I’m 77 years old. I KNOW I’m going to die. I don’t know how or when – but I know from personal observation and biology textbooks that all life ends. That knowledge gives me courage.

I had far less courage when I was younger because I knew that age and death are intimately related and to go before a certain age normally involved something unpleasant. Now I am closer to death my main aim is to plan as tidy and painless an exit as I can.

I am a supporter of Dignity in Dying – I joined in the days of its old name ‘Exit’. I preferred it because it was short and to the point. The ‘Assisted Dying’ bill really is putting woke lipstick on a pig.

Why can’t we just be up-front when it comes to the tedious certainty of dying? Part of the taxes I pay ought to provide those of us who want it with an NHS offer of painless life termination. Self-deletion is the only option you have to avoid loss of bowel control and dribbling into dementia. So, it doesn’t go far enough. Everybody above retirement age ought to have the right to exit when they wish.

It is remarkable that it wasn’t until 1961 that the law making it a crime to commit suicide was repealed. It could and did attract a prison sentence! Assisting someone to commit suicide still carries a sentence of potentially 14 years. That’s partly what the Bill seeks to negotiate around.

There needs to be safeguards built in – a cooling off time and so on, but I think the idea of having a state-sponsored party (in lieu of all the money my death will save the state) isn’t unreasonable.

My father died young at 72. He was in the navy for a decade having stupidly joined at age 16 and got caught up in the war. Along with all matelots he was inducted into alcohol and nicotine dependency as part of deliberate state policy – just like the British Empire deliberately got the Chinese hooked on opium. He was given a substantial weekly supply of rum and untipped cigarettes – called Senior Service. That and the ferociously freezing Denmark Straits clipped his life short.

He gave up the cigarettes in opposition to something disagreeable that Mrs Thatcher wanted to spend money on which he reasoned the tax on his cigarettes paid for, but he never gave up the rum. He used to talk to me about his life at sea and how he always feared for the worst. The rum did work on you, he assured me. Under the stress of combat people rarely contemplated suicide. There was no talk of assisted dying. They were entirely focussed on staying alive.