Lighthouse

You joke but when people kept calling us a 'selling club' all that ever really meant was that we were recruiting good players that Champions League teams wanted.

The implication being, and I'll admit I haven't seen any mention time limit imposed in this proposal, that she would have made that decision at some point following her initial diagnosis. In cases of dementia a slightly more challenging set of circumstances would be presented in that there would have to be an agreement from doctors that the point of zero QoL has been reached, with the patient having previously consented to AD whilst of sound mind.

Obviously missing both our opening batsmen and Turner from a team which underperformed in the Blast, so not great on paper. The TBC players will be interesting, I wonder if they’re being looked at as potential permanent additions next year.

Nothing entitles you to be smug and arrogant, no matter how good you were at something in life. It certainly doesn't give you license to be condescending on issue which have nothing to do with your personal expertise. I would apply that broadly across the board, whether it's people like Tiss talking about vaccines or people like Lineker talking about environmental issues. By all means have an opinion but when you start telling other people that their lives are a sacrifice you're willing to make for the greater good, you start to sound like Lord Farquad in Shrek.

Could paliative care be better? Perhaps, the care given to my grangmother was as adequate and comfortable as you can reasonably ask for, but I wouldn't doubt other people who found their own provision substandard. TBH though, that's just a distraction argument and doesn't do anything to tackle the main issue at heart. I'd be interested to hear what you think specifically is inadequate, which would potentially drive people towards unnecessary suicide. This bill is aimed at people whose condition has deteriorated beyond what medical science is able to treat, to the point that even palliative measures don't provide a meaningful quality of life.

That was not my thrust at all, I've no idea what you inferred that from. When I was 15 and went to a GP for acne medication he sat and spoke to me about different treatments available. I'd have thought it went without saying that process would also follow for the slightly more serious issue of medically assisted death but never mind. Glad we agreed in the end.

No idea what your point is, I've never not said that.

Right, so he clearly wouldn't have chosen euthanasia then, at least not until the point that his condition because unbearable and his quality of life was so low as to drop below the threshold of wanting to live every moment we can. The fact that he has no outlived his original diagnosis isn't really relevant to the discussion. Once you reach the point that you are choosing to die, you are clearly well beyond the point of a wrong or inaccurate diagnosis. The most relevant personal example I can give would be my grandmother who died from dementia. She lived about 7-8 years beyond her original diagnosis and for the most part she still enjoyed life to an extent. In the last two years her attachment to reality became progressively weaker and the final year was spent in a care home. She and my grandfather were fairly pragmatic and when intitally diagnosed would probably have agreed to AD but it wouldn't have been until the final couple of months when she was bedridden, drifting in and out of consciousness and unable to comprehend the world around her. By that point there would be no chance, literally zero, that the doctors had made some mistake and she could have sprung back into life, had she not been euthanised. That's how this law will be implemented. You give examples as if someone will be diagnosed with 6 months to live and immediately ask to book a euthanasia appointment next week, no questions asked. That wont happen.

I don't get your point. Of course there's going to be discussion and enquiry into what the patient wants and a very detailed explanation of the exact details surrounding their condition and the options available to them. That's literally a doctor's job when dealing with a patient, there's absolutely no reason to think this would somehow be different for a condition serious enough to warrant euthanasia being an option.

Given choice, do you think he'd want to have been euthanised immediately or carry on for as long as possible until existence became unbearable?

What? That's nothing like what I said. You said the freedom of choice was the safeguard, it isn't. A choice is a choice, a safeguard is something which then stops that choice being abused and manipulated. In this case, you need the agreement of two independent doctors that a terminal illness has been objectively diagnosed. That way you cannot be euthanised simply by virtue of the fact that someone has told you that you probably ought to.

The fact that this is a free choice isn’t in itself a safeguard, although I think it goes without saying that this proposal is not compulsory for the terminally ill. The safeguard is the thing that prevents this choice from being corrupted or manipulated in some way, I.E. there has to be a verified, independent medical diagnosis backing it up.

No, he’s another practicing Christian whose god commands him to preserve life and is wilfully misunderstanding the bill to make it appear immoral. Two independent doctors have to confirm that a patient is terminally ill, that is the main safeguard. You might be able to coerce a person into believing they need to die but you will not be able to convince two doctors to go along with it. If they did, for no valid medical reason, they end up struck off and in prison.

QoS was always on borrowed time, rather like TotP, due to the availability of online content. All the videos, stats and personalities etc. are now freely available all over social media and on podcasts, so it no longer had any kind of unique appeal. I can’t remember the last time I watched it TBH.

I never said anything about his ability as a footballer, you brought that up. As a TV personality I find him smug and patronising, lecturing people about social issues he has no expertise in.

The quality of the players is absolutely relevant and our attacking players are terrible. When he was in the Championship, with decent Championship players, he clearly did have attacking intentions as we were the third top scorers with 87.

The problem (for want of a better word) with having a better world is that more people survive longer, so you get a population explosion, which just leads to more people in poverty. It’s a vicious circle of sorts, where the world perpetually supports a population which is just on the tipping point of poverty.

Sorry to hear about your loss. Stories like this reiterate that this should be a personal choice and isn’t necessarily for everyone.

We can easily recoup that on a young English CB with a season of PL football and an England call up. I wouldn’t sell for less than £25-30m, personally.

A few years ago a bunch of JSO protestors broke onto the track after the British GP whilst cars were still circling and Gary took to Twitter to praise their efforts. When Martin Brundle pointed out they were putting the lives of drivers and marshals at risk (not to mention themselves) Lineker doubled down by saying it was for the greater good and that the protesters would be remembered as heroes in years to come. Weirdly he’s never volunteered to remove himself and his own carbon footprint from the world.

It pleases me but I’d say I’m more in the ‘anti- smug, self satisfied w*nker’ brigade.

None of that is era specific. You like the music from when you were younger and the football from when Saints are better. If you said that to a 19 year old Brighton fan today, he’d reply that your music was "skibidi innit bruv," and that football is the best it’s ever been. Taking the p*ss out of Mohammed is hardly a modern faux pas either, try doing that in the 1970’s, you’d get the same response.

I don’t think most of the cultural stuff was better, people just have rose tinted glasses and tend to have a positive bias towards the things they remember. Music - everyone thinks the stuff their generation listened to as teenagers was the greatest era and that what came after it is ‘just terrible noise’. Nothing changes in that regard, people just look back fondly on what they remember. People who went to school in the early two thousands for example will talk about how awesome Green Day and Linkin’ Park were but tend not to mention Eamon and Frankie singing F.U.R.B. Football - Again, people are selection. If you mention the 1998/99 season to a Saints fan, they will probably go all misty eyed at the thought of Pahars’ double against Everton or Saints fans taking over Wimbledon. 90% of the season we spent getting spanked at home by teams like Ipswich and Coventry, people tend to forget. Censorship/being offended - if you think ‘everyone is offended these days’ is something new, I suggest you watch an interview with John Clease, Michael Palin and two very pious, religious types upon the release of Life of Brian. These days God and Jesus are recurring characters on loads of comedy shows but Python had to fight tooth and nail just to get LoB into cinemas. I don’t think life is generally more boring either. We used to have four TV channels, now there’s a near infinite selection of online and streamed content. Then there’s the big advancements in worldwide travel. Around the turn of the century, EasyJet and Ryanair changed the game in Europe. It went from being a privilege to go to Mallorca or Tenerife to suddenly every man and his dog being able to go to any city in Europe, cheaper than most train tickets. A weekend away in Scarborough is now a city break to Riga, Belgrade or Budapest.

By the metric most important to me, I.e. the health of myself and my family, life is better now. What people eat is their choice but ultimately if a doctor told me tomorrow that I had HIV or cancer, I’d have a much better chance of survival than I did in 1993. The main reason for the world being worse is overcrowding, which in turn drives up house prices as well as other living costs. That sucks, especially for the younger generations with more debt, trying to get a foothold in the real world, but overall life is better.

Yes, a ridiculously narrow three year window in which life was, in your view, better in the very late nineties. That’s ignoring all the stuff about healthcare and a whole bunch of other metrics by which life is better.