IN a historic moment, Parliament has passed a bill allowing the terminally ill to choose to end their own lives.
Assisted dying is still years away from becoming law.
But as we all live longer lives, the national debate around assisted dying is just beginning.
Your views on the subject will be totally shaped by your memories of watching your loved ones die.
My dad died of lung cancer in a hospital on a spring night in 1987. My mum died at home of the same disease exactly 12 years and one day later.
I was not there for their moment of death.
But I watched them both dying and the memories are engraved on my soul.
“This is not me,” my mum said more than once in those traumatic final days.
My dad said nothing at all, as we watched him endure the unendurable in that cancer ward.
I learned that there is a point where terminal illness narrows down to nothing but suffering.
No matter how brave you are, or how hard you fight, or how much you pray.
Dying can rob those you love most dearly of their dignity — when all they ask is that they be permitted to leave this life without more pain and humiliation.
I spent the last week of my mum Emma’s life staying with her in the house in Billericay where I grew up.
That house where she had been a young wife and mother, where she had raised a family, where we had been so happy for so long.
Mum’s dying wish was to die at home.
But the GP was coming to see her in the morning, and it seemed certain she would be moved to a hospital.
The night before she died, I drove back to London to find her a hospice and left her with her great friend Nelly, a retired NHS nurse.
Mercifully, my mum slipped away in the night.
My mum had a wonderful life — she had a husband, a son, a grandson and six brothers, and countless friends who all adored her.
But right at the end, she wanted it to be all over and it broke my heart to see her suffer.
And here’s the funny thing — I don’t think my mum would ever have chosen assisted dying.
But she should have had THE CHOICE.
We should all have the choice.
Yes, any assisted dying law needs to have every protection in place for the vulnerable, the disabled and those who are in danger of being coerced into ending their life. But we all have to die.
I don’t want to end my life in nappies.
I don’t want to end it in Switzerland.
I don’t want to spend my last days in agony while my family blow a fortune on my care.
I would rather say — enough.
I would much rather rest in peace.
And with all my heart, I believe we should all have that freedom of choice.
BOBBY MOORE is England’s greatest sporting hero.
He was a greater hero than anyone ever knew, having secretly fought — and beaten — testicular cancer shortly before winning the 1966 World Cup.
Bobby, who died aged just 51 in 1993, is in the news because of reported sightings of the missing shirt he wore when England beat West Germany.
His ex-wife Tina says she last saw the shirt in her attic in Essex 30 years ago. It was never sold, auctioned or given away.
I hope whoever has Bobby’s red shirt has a big enough heart to give it back to his family.
This country never gave Bobby Moore the love and respect he deserved during his tragically short lifetime.
It is depressing to think that, in death, someone would take the World Cup- winning shirt from his back.
IF you can remember The Groucho Club, then you were probably not there.
As the legendary Soho private members’ club closes its doors at the request of the police, old media faces are coming forward to reminisce about the high times we had at The Grouch.
Broadcaster Robert Elms recalls a marathon drinking session with Adam Faith and me that climaxed in a mass brawl.
It must have been a bloody good night because I have no memory of it.
But that was the Groucho Club for you.
I was a founding member in the Eighties and had my stag night there in 1992 – a much livelier venue than Prague or Ibiza or Bangkok.
George Michael and I had our launch party for the book we did together at The Grouch. I launched my novel Man And Boy there.
My social life revolved around that pretentiously exclusive den of sin for years.
I used to meet my acting mate from Muswell Hill, Christoph Waltz, there for dinner in the days before Quentin Tarantino started casting him in movies.
Christoph went on to win two Oscars. And the thing about the poseurs who inhabited the Groucho Club – they all THOUGHT they were going to win two Oscars.
The Groucho Club was founded as an alternative to the old-school gentleman’s private clubs. Looking back, it feels to me like we were all playing at being grown-ups.
You would make a reservation for two for dinner and your dining companion would turn up with 20 more friends.
It was fun while it lasted, although my membership lapsed long ago and I have not set foot in The Grouch for years.
But I still have good friends who are members.
One of them took so much Colombian marching powder back in the day that the rumours persist that he is still in there, haunting the deserted Grouch, waiting for the tiramisu he ordered back in the Eighties.
Michelle Yeoh was the first modern Bond girl.
Her character in 1997’s Tomorrow Never Dies, Chinese secret agent Wai Lin, was – like Yeoh herself – a trained martial artist.
Unlike all those Sixties dolly birds who fell into Sean Connery’s hairy arms without being asked twice, Wai Lin was capable of resisting the seduction techniques of Pierce Brosnan’s 007.
Wai Lin was a state-sponsored assassin – just like 007. This was as close as James Bond ever got to equal opportunities.
So it is absurd for Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour to be embroiled in a sexism controversy because it introduced Michelle Yeoh as “a Bond girl”.
Yes, Yeoh is much more than that – she has a Best Actress Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once.
But are we really going to call Michelle a former “Bond person” or pretend she never shared a motorbike with 007?
Yeoh’s performance in Tomorrow Never Dies should be a source of celebration.
Wai Lin even has her own Wikipedia entry.
Mind you, so does Pussy Galore.
SMITHFIELD meat market is the beating heart of London.
The romance. The history. The fact that while the rest of the city sleeps, Smithfield is roaring with life.
The market is scheduled to close forever in 2028. London will never be the same.
It has existed for so long that when Charles Dickens wrote about Bill Sikes dragging Oliver Twist through the market, Smithfield was already 600 years old.
The voices of the porters. Their blood-splattered white coats.
The pubs with their unique opening hours served exhausted men their hard-earned beer at dawn, rubbing shoulders with the kids who had been dancing all night at Fabric, as Wren’s dome at St Paul’s Cathedral shone in the moonlight.
Smithfield was – is – magical. If it closes as planned in 2028, then a part of the capital’s soul will die with it.
THE best film I have seen all year is Small Things Like These, starring Cillian Murphy in his first role since winning the Best Actor Oscar for Oppenheimer.
The story is based on the scandal of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries, the church-run homes for unmarried mothers and their babies – “fallen women” who were often little more than children themselves.
Small Things Like These is a Christmas movie. Children write to Santa, fairy lights twinkle, snow falls. But it is a Christmas movie the way that Fairytale Of New York is a Christmas song.
And like that old Pogues classic, it is a work of heartbreaking genius.
“HEARTBROKEN” was the word used most frequently to describe the Queen’s reaction to the death of Beth, the Jack Russell who Camilla rescued from Battersea.
Losing a dog cuts so deep because, while we grow away from our parents and our children grow away from us, our dogs are as close to us on the day they die as they are on the day they came home as puppies.
There is a unique bond between humans and their dogs that is made of unconditional love. It can never be broken. Not even by death.
BIKINI-clad Netflix star Olga Bednarska – you must have seen her in series three of dating show Too Hot To Handle – has avoided jail after smuggling £158,000 of drugs into the country from Thailand.
Where on earth did she hide it?
