Intimations of mortality...

I was sad to see reported in the weekend's news that comedienne Dawn French, 49, is convinced that she will die when she is 50, and has retired to the country to prepare for death.

But my guess is that Dawn herself is not sad at all. On the contrary, she seems calm, collected and at peace with her own mortality. All round her, I guess, family, friends and fans are weeping and wailing, trying to convince her that what she believes is misguided, morbid, or a little mad. She, however, has believed since she was a child that she will die young and so has come to terms with it.

I very much hope, for everyone's sake - not least her husband and daughter's - that Dawn is just plain wrong about this one. But if I had to make my choice between her accepting and positive approach to dying and the terror that the rest of us feel when faced with our inevitable mortality, I know exactly which I would choose.

Ooops....

Regular readers may remember my piece of a last week roundly endorsing the showing of a death on prime time television. It now turns out that the programme doesn't show Malcolm Pointon's moment of death, but the moment of his passing into unconsciousness three days earlier.

I'm not criticising his wife - she didn't issue the press releases giving the impression that death was what was being filmed, though at the same time she didn't deny them. I do blame the production company for allowing the story to run in the press and for capitalising on the ensuing debate to raise interest in the documentary.

But most of all, I'm sad that everyone bottled. I totally understand that Barbara Pointon might not want this private moment filmed - but the point I made in my earlier post still stands. This very privacy around death means that we as a society do not know the reality of it. If we did, we would both take death more seriously and live life more fully.