ennistymon Co. Clare
from the 6th to 9th November. http://idwcon.org/

More later,

In The Guardian van 28/9 heeft Terry nogmaals zijn visie gegeven op euthanasie en de regels die daarvoor gelden in de UK:

quote:

Discworld author Terry Pratchett has spoken out against new guidelines on assisted suicide which were issued last week.

The guidelines do not provide immunity from prosecution – assisting suicide carries a prison sentence of up to 14 years – but are intended to offer clear advice to the relatives of people wishing to kill themselves about whether they would face prosecution.

Pratchett, who revealed in 2007 he was suffering from early-onset Alzheimer's, said yesterday the new guidelines had him "a little more angry". "No one is really happy with them," he told the BBC Politics Show West. "It would appear they are suggesting that people could help you kill yourself, and then the police would investigate as an act of murder and decide whether or not this was really the case, which seems a very lame way of doing things."

The bestselling fantasy author suggested instead "that there should be possibly some kind of non-aggressive tribunal system where someone who, for whatever reasons, wishes to end their life – and I would only really accept medical reasons, I must say – can make their points to a magistrate or a coroner, along with the medical evidence on which they wish to end their life". This, Pratchett felt, would "protect the vulnerable", and "could weed out the hypothetical granny who is being urged by her heirs to commit suicide, so they can get their hands on her money".

Pratchett said that he himself was "feeling fine", and that although he can no longer drive a car or use a typewriter, he is continuing to write using a speech-to-text programme. "I can now talk to the typewriter and get the work done," he said. Pratchett's new Discworld novel, Unseen Academicals, is published in October.

"The reason I wish to end my life is because of a medical condition – it's not bad yet and I'm full of the joys of spring, but it will eventually get very bad and Alzheimer's is the most feared disease among the over-60s. It is not nice. I do not wish to be there for the endgame," Pratchett said. "I spoke to a doctor who told me when he was a young doctor he walked through a ward of terminal Alzheimer's patents who effectively were not there any more, and he wondered why they were being kept alive, when there was very little there to keep alive."

A 12-week consultation on the new guidelines is currently ongoing, with the finalised policy to be announced next spring.

En op dezelfde dag in The Telegraph, een bespreking van Unseen Academicals, dat uiteraard leidt tot een gesprek met Terry over zijn ziekte:

quote:

Recently, Sir Terry Pratchett has been having a recurring nightmare. He finds himself in a strange city where all the buildings are derelict and everything is bathed in a thin grey light. ‘It’s like a southerner’s idea of Leeds, if you know what I mean.’

In his dream, he wanders around trying to find somewhere familiar. ‘On one occasion I found myself in a building and I looked out of the window and saw this steam engine on some tracks.

'The next time I was on the train, but I couldn’t get out of the carriage. And then the time after, I crawled up this embankment to where the train was, only to find the rails had been cut off at either end.’ What did you make of that? I ask. He chuckles. ‘Well, I think I know a metaphor when I see one.’

Pratchett lives in a narrow Wiltshire valley with a stream running through it and sheep munching on the hillsides. When he opens the door of his studio – a tiny, white-bearded figure in his usual black shirt and trousers – he looks thoroughly fed up.

‘I hadn’t realised there were going to be so many of you,’ he mutters – there are five of us, including the photographer and his two assistants. ‘Mind you, when Panorama came to see me, there were 25 of the buggers.’

He leads the way into his studio. It’s done out in a vaguely ecclesiastical style with a vaulted roof, oak beams and two enormous lecterns with dripping candles attached. In one room is his desk with six computer screens arranged around it like a bay window – he works on them simultaneously.

In the other is a black leather chair. Mounted above it is the specially designed helmet that fires bursts of infra-red light into his head to try to reverse the effects of posterior cortical atrophy – a form of Alzheimer’s – with which Pratchett was diagnosed in 2007 when he was 59.

What makes the most immediate impression, though, is a strong smell of mice. ‘They’re unavoidable in a place like this,’ he says. Maybe so, but surprisingly, given what a fastidious, even fussy, man Pratchett is, the place is also very dirty. There is thick dust around the edges of the rugs and the lavatory looks as if it hasn’t seen any bleach in a long while.

We sit down next to the helmet, and a woman who might be the housekeeper, or possibly Lady Pratchett (no indication is given), asks if we would like coffee. ‘I’ll have brandy in mine,’ says Pratchett, which again seems quite odd, given that it’s only 11.30 in the morning.

It’s tempting to ascribe some of this to the effects of the PCA. But as Pratchett talks, it soon becomes clear that there’s nothing wrong with his vocabulary, or his fluency.

Periodically, though not very often, he’ll break off in mid-sentence and there will be an awkward pause, and once or twice he comes up with some startling non sequiturs. However, I’m being quite truthful when I tell him later on that if I didn’t know he had PCA, I would never have guessed.

‘That’s because I talk,’ he says. ‘I can turn a phrase and actually I can turn a phrase bloody well when I want to. But if I took off this shirt and you threw it on the floor and perhaps pulled a sleeve inside out, I would be able to put it back on again, but you would see the celebration happening afterwards. It’s all to do with one’s apprehension of the world.

'My eyesight, as eyesight, is perfectly good. But how the brain deals with what my eyes can see can be pretty ropy. For instance, I might glance down and not see that cup on the floor. If you told me the cup was there, I would see it. However, the brain is filling up the space with something else. But because I come out with words properly used, like apprehension, you think there can’t be anything wrong with this guy.’

Do you think the helmet does any good? ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I just don’t know… Does it do me any harm? I don’t think so, and that’s the most I can say.’ Pratchett also takes Aricept, the only drug that’s shown some success in halting the progress of Alzheimer’s. As to whether that’s working, he doesn’t know either. ‘I’m not really sure how the PCA will develop – it’s very hard to tell.’

For much of his writing career, Pratchett has written an astonishing two novels a year, clocking up worldwide sales of 45 million. Now, he’s down to one. He no longer types – it was problems with typing that first prompted him to seek medical advice – but dictates into a speech-to-text programme that instantly transcribes his words into prose.

However, the quality has not suffered. Pratchett’s new novel, Unseen Academicals – out in October – is the 32nd novel in his Discworld series and fizzes as exuberantly as all the others. Meanwhile his last book, Nation – not one of the Discworld series – has been turned into a play by Mark Ravenhill and is opening at the National Theatre in November.

Nation is about a boy called Mau on a Pacific Island who believes he is the last person left alive in the world. Reading the book, it’s hard not to be struck by how vividly the boy’s sense of helplessness and isolation is evoked. It was also written around the time Pratchett’s Alzheimer’s was diagnosed and I found myself wondering if the boy’s emotions mirrored his own.

There are also several mentions of ‘shadow-worlds’ in the book. Anyone who saw Pratchett’s two-part television documentary, Living with Alzheimer’s, earlier this year, will recall him breaking off in the middle of a reading and saying he couldn’t carry on because ‘this shadow keeps falling across the page’.

‘Now hold on,’ says Pratchett when I mention this. ‘Could I correct you there? I swear I told my editor the outline of Nation some four years before I was diagnosed. But that said, and this is a thing that really puzzles me, I understand that PCA is something that can be with you for quite a long time before it’s diagnosed. So you do have to wonder if there are channels that we have no conception of.’

It’s plain that Terry Pratchett can be a touchy, abrasive man, keen to remind you of his erudition and intelligence. He has a fondness for words like ‘deleterious’ which he articulates with relish. It’s plain, too, that he is by no means without vanity – hence the black clothes, the matching fedora and the cane that he carries at Discworld conventions. To begin with, he wraps his arms tightly around his chest. But as he talks, he slowly relaxes and becomes less chippy, less defensive.

There’s also something of the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland about him. When he was a boy, Pratchett says, he always had a sense that he had arrived at school about a week after everyone else. ‘It was as if they’d gone to all the orientation lectures and I could never quite get a grip of anything.’

He grew up in poverty in Beaconsfield, in a house with no bathroom, no electricity and no running water. A dreamy, introspective boy, he recalls his mother reminding him recently that, aged about six, he used to see people in colours. ‘Apparently I’d say things like, “I like Mrs So-an-so, she’s so purple.” And this would have nothing to do with what she happened to be wearing.’

It was around this time that he had a peculiar vision. Walking back from school one day, Pratchett went through a chalk pit.

‘As I climbed through the chalk pit, I saw these fish. They were like Jurassic fish – armour-plated things with bull-noses. And they were swimming in and out of the chalk as if they were underwater. That memory is as clear in my mind now as it was then. I can remember thinking, “Is this really happening, or what?’’’

This is a question that has hung over much of Pratchett’s subsequent life and work. As a child, he read extensively – mainly sci-fi and fantasy literature, which he bought from a shop in High Wycombe that specialised in soft porn and only sold sci-fi under the counter.

His first novel, The Carpet People, was written while he was working as a junior reporter at the Bucks Free Press. It started out as a weekly narrative to fill a column called the Children’s Corner, and it was only after several months that Pratchett realised – rather to his surprise – that he’d accumulated enough material for a book.

He went on to become the press officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board. ‘For years, I never thought much about being a writer. Periodically, I’d write a novel and it would be published and I’d get a little cheque. But it wasn’t until The Colour of Magic started to sell very well that it occurred to me that I appeared to be good at it.’

By then he had already embarked on what would turn into a magnum opus – his Discworld series. Set on a large disc resting on the backs of four giant elephants, supported by an even bigger turtle which is swimming through space, the books owe more to writers like Mark Twain and Jerome K Jerome than they do to conventional sci-fi.

‘I remember I got rather fed up with all the imitation Tolkien stuff that was coming out at the time. There was also a lot of medieval fantasy written by people who clearly had no idea what medieval life was actually like.

‘Basically, I decided to have fun with it. I must have read every issue of Punch published in the 20th century, and I think in the process I picked up the true voice of English humour – that amiable, fairly liberal, laconic voice which you find in something like Three Men in a Boat.’

As to the question that his hordes of devoted fans never tire of asking, ‘Where does it all come from?’, Pratchett happily admits he doesn’t have a clue. ‘One of the delights of the job is controlled serendipity. I have lots of weird books like The History of False Teeth and The Frozen Water Trade in the Southern United States in the 18th Century.

'All this stuff streams down into me. My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It’s just a matter of joining the dots – and that process really hasn’t got any more difficult since my diagnosis.’

While Pratchett’s brain may be buzzing with snippets of arcane information, there’s nothing in the least chaotic about the way he works. ‘I’ve always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.’

What happens if you don’t write? Behind his round gold glasses, Pratchett looks quite blank. ‘Um… I really don’t know. I have to write because if I don’t get something down then after a while I feel it’s going to bang the side of my head off.’

Over the last couple of years, Pratchett has turned from a famous writer into a public figure. Not only has he become a spokesman for Alzheimer’s research – he’s donated £500,000 to the Alzheimer’s Research Trust and has presented a petition to Gordon Brown asking for more funds – but he’s also taken up the cause of what he calls ‘assisted death’. He hates the phrase ‘assisted suicide’ because of the stigma still attached to suicide.

Nowadays, people are as likely to stop him in the street and ask him about dying as they are about his books. ‘It’s extraordinary, the number of people who come up to me. Secretly, I think everyone hopes that when they reach the end, a doctor or a nurse will give them a little extra dose of something.

'However, I do get a lot of weird Christians with a little red glint on their spectacles and spittle at the corner of their mouths who say things like, “The Commandment says, Thou Shalt Not Kill.” And I always say, “Well, that’s rather strange given how bloodthirsty Jehovah was.” Personally, I think the Commandment should read, Thou Shalt Commit No Murder, which is rather different. In any case, it’s all made-up.’

As for his own death, Pratchett insists that he is pretty sanguine about it – at least most of the time.

‘I can’t find a shred of fear about actual death. As for loss… yeah, I fear that. But I don’t fear death because there is nothing there. I don’t think you wake up and the heavenly host is looking down on you going, “Hah! You got that one wrong, didn’t you?” And not having that fear is a great release, I find. But I do fear a protracted death and loss of senses and loss of control and total dependence on other people. Of course I do.’

It’s time for Pratchett to have his photograph taken outside. Before he goes, I ask if I can take his phone number in case there is anything I need to check. He starts to give it to me, then his voice falters. Scrunching up his face and clearly making an enormous effort, he comes out with the remaining digits, as if he’s having to drag them up from the bottom of a deep dark hole.

* ‘Unseen Academicals’ by Terry Pratchett (Doubleday, RRP £18.99) is available from Telegraph Books for £16.99 plus £1.25 p+p. Call 0844 871 1516 or visit www.books.telegraph.co.uk

En een interview met Terry op de BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/breakfast/8302339.stm

Een radio-interview in het programma The Author Hour op VoiceAmerica:
http://theauthorhour.com/terry-pratchett/

In Engeland heeft de stad Wincanton in een nieuwe wijk straten vernoemd naar straten in Ankh-Morpork. De stad is ook officieel zusterstad Terry heeft de straatnamen onthuld. Lees hier een verslag.

[ Bericht 36% gewijzigd door Lord_Vetinari op 01-11-2009 11:07:15 ]

quote:

Op zondag 20 december 2009 02:45 schreef wonderer het volgende:

[..]



Verder ben ik bezig in The Hogfather (vaste prik ) en komt Nation deze kant op. Ben benieuwd.

quote:

Op zondag 20 december 2009 18:05 schreef wonderer het volgende:
Wat? Ik vind Charles Dance tof

Gewoon. Ik vind het niet tof dat je boektitels verkeerd schrijft.

Sir Terry heeft een award gekregen van het Writers Guild voor "Outstanding contribution to children's writing".

http://www.writersguild.o(...)397_WGGBNewsGui.html

LOL.

Ik zit net "Garfield & Friends" tekenfilms te kijken. Komt de aftiteling voorbij:

Model maker: Salene Weatherwax



Life imitating art

One of the most popular authors writing today, Sir Terry Pratchett, is to deliver BBC One's annual Richard Dimbleby Lecture on 1 February 2010.

This will be the 34th lecture held in honour of the veteran broadcaster who died in 1965.

The first novelist to give the lecture, Sir Terry Pratchett is the acclaimed creator of the bestselling Discworld series. The first Discworld novel, The Colour Of Magic, was published in 1983 and there are now 37 books in the series.

Regarded as a significant satirist, Pratchett has won numerous literary awards, was awarded an OBE in 1998, Knighted in 2009 and has received eight honorary doctorates. His novels have sold more than 65 million copies and have been translated into 37 languages.

In December 2007, he announced that he had been diagnosed with a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer's disease. Since then, he has become Patron of The Alzheimer's Research Trust and has been closely involved in fundraising as well as making a sizeable donation to the charity himself.

In this keynote lecture, Shaking Hands With Death, Sir Terry Pratchett will explore how modern society, confronted with an increasingly older population, many of whom will suffer from incurable illnesses, will need to redefine how it deals with death.

Jay Hunt, Controller of BBC One, says: "I'm absolutely delighted that one of our most popular and best-loved authors has agreed to give this lecture. Sir Terry Pratchett has spoken with great bravery and honesty about his battle with Alzheimer's and I look forward to an intelligent and thought-provoking speech."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/pres(...)ry/14/dimbleby.shtml

The National Theatre zendt een stuk over Nation live op 30 januari de wereld rond:

http://www.nationaltheatr(...)national-venues.html

The Live Show will include a couple of videos produced by young film
makers showing their interpretation of Mau and Daphne's first
meeting.

Review: Terry Pratchett On Nation

National Theatre Platform, 19th January 2010

Reviewed by Jessica Yates

Terry Pratchett was interviewed by Sarah LeFanu, former Artistic
Director of the Bath Literary Festival, who has interviewed him
several times before. The Olivier Theatre was very nearly full for
this early evening Platform, so that meant that approx. 1000 people
were there to hear Terry, many of whom had also booked to see Nation
that same evening.

Ms LeFanu revealed that 60 million copies of Discworld novels had
been sold (gasps and cheers), and that (as we knew) Terry had also
written a number of 'wonderful and varied novels for younger
readers'. Nation was a really big story, partly a love story, partly
a myth of origins, it asked big questions and turned the world
upside down.

Terry reminded her that she was in at the start. He was launching a
book several years ago, before the disastrous tsunami in 2004, and
he told her the germ of the story, about a boy raging against the
gods. When he had finished the books he was contracted to write, he
then told his agent he had to do this one; and never before had a
book dragged him along so much. Every time he needed some
information he had already got it from a lifetime of reading plus
useful contacts. He found a place which resembled the island - a
rainforest in Australia.

LeFanu went on with the story of how the National Theatre took over
the book for their next Christmas show for families, and Terry
commented that it was like taking a new toy away from a kid after he
has started to play with it. He gave the team advice - which they
took on board - and then threw overboard, as they kept saying that a
play is different from a book. 'A playwright has a whole orchestra
to play with - often literally - and I've got one lousy alphabet!'

LeFanu asked him if he was nervous when he first came to see the
show, and Terry replied that it felt like Wyatt Earp walking down a
quiet street in Tombstone. He could see the changes from the start,
but to be fair, putting more in would have made it longer. They
spoke of the challenge to young people to make their own film of the
tea-party scene, and Terry praised the winners who would have their
films shown before the live broadcast of Nation on Saturday 30th
January.

They now invited questions from the floor, and first Terry was asked
who his favourite character was. He replied that at present it was
Tiffany, as he is writing the fourth book about her, which will
bring her up to adulthood. After her, it would be Commander Vimes
(cheers). Would there be any more Johnny Maxwell books? Well,
you've got to have something to say (so probably not).

Which Discworld character do you feel your personality reflects?
Commander Vimes on a good day and ? Death of Rats? on a bad one
(sorry I couldn't quite hear that). Terry then went on to discuss
the differing portrayals of Death in the Discworld and Nation. In
the latter, Death was like Bergman's Death in The Seventh Seal. When
he saw that film on his Granny's TV it had a tremendous effect on
him.

Why is Nation set on a parallel world? 'It's my Get out of Jail Free
card' - readers won't be able to find the island on a map, and spot
any other inaccuracies. LeFanu commented on the wealth of background
material in the programme and summed up by saying that in the book
we are reading about ourselves, and that she hoped there would not
be many dry eyes in the theatre tonight.

The session ended with rapturous applause!

Sir Terry Pratchett to call for assisted suicide to be legalised



_{Sir Terry Pratchett will call for a tribunal to be set up where people can apply for legal permission to end their lives}


Sir Terry Pratchett will make a provocative call on BBC TV tonight for assisted suicide to be legalised.

The fantasy novelist, who has Alzheimer's, will call for a tribunal to be set up where people can apply for legal permission to end their lives at a time of their choosing.

Sir Terry's impassioned plea will come as he delivers the annual Richard Dimbleby Lecture on BBC1.

Extracts were released in advance yesterday as the BBC published a poll which it said showed 'a clear majority of Britons support allowing supported suicide for the terminally ill'.

The survey was taken for an edition of Panorama to be broadcast before Sir Terry's lecture.

It will feature an interview with Kay Gilderdale, who was last week acquitted of attempted murder after helping her daughter Lynn, who was paralysed by ME, to end her life.

The BBC says it is 'pure coincidence' that the two programmes are being shown on the same night.

But critics questioned if the corporation has an 'agenda' on the eve of publication of guidelines on assisted suicide from the Director of Public Prosecutions.

They are expected to effectively give the green light to relatives to help desperately ill loved ones to die.

Panorama will also feature Baroness Campbell, who has battled a degenerative illness for 50 years and is opposed to the introduction of assisted suicide.

But the anti-euthanasia group Care Not Killing said it had 'grave concerns' over the level of balance with which assisted suicide is portrayed. It also raised concerns over the presentation of the Panorama poll findings.

The poll showed that 73 per cent said friends or relatives should be allowed to help someone who is terminally ill to commit suicide.

But this fell to 48 per cent when the illness was incurable and painful, but not fatal - and 49 per cent said those involved in such cases should face prosecution.


_{Lynn Gilderdale: Paralysed by ME}

Care Not Killing director Dr Peter Saunders said the results of polling tend to be coloured when emotive cases have recently made news.

Sir Terry is the first novelist to deliver the Richard Dimbleby lecture in its 34-year history. Previous lecturers have included Prince Charles, Bill Clinton, Dame Stella Rimington and Dr Rowan Williams.

He will argue that 'assisted suicide' - or 'assisted death' as he prefers to call it - is 'an idea whose time is really coming'.

The author of the hugely successful Discworld books first made a plea for the right to take his own life last summer following the controversial House of Lords judgment in the case of Debbie Purdy.

The Law Lords ruled that the DPP must give Mrs Purdy, who has multiple sclerosis, guidance on whether her husband will face prosecution and a possible 14-year jail sentence if he helps her travel to the Dignitas clinic in Zurich to die.

In the lecture, Sir Terry will say his proposed tribunal would be acting for the good of society as well as that of the applicant. It would also 'ensure they are of sound and informed mind, firm in their purpose, suffering from a life-threatening and incurable disease and not under the influence of a third party'.

'I would suggest there should be a lawyer - one with expertise in dynastic family affairs - and a medical practitioner experienced in dealing with the complexities of serious long-term illnesses.'

The tribunal would also offer protection to the medical profession and Sir Terry will suggest that many GPs would support the right to die if they were protected.

Summing up, he will say: 'We should aim for a good and rich life, well lived, and at the end of it, in the comfort of our own home in the company of those who love us, have a death worth dying for'.

But Dr Saunders said: 'To argue that if you are terminally ill you deserve less protection from the law than do the rest of us is highly discriminatory as well as dangerous.

'Many cases of abuse involving elderly, sick and disabled people occur in so-called loving families and the blanket prohibition of intentional killing or assisting suicide is there to ensure that vulnerable people are not put at risk.'

A BBC spokesman said: 'The Dimbleby lecture always features a prominent person talking about something they are particularly involved in. Across the BBC's output there is a wide opportunity for different points of view to be heard.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.u(...)d.html#ixzz0eGXNXkBB

Een ingekorte versie van Terry's tekst vinden we hier

MPs accuse BBC of promoting euthanasia in 'biased' coverage of topic

A group of MPs have accused the BBC of promoting euthanasia after it aired a speech by Sir Terry Pratchett calling for assisted suicide to be legalised.

The cross-party group of MP called on the Government to threaten to cut off public funding to the broadcaster.

A Commons motion said the corporation 'misused public funds' in its coverage of euthanasia, highlighting the high profile given to Sir Terry's speech in favour of assisted suicide.

The motion claimed the BBC 'ignored the rights of the disabled' and had used drama as well as news to promote its pro-euthanasia stance.

Tory Ann Winterton has the support of one Tory and four Labour MPs for her early day motion.
The BBC aired an interview with Kay Gilderdale, who was acquitted of attempted murder after helping her daughter Lynn, who was paralysed by ME, to end her life

They claim there had been 'numerous complaints' over the 'persistent bias of the BBC on matters relating to euthanasia and other life issues and on the manner in which the BBC have misused public funds to promote changes in the law'.

The MPs complain of 'thinly-disguised plays and soap operas being used to promote the use of euthanasia and misrepresentation of pro-life activists in the UK as people of violence'.

They claim the 'multi-million pound campaign' culminated with a Panorama programme on Kay Gilderdale, who was cleared of attempting to murder her 31-year-old daughter Lynn after pleading guilty to assisting her suicide, and Sir Terry's comments.

The fantasy novelist, who has Alzheimer's disease, gave the annual Richard Dimbleby lecture this week and called for a tribunal to give seriously ill people permission to get help to die.

He offered himself to be a test case for one of the tribunals.

The BBC said on Monday it was 'pure coincidence' that the two programmes aired on the same night.

The MPs said that 'as usual the BBC have ignored the rights of the disabled, despite the fact that every disability group in the UK is opposed to the legalisation of assisted suicide and euthanasia'.

They urge the Government to make it clear to the BBC public funds will be withdrawn unless it complies with its charter and ensures 'all programmes on issues of public interest are treated impartially'.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.u(...)c.html#ixzz0eap4huPV

quote:

Op vrijdag 5 februari 2010 12:30 schreef Lod het volgende:
Ik vond de films, en zeker Colour of Magic, nog best aardig. Uiteraard niet te vergelijken met de boeken maar desalniettemin. De tekenfilms die gemaakt zijn van discworld, die zijn bagger

Sir Terry was erg te spreken over de tekenfilms, anders. Op de DVD staat een interview met hem en hij is vol lof.

Ik vond beide Real Life films overigens wel goed. Maar dat komt omdat ik met name in Hogfather Susan zo'n lekker ding vond LOL

Update van PTerry himself:

Folks,

So many people have contacted me since the Richard Dimbleby
lecture that there is no possibility at all that I can reply to
everyone individually.

Generally speaking people are asking what they can do to help,
support and, indeed, take some control over their own death. The
people to contact for all this are at Dignity in Dying -
http://www.dignityindying.org.uk - they can campaign better than
two blokes in an office.

I'm getting some interesting letters though, some of them are from
couples who have refrained from having children for the good of
the planet, and now fear facing their final illness with no one to
fight their corner. The same thinking seems to be affecting people
who are happily single. Suddenly the ties of family seem more
attractive than once they did. As one lady said 'saying that
friends are the new family is all very well, but it starts to ring
hollow as we get older.'

I want to make it clear what it is that I have been saying
recently since retelling can change things.

I think that assisted death should be available to people who
clearly have a serious and incurable disease and are demonstrably
capable of making their wishes felt and clearly do understand
their situation.

And that is that. Causing or assisting the death of somebody who
has not made their wishes publicly clear should be treated, at
least initially, as murder. If there are exonerating
circumstances, then the legal system is capable of recognising
these. We are not, by and large an uncaring and punitive society.

The tribunal idea which the charity Dignity in Dying is
investigating is a suggestion, and at the moment only that.

I believe it could help those unclear about the law and the
guidelines, and also act as a gentle filter, identifying the
hypothetical pressured grannies that opponents of assisted dying
continue to summon up as an argument, but also perhaps to suggest
that a future that currently looks dark may yet be improved. I
suspect that the majority of people seeking assisted death will be
individuals in every sense of the word, looking for an organised
death after a productive and organised life. I'm probably one of
them. But I must say, it is a pleasure to meet other people with
PCA, even if only to share anecdotes with those who truly know
where you're coming from. A trouble shared is not halved, whatever
the proverb says, but at least it is understood.

The generation currently sliding into old age must surely be the
first one ever to grow up unfamiliar with the realities of death.
It has been hidden away, not spoken of, not acknowledged. It would
be better for our mental health to do so.

I can just remember, when I was a child, that sometimes you would
see somebody wearing a black band around their arm, as a sign of
mourning. I've seldom seen them as an adult. But now the task of
dying is left to us, we might as well get good at it.

On a more cheerful note, I'm working my way through the second
draft of I Shall Wear Midnight, but as ever fighting for writing
time among all the other calls. I shall be back on the sofa of the
One Show on Thursday 11th February at 7pm on BBC One and I hope to
get my Seamstresses Guild Crest before bumping into Christine
Bleakley again

Late News: We've been told that my sword is ready for viewing; I
couldn't have any hand in the making of the horn hilt or the
silverwork. Sadly, I won't get to see it until next week.

All the best.

Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett welcomes assisted suicide policy

Author and euthanasia campaigner says new rules are best possible outcome in absence of law change

The author and euthanasia campaigner Sir Terry Pratchett has welcomed new guidelines on assisted suicide set out by the director of public prosecutions (DPP) today.

Pratchett used his Dimbleby lecture this month to call for euthanasia tribunals to give people with incurable diseases the right to medical help to end their lives. He said the new rules were the best possible outcome in the absence of a change in the law.

"I am really pleased, I think we're going as far as we can go without legislation," he said. "It's rather more looking into the mind of the person [who is] helping assist the person to commit suicide. I rather like that it's getting away from the 'tick-box' approach the preliminary guidelines seemed to be suggesting."

The DPP, Keir Starmer QC, said the final advice was not intended to be a tick-box exercise and the policy was now more focused on the motivation of the suspect.

Pratchett, who was diagnosed two years ago with a rare form of early onset Alzheimer's disease, said that while he welcomed the guidelines he would continue to campaign for a change in the law and for the introduction of euthanasia tribunals.

The author of the bestselling Discworld fantasy novels, and patron of Dignity in Dying, said what he had heard from the DPP strengthened the case for tribunals, which would provide a "safety net" for people who might be coerced into ending their own lives.

Sarah Wootton, Dignity in Dying's chief executive, called the guidelines a victory for common sense and compassion and a milestone on the way to legalising assisted deaths. But she said the situation remained flawed as assisted suicide was still illegal and, even with the help of the guidelines, people faced stressful investigations.

"The law still needs to change and we'll continue to campaign," she said.

Lord Carlile QC, chairman of Care Not Killing, said the guidelines greatly reduced the risk of undermining existing law.

"Our main concern was that the interim guidelines singled out as a group those who were disabled or ill, thereby affording them less protection than other people under the law," he said. "We are very glad this has been removed."

http://www.guardian.co.uk(...)isted-suicide-policy


Een video uit december, waarin Pratchett praat over religie:
http://www.guardian.co.uk(...)y-pratchett-religion

"Sir Terry Pratchett wants to win control of how his own story ends"
is the headline in The Times on February 6th. The interview takes
place in a Wiltshire pub. You've got to love a man that writes
about being discovered lying head on his computer keyboard by either
his PA Rob or his wife. And them saving the work in progress before
checking for a pulse.

Het hele verhaal: http://www.timesonline.co(...)h/article7017199.ece


The Telegraph reports that the BBC has been accused of 'promoting
euthanasia by ignoring rights of disabled' after airing Terry's
Richard Dimbleby Lecture. One does have to wonder if the people
making the complaints actually watched the lecture and listened to
what Terry had to say?

http://www.telegraph.co.u(...)hts-of-disabled.html

Dit is dan weer wat minder leuk nieuws:
Terry has written to MPs urging them to adopt the Digital Economy
Bill especially the part that talks about piracy.

http://www.guardian.co.uk(...)hett-internet-piracy

Terry's opvattingen worden niet overal omarmd:

The door to euthanasia stays shut, as it must
Dominic Lawson

The point of national treasures is that we are meant to unite in worship at the shrine of their sagacity; but it should be possible to remove national-treasure status as well as bestow it. I nominate Sir Terry Pratchett for relegation.

The “Discworld novelist” (as he is known, somewhat mysteriously to those of us who have never read a word of his fiction) has become a figurehead of the euthanasia movement, which in this country now calls itself Dignity in Dying. After the publication on Thursday of the director of public prosecutions’ long-awaited guidelines on “assisted suicide”, Pratchett was interviewed by Jon Snow on Channel 4 News. He told Snow it was only “the far right” who argued that it would threaten the vulnerable and old if the law were changed to give blanket immunity against prosecution in such cases.

Although Snow chose not to query Pratchett’s remark — national treasures may not be challenged on television under any circumstances — it was an outrageous thing to say. Anyone who has taken the trouble to study the voting records in parliament when it has debated this issue would have known that this matter is not predictable by political affiliation; for example, left-wing “old Labour” has always been much more opposed to legalisation of any form of euthanasia than the Blairites. When this topic was debated earlier in the month on BBC’s Question Time, the most excoriating attack on any change in the law came from George Galloway, the Respect MP.

In their fanaticism, the full-time advocates of euthanasia find it impossible to accept that those who take a different view might be as “enlightened” as they are. They are also incapable of understanding the limitations of their position that autonomy alone gives a person the absolute right to demand that the state — via the National Health Service — terminates his life whenever he wants.

As Professor Nigel Biggar of the Royal College of Physicians’ committee on ethical issues in medicine has written: “If we were to regard the individual as the sole arbiter of the worth of his or her life, then how could he or she continue to oblige the care and commitment of other people?” In other words, if we don’t accord any value to someone’s life beyond that attributable to their own estimation of it, why should we care about others’ health at all — beyond the negligible good manners of respecting another’s opinion?

Fortunately, such an atomised view of the fabric of society does not govern the actions of Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions. The assiduous media management of Dignity in Dying had been able to spin many newspapers into expecting some radical change in favour of its campaign. Yet Starmer’s allegedly “new” policy, as he pointed out with adamantine clarity, “does not change the law on assisted suicide. It does not open the door for euthanasia”. All he has done is to set out the factors governing decisions whether or not to prosecute — and, as he said on Thursday, “prosecutions are neither more nor less likely” as a result.

Despite the claims of Dignity in Dying, the courts have long been able to display compassion in such cases, assisted by a keen awareness of the circumstances in which a jury would be most unlikely to convict. That is why, so far, none of the 100 or more relatives who have accompanied suicidal Britons to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland has been prosecuted.

This is, necessarily, a far from straightforward matter. Starmer said he is minded to prosecute in cases where “the suspect was not wholly motivated by compassion; for example, the suspect was motivated by the prospect that he or she or a person closely connected to him or her stood to gain in some way from the death of the victim”. Yet how do we know if someone’s motives do not contain a smidgen of hope for gain — looking after an elderly relative properly is hardly cheap — along with all the compassion volubly expressed as justification?

No wonder, when asked if he could give an absolute assurance to Debbie Purdy, another Dignity in Dying campaigner, that her husband will not face prosecution after any terminal trip to Zurich, Starmer responded that no one could be given immunity.

The interesting question remaining is why the campaign to introduce a measure of euthanasia is attracting such widespread public sympathy, at least as measured by the questions of pollsters as they ring up ordinary members of the public to ask them — one hopes not during tea with the children — how they would want to die. I don’t think it can be a coincidence that this apparent trend in opinion towards euthanasia has followed a dramatic increase in the costs of looking after the elderly, especially when it involves care homes.

When David Willetts, the Tory MP, recently published his much-acclaimed book about the alleged selfishness of the baby-boomers in not providing sufficiently for the future, he did not address this point about an unwillingness to provide for the previous generation. Perhaps there are limits to the extent to which even the most intellectually conscientious of politicians is prepared to question the motives of the electorate.

The wittiest British novelist of the baby-boom generation, Martin Amis, got into some trouble for telling this newspaper a month ago that it would soon become necessary to encourage “with a medal and a martini” the old to enter euthanasia booths on street corners. Otherwise, said Amis, “there’ll be a population of very demented old people, like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shops”. Cue (as intended) outrage.

Yet I prefer the mischievous grotesqueries of Amis to the deceptive kindness of his fellow novelist Pratchett. In his recent Dimbleby lecture (yes, the BBC loves him too) Pratchett complained that “medicine is keeping more and more people alive” — idiot doctors! — “all requiring more and more care, a burden that falls initially on the next of kin”. Here we see how those apparently arguing for assisted suicide only for the sake of the “sufferer” so easily and unobtrusively descend the slippery slope towards euthanasia on grounds of all-round convenience.

The truth in any case is that if someone feels he has become, in that horrible phrase, “a burden to his family”, he is absolutely entitled to refuse medical treatment — and certainly all invasive procedures. That is why it was so disingenuous of Lord Lester, who has acted as a legal adviser to Dignity in Dying, to declare that “not everyone wants doctors and nurses to strive to keep them alive”. Lord Lester, as a distinguished lawyer, must know no doctor could ever impose on him, while sentient, a treatment he does not wish to have, even if it were essential to preserve his life. As used to be said in such circumstances: he could turn his face to the wall.

In his Dimbleby lecture, Pratchett quoted approvingly in full the line to which Lester merely alluded: “Thou shalt not kill; but needst not strive / Officiously to keep alive.” These words of Arthur Hugh Clough, the 19th-century poet, have for years been obtusely (if not dishonestly) misrepresented as an endorsement of euthanasia. The poem in question, The Latest Decalogue, is in fact a bitterly satirical account of what Clough saw as the perversion of Christian morality in Victorian Britain. That is why another line of his poem reads, “Do not adultery commit;/Advantage rarely comes of it,” and it says towards its end, “Bear not false witness;/Let the lie/Have time on its own wings to fly.”

These lines admirably sum up the strategy of the euthanasia lobby, even if it does have a national treasure to spread a warm glow over its chilling manifesto.

dominic.lawson@sunday-times.co.uk

Mijn persoonlijke mening: Een naar, bekrompen mannetje zonder gevoel voor humor en tussen de regels door lees ik groen-gele jaloezie dat een schrijver van humoristische boeken een 'Sir' is, terwijl een columnist van The Times nog steeds een 'mr' is. Hij zet zijn mailadres onder het artikel en dat heb ik dus meegekopieerd, dus voel je vrij, deze meneer je mening te geven

De Dimbleby-lecture staat in 6 delen op You Tube:

It looks like the SKY adaptation of Going
Postal has been delayed. It was originally scheduled to be
broadcast over the Easter period but it is now looking more likely
to be broadcast at the end of May 2010. There has been very little
advertising from Sky although an empty holding page has been set up
for the show on the Sky website:

http://sky1.sky.com/going-postal

Hot of the press - As of the 1st April Sky have put the trailer
up at: http://sky1.sky.com/going-postal-about

--------------------

Terry Pratchett has written a story for an imaginary character in a
real portrait for the National Portrait Gallery.

In Terry's story it appears that a seafarer named Joshua Easement
gives Queen Elizabeth a present from the Americas. Having no sense
of smell he doesn't realise that he's given her a skunk.

http://discworldmonthly.co.uk?redir=NPG156A and
http://discworldmonthly.co.uk?redir=NPG156B and
http://discworldmonthly.co.uk?redir=NPG156C

---------------------

Authors including Terry Pratchett, Ian McEwan, Philip Pullman and
Roddy Doyle have participated in a survey to find a 'writers' pick'
of the past decade in books.

Terry's choice was Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly
Everything.

More information can be found at The Guardian website:
http://discworldmonthly.co.uk?redir=DECADE156

quote:

Op donderdag 15 april 2010 23:03 schreef Dagonet het volgende:

Ik heb net eindelijk Nation gelezen en die vind ik tot nog toe wel z'n beste denk ik, een culminatie van alles waar hij naartoe werkte in z'n eerdere boeken.

Ik vind het een briljant boek. Knappe verweving van echte geschiedenis met parallele universum-dingetjes, waardoor het herkenbaar is en toch helemaal anders. Ik vind het wel minder uitbundig humoristisch als de Discworld boeken.

quote:

Op vrijdag 16 april 2010 10:20 schreef De_Hertog het volgende:

[..]

Als je de pocket wil duurt dat nog 55 dagen

6,81 pre-order prijs op bookdepository.

Toevallig vandaag gepre-ordered bij Play.com. 7,99 incl verzenden

This weekend the third Discworld adaptation by The Mob Films and Sky
will be broadcast on Sky1 and Sky1HD. Part one starts at 6pm on
Sunday 30th May and part 2 will be on Monday 31st.

The secrets of my success: Terry Pratchett


Terry Pratchett

'I will outsell the Booker winner, and that's not because I'm better than the Booker winner. It's simply a matter of popularity,' said Terry Pratchett

Born in Beaconsfield in 1948, Sir Terry Pratchett is one of Britain's most successful authors with more than 65 million books sold worldwide in 37 languages. He is best known for the Discworld series, which accounts for 37 of his 49 books to date.

In 2007 he was diagnosed with Posterior Cortical Atrophy, a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer's disease. Since the diagnosis, he has donated £500,000 to the Alzheimer's Research Trust, and become something of a figurehead for dementia sufferers. He gave the BBC Richard Dimbleby Lecture last year on the subject of assisted dying, which drew criticism from the anti-euthanasia group Care Not Killing.

Pratchett was awarded the OBE for services to literature in 1998 and knighted last year.
Remember what your mother told you.

If I say that it was my destiny to write, that sounds altogether too posh. But my mother, who was cremated recently, and is very much in my thoughts now, used to walk me to school. And she used to tell me stories on the way to school: all that she could remember of the Greek myths, for example. (I must have been the only kid on the planet who had a tortoise called Phidippides - the runner who ran the first marathon). But the thing is, I listened to these stories, not always understanding them, but getting enough of them over the mile and a half each way every day that it just stuck.
Appreciate the value of education.

My mother and father weren't great readers, but they valued learning, because a certain A Hitler spoiled things for everybody, and meant that such further education as they might have had didn't happen. They wanted me to have the education they didn't have.
Once you've got a kid to learn and read for pleasure, you've done nearly everything you can.

School is there to teach social interaction; how to deal with the *******s and the bullies.
Find out what you're good at.

I found out by sheer accident, and that became my life's work. Now that many schools don't have orchestras and don't sing, people are missing opportunities to find out what they can be. Somewhere out there in this country is a child who's probably now carrying a hod on a building site because he's never put his hands on a piano. I think once people know what they're capable of being, they become, not a better person, but less likely to be an unpleasant one.
Be self-motivated.

First you have to get it right for yourself. Then there are the readers - and there are the fans. There are probably 10,000 hardcore fans who will be the first in the queue, who will buy the towel, the eau de cologne or whatever, and there are thousands, millions out there who will buy the books, and maybe a poster from time to time. And you write for them. You write for the readers, and hope that you've got it right. What does help these days is that science fiction/fantasy is no longer a genre. It outsells mainstream literature. As a matter of course, I will outsell the Booker winner, and that's not because I'm better than the Booker winner. It's simply a matter of popularity.
Making money isn't something to be ashamed of.

There's a feeling now that if you have money you must have got it by having some kind of shady dealings, or being an MP. But I just did it - I sat down and did the one thing I was good at, for a very long time. Now I'm a millionaire several times over.
Keep asking questions until something happens.

Sometimes I think I have a kind of creative stupidity - it's the 'what if?' thing. If you have that curious mindset, you see things that other people don't. For example, have you read The Wind In The Willows? What seemed odd about it to you? The animals change their size repeatedly - they go down holes, drive cars, walk around - and nobody notices. The magic of The Wind In The Willows is that as a kid you don't question that - and it does wonders for the way they think.
Always write.

A day without writing makes me neurotic; it's something I should be doing. I've spent more than three decades writing the books, and my last holiday was... well 9/11 took place during it. I'm slowing down now, for reasons you know. I've signed a contract for two more books after this one - I don't know if my health will actually survive that, but it's an act of faith. I cannot conceive of not being a writer and not having a book to do. And I've always said that if my PA or my wife finds me slumped over the machine, what's the first thing they should do? Save the work in progress!
The fight gives you strength.

After the arguments I had with Care Not Killing, that's how I felt. I'm fortunate, given my circumstances, that I can work round the problems, and that my life is full of stuff to do, to the extent that I have to turn down an embarrassing amount.
Read a book, magazine or newspaper written by and for people who have a world view completely different from your own.

I won't go there with specific examples, but you should not live permanently in your own world view.
Always keep at the back of your mind the possibility that you're dead wrong.

It came home to me once - I was on a train, by myself, going up to Glasgow. A guy got in with a six-pack and a shell suit; he was big, uncouth-looking and probably a bit drunk. I had this sudden flash in which the train had had an accident, a crash, and there was this guy pulling ragged metal off me. I think that was my remembering one of the big London rail crashes - I remembered people going in, helping each other out. It showed the real commonality of mankind. And that sometimes happens, and when it does it's a wonderful thing.

'Terry Pratchett's Going Postal' is on Sky1 on May 30 and 31

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.u(...)ewsxml#ixzz0pOtd1Uh9

'Yes, I have got Alzheimer's, but in many ways I'm the luckiest man alive': Terry Pratchcett on defying dementia

Extrovert novelist Sir Terry Pratchett likes to make cameo appearances in the screen adaptations of his books - 'my one vanity', he calls it.

He was a toymaker in the Hogfather, an astrozoologist in Colour Of Magic and in the latest of his Discworld novels, Going Postal, he is briefly seen as a postman.

But is there more to this particular cameo than vanity? For viewers will see him pushing open a door only to find himself staring into a deep, dark void.


_{No fantasy: Richard Coyle and Claire Foy star in Going Postal which is based on Terry Pratchett's novels}

He can find only one word to describe the abyss: 'It's an embuggerance.' He also used that word - a Pratchett invention - to describe his feelings three years ago, when he revealed that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease.

Is the fact that his character is staring into the abyss a metaphor for Terry's own tragic circumstances?

'I've got a very serious condition but I've no plans to disappear into the abyss any time soon,' says 62-year-old Pratchett. 'If the truth be told, I wasn't that keen on playing the postman - I'm hardly the world's greatest actor.

'After six takes, I just about got it right. Mind you, I had to put up with Charles Dance looking on smiling while I was filming the previous five takes.

'He's a fine actor but I wonder what he would be like writing a fantasy novel?

'As for the scene - people always try to find extra significance in on screen events, but they are often just coincidental.'


_{Serious condition: Pratchett, who makes a cameo role in the TV adaptation, was diagnosed with a rare form of early onset dementia 14 years ago}

Aside from forgetting the odd word (bark, the name for the coating on a tree, eludes him for a while), Sir Terry is on fine form. He is wearing a black, polo neck pullover, dark trousers and his famous white beard is neatly trimmed.

He's anxious to emphasise that there is life in the old dog yet. 'Do me a favour', he says, 'and spread the word that I'm not short on intellect.'

He's even prepared to portray himself as an ageing literary sex symbol, recounting the story of a woman at a Discworld convention who was 'particularly keen to make my acquaintance and may possibly have wished to take things further'.

Was he tempted? 'Well I did have a spare afternoon, but I chose to go shopping instead because I love my wife, Lyn, and had no intention of straying after 41 happy years.

'In a funny way, I felt I had let the male side down by refusing this woman's overtures - even though I was rather relieved to walk away.

'Flirting I can handle, cheating I couldn't. The woman organising the convention sent out an email warning: "Terry will flirt like a champion. But don't worry, you will never meet a more married man."

'I was not ashamed she had written that. I enjoy the pleasures of life, but I know where to draw the line.'

Despite being diagnosed with a rare form of early onset dementia - posterior cortical atrophy - in 1997 and being aware that a frighteningly small percentage of those diagnosed with the disease live more than 14 years after diagnosis, Terry isn't about to stop enjoying life.

'I'm doing all right. There are problems caused by the disease. For example, if I go to the toilet from the kitchen I find it hard to remember the way back. But it's not a big problem - I might walk into a cupboard but there is always a door to get me back to where I was.

'I can no longer drive a car but I never had car machismo and my PA and my wife drive.

'I have minor problems with work. It was because my typing and spelling were becoming so erratic that I was first diagnosed as having Alzheimer's.

'If I did a job which didn't require me to churn out words the disease may have gone undiscovered. But I can cope with the problems. I use technology to dictate letters and I write my books by speaking what I want to say into a machine. My style of writing is conversational anyway.

'What I am hoping for is a piece of software that allows me to go into my office, say to the computer "open the file I was working on yesterday afternoon" and I can read it on the screen, then dictate additions. I hope that technology is available in time for me to use it.'

Sir Terry is also hoping that medical advances allow him to sustain his life well beyond current expectations. 'Alzheimer's will be conquered one day and I can only hope that medical breakthroughs keep me going.

'Above all, I want to remain in control of my own life. My mother was cremated a couple of days ago, having suffered a massive stroke, from which she never recovered.

'She had a good life - dying at 88 is not a tragedy. The last thing she would have wanted was to have been fed by somebody and to look out of the window all day, which would have been her fate had she survived.

'I want the right to decide how I live and how and when I die - to retain my dignity.'

Terry's determination to raise the profile of Alzheimer's, plus his attempts to legalise assisted suicide, means a pretty extraordinary postbag for the Wiltshire-based author.

'I only used to get letters about my books,' says Terry. 'Now, I get some strange stuff - and some pretty strange reactions in the street too.

'And I have had some mail from those of a religious persuasion. "You are going to die because God loves you," read one. In which case, thank goodness God doesn't hate me!' One is tempted to regard Terry's Discworld books - 70 million of which have been sold worldwide - as his escape from real life.

But Going Postal is very much of this world, with its focus on the evils of big business, represented by David Suchet's money grabbing character Reacher Gilt.

'It's about post offices closing, piratical takeovers. There are plenty of resonances with this world.'

He IS also currently writing his autobiography, which is obviously non-fantasy too. 'What I want to do is go away and write my next novel and connect fully again with that world of fantasy,' he says.

'That's what I have done for the past 30 years until I was foolish enough to say: "I've got Alzheimer's." Then it all changed.

'I wish, for so many reasons, that I could go back to the way things were - although I recognise that I have been luckier than most.

'I remember flying first class on a global book tour, looking in the toilet mirror in the dead of night and saying to myself: "You lucky b*****d.

"You are only in first class because you put letters in an amusing order. You really don't deserve it."

'But then, in my mind, I probably don't "deserve" to have Alzheimer's.

'I've just been unlucky, in that regard.'

Going Postal is on Sky 1 on Sunday, May 30, and Monday, May31. For more information, visit Alzheimersresearch.org.uk.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.u(...)e.html#ixzz0pOuABUIu

A new website that contains the fictional stories that Terry wrote
whilst he was working as a journalist for the Bucks Free Press
newspaper in the mid to late 1960s has just launched.

The stories have never been made available outside of the original
issues of the newspapers that they were published in; there are some
true gems, including a Carpet People story that ran in issues
published late 1965; pre-dating the publication of the original
Carpet People book by at least 5 years!

http://www.terrypratchett.weebly.com

Sir Terry Pratchett creates Wincanton ‘Walk of Fame’

Legendary author Sir Terry Pratchett OBE returned to the Somerset town of Wincanton to leave Hollywood style ‘walk of fame’ imprints at Taylor Wimpey’s Kingwell Rise development.


_{Sir Terry places his hands and signature into concrete}

The new homes development in the small Somerset town rose to fame this time last year when it unveiled Discworld-inspired road names in keeping with the town’s official twinning with the fictional city of Ankh-Morpork from the Discworld novels.

Treacle Mine Road and Peach Pie Street won the public vote but since then Taylor Wimpey has gained council approval to name all of the roads at the development after Discworld with additions including Hen And Chickens Field, Morpork Street and Kinklebury Street.

Hundreds of Discworld fans, many in costume, descended on Kingwell Rise to see Sir Terry place his hands and signature into concrete at the development following other Discworld activities organised by the Discworld Emporium of Wincanton.

Sir Terry Pratchett said: “It is just great to return to Kingwell Rise a year on and actually see homes now built along Treacle Mine Road and Peach Pie Street – it certainly feels more real now – as opposed to fantasy fiction! I hope the new residents are enjoying their road names – I’d definitely pay good money to live on Hen And Chickens Field!”

Richard Goad, regional sales and marketing director for Taylor Wimpey, explained: “We are simply over the moon to have Sir Terry back at the development leaving another permanent mark on Kingwell Rise for current and future residents. Following the public vote last year, it seemed fitting to try to get approval on Discworld names for all of the roads at the development and we are thrilled that we did.”

Replica road names were signed by Sir Terry and are planned for auction at the official Discworld convention in Birmingham in August. All proceeds, in addition to a further donation from Taylor Wimpey, will go to the Alzheimer's Research Trust, of which Sir Terry is a patron.

quote:

Op zondag 30 mei 2010 13:01 schreef Pandora73 het volgende:
Vetinary,

Deel 1 van Going Postal aan het downloaden

quote:

Op zondag 30 mei 2010 23:31 schreef wonderer het volgende:

[..]

Mijn torrentboer heeft hem nog niet... *nog even wacht*

Usenet

quote:

Op zondag 30 mei 2010 23:32 schreef speknek het volgende:
Je zou maar op Treacle Mine Road wonen, hoe baas is dat

Lijkt me niet iets om hier in NL in te voeren. De vertaalde namen zijn lang zo leuk niet.