Times When I’m Glad I Don’t Own A Car
Today, according to this article on the BBC web site, the Dartford Crossing has been closed to traffic for seven hours. This article doesn’t say why, but it was a man threatening to jump. In the end according to this article after four hours of negotiating he jumped and later was pronounced dead in hospital.
I’m not going to question the man’s motives or suggest that the police should have taken more radical or forceful action, but why is it, it’s inevitably men, who climb on buildings and bridges and threaten to jump? I can’t remember an incident, where it was a woman, who was the prospective jumper.
I’m just glad though, that I’m a non-driver, as I can’t remember this sort of incident with trains. Perhaps, the men who threaten to jump are frightened of getting smashed into small pieces by something like a Class 66. Thinking about it, most suicides on the railway seem to be with passenger rather than freight trains. I wonder why? I have travelled on passenger trains with freight drivers and they have told me that many that get killed by freight trains are thieves nicking cable and other things in the middle of the night.
Paracetamol Deaths Fall
According to this article on the BBC, smaller pack sizes for paracetamol has led to fewer deaths, many of which are suicides.. However the number of suicides on the railways continues to grow to such a level, that special measures had to be taken.
And yesterday, it would appear that someone jumped off the roof of Eastfield. Accident? I doubt it!
The trouble with suicides, is that we try to stop them, by limiting the methods, when it would be better to stop the reasons people feel they might take their own life.
As to pain-killers, I rarely take them! A couple of years ago, I did have some severe pain after the stroke and had to resort to paracetamol, codeine and later amitriptyline. But I haven’t had a pain-killer since late 2010, although I may have had a small glass of the Scottish all-purpose remedy.
The Rail Industry And The Samaritans Get Together To Cut Suicides
One of the most common ways of committing suicide these days, is to jump in front of a train. It happens about 250 times a year. But this article about the Samaritans and the rail industry getting together, shows that everybody is concerned and taking action.
We need more initiatives like this.
Do We Have A Death Wish?
After the death of my wife and son, some medics thought I might be suicidal. I don’t think I ever thought about it, although I was pretty depressed by myself in hospital in Hong Kong, until my son arrived.
But in some ways today, showed me a dark side, that I keep very much under control.
As a child, I didn’t like the Underground and especially, when I was waiting for a train in a tunnel station like Wood Green, I’d tend to back onto the wall, with my hands over my ears. I still hold back on the Tube, but often these days there is an empty seat, to sit safely. I’m probably just being prdent these days.
On New Barnet station, whilst waiting for my train, a couple of fast trains ran through and they scared the wits out of me. So I retreated into the shop.
I do wonder how many commit suicide in such a situation on the spur of the moment.
Thinking about it, I do wonder, whether it’s just the survival genes taking over. After all, we all have a lot of those, as those that don’t would have died out years ago in the caves.
let’s face it, it also helps you do extraordinary things. Just look at the story of the baby rescued from the dock in Somerset, by the 63-year-old, George Reeder.
Platform Edge Doors
I travelled on the Jubilee line this morning and the line has platform-edge doors in the central section around Canary Wharf station.
According to this web page, Crossrail will have them too in the centre section.
Now I know that in theory they are a good way to stop suicides and accidents with drunks, but do they just just move the problem elsewhere?
After all, the preferred way of suicide in the 1950s was to put your head in a gas oven. Suicides continued despite safer North Sea gas.
I suppose we won’t make station platforms totally safe, until all lines have platform-edge doors. But that would be rather expensive.
RIP Tony Scott
I did see a couple of Tony Scott‘s films, but I wasn’t a great fan.
RIP Tony Scott
However, I’ve never seen a cinema put something like this on the front.
What Should The Norwegians Do With Anders Breivik?
We have had three massacres in recent years in the UK; Hungerford, Dunblane and Cumbria.
These three are different to the shootings in Norway, in that all three of the perpetrators killed themselves. Even Raoul Moat did this after his horrendous crimes.
So does this mean that they understood the enormity of what they had done in some bizarre way? But we do often hear that the gunman has killed himself or themselves after this sort of case.
So this is the unusual thing about the Breivik case, in which his fate is decided today. Most criminals or terrorists of his kind usually commit suicide. The nearest we have to Breivik in this country is David Copeland, who was a neo-Nazi, who killed three, but it could have been so many more. He was considered to be mentally ill, but was tried for murder and will serve at least 50 years in jail.
I suspect that Breivik is the one person, who if released would either be murdered by his countrymen or do it again.
Codebreaker At The Science Museum
This morning, I went to see the exhibition about Alan Turing called Codebreaker at the Science Museum.
Posters for Codebreaker
it is actually only a small exhibition, but with good quality and some unusual exhibits, including a differential analyser built out of Meccano.
There was also some exhibits and documents on Turing’s personal life, including the Coroner’s report on his suicide.
The exhibition says that his mother thought his death may not have been suicide and in his Wikipedia entry, this is said.
Turing’s mother argued strenuously that the ingestion was accidental, caused by her son’s careless storage of laboratory chemicals. Biographer Andrew Hodges suggests that Turing may have killed himself in an ambiguous way quite deliberately, to give his mother some plausible deniability. Hodges and David Leavitt have suggested that Turing was re-enacting a scene from the 1937 film Snow White, his favourite fairy tale, both noting that (in Leavitt’s words) he took “an especially keen pleasure in the scene where the Wicked Queen immerses her apple in the poisonous brew.”
If you look at others like Turing, such as Newton, you find characters very much on the edge. I used to work with a programmer, who always sang and made strange noises as he coded. He argued that programming was such a logical business, you had to do something mad to balance the mind. Turing wasn’t a programmer in the sense we think now, but he was someone steeped in logic and I suspect the same applied to him.
Sadly, in today’s world, Turing would probably be treasured in much the way Stephen Hawking is.
At least now, hopefully his sexuality would not have been the problem it was in the 1960s.
Everyone and Everything Is Leaving Me!
Not really, but it sometimes seems so. I now have no mobile phone and won’t probably until I get my Nokia 6310i in a few days. My wife and son have both left me and all I get is a visit from an occasional friend. The radio is just going on and on about the Diamond Jubilee and today’s episode, is not what I’m interested in. The torch relay has stopped for lunch and there is nothing to do this afternoon. My health seems to be going downhill rapidly and it seems that I get tired walking just a hundred yards or so.
At least Suicide is Painless!
But that is not an option, as it’s not painless for those left behind. My other son, who’s working today, by the way, has suffered enough grief in the last five years, and I would never inflict anymore on him, by my own hands.
They’re having a party in the Square, but do they really want me there, as I’m just rather a miserable killjoy at the moment.
Are All Our Spies Kinky?
The revelations in the inquest into the death of Gareth Williams seem to get more and more bizarre. Here‘s the latest instalment from the Telegraph. What will Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells be writing in his letters to the paper?
It has been said he was a brilliant mathematician. Obviously, if this was the case, he should have been able to work out how long it takes someone to suffocate in a sports bag!
The Anonymous Widower 