Jdack and I went and saw Terry Pratchett in conversation with Garth Nix at the Opera House last weekend. It was all kinds of wonderful, mainly because I am a massive Pratchett nerd (and also a pretty big Garth Nix fan), and I had a slightly surreal fan-girl moment of giddy I-am-not-worthy-ness at being in the same room as someone who ranks so highly in my personal pantheon. It almost makes me wish I’d dressed up, just to get into the spirit of the thing, like these people;
Pratchett talked a bit about the new book (yay, it’s a city watch book!) and there was a reading of an extract from it. But he mostly talked about his condition (a rare form of early onset Alzheimer’s) and his advocacy for assisted dying. I’m a little bit ambivalent about the idea of assisted dying. On the one hand, I absolutely think that people with fatal illnesses should be able to choose to end their life with dignity when the suffering gets to be too much. But I disagree with people who think that assisted suicide should extend to people with depression, for example (not that Pratchett seemed to be suggesting this, but just to explain why I’m iffy on it). Like many people, I’ve dealt with depression for years, and occasionally take medication to help me keep on an even keel. I understand the pain of depression, but I worry that if it was considered grounds for assisted dying that many people who could be saved would take the option. I’ve been so down that if someone had offered me a sure-fire, painless ticket out, I would have taken it (don’t freak out, I’ve never planned to kill myself and I’m getting better and better at riding out the dark times as I get older, mainly because I don’t feel embarrassed about asking for help these days, and also because I’m lucky that the people who are close to me are very good at noticing when I’m starting to spiral downwards). But Pratchett makes an interesting case that is hard to argue with, and he is well worth listening to. There’s a great interview here, on the ABC Book Show.
We really need more media coverage of people like him on highly emotive issues like this, instead of the sensationalism and fear mongering we generally get. He’s intelligent, eloquent, and in many ways you could think of him as the non-threatening face of this movement. He’s an irascible old fart (and I mean that in the best possible way), a sort of exasperating but cuddly grandfather figure and it’s hard to argue with his point of view. And I completely agree with him that as a society, we need to stop allowing ourselves to be held hostage by a few shadowy religious types, on this topic and many others. Time and again we see that, along with assisted dying, the vast majority Australians are in favour of the decriminalisation of abortion, and are in favour of gay marriage, yet there is a tiny core of nutters that stops us from moving forward. I’ve really never understood why these people care so much what goes on in the bedrooms and bodies of other people, and who knows why the politicians are so scared of them, but I say to the nutters out there, if you care that much about this stuff, feel free to go and form your own society somewhere else, where you can repress whoever and whatever you like, and let the grownups get on with the business of making decisions rationally.
Ahem. Sorry, I got a bit off topic there. Where was I? Oh, yes. Terry Pratchett. At the end of his talk he handed out plastic teeth (if you’re familiar with his books you’ll understand why. Otherwise, I direct you to Hogfather).
We were too far back from the stage to get any, but it was a wonderful spectacle nonetheless; how often do you get to see an internationally best-selling author hurling handfuls of plastic teeth from the stage of the concert hall in the Sydney Opera House? Then we all sang Happy Birthday, gave him a round of applause and that was that.
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