There's been yet another warning about contracting cancer in your lifetime. The list of various causes is growing steadily. If you smoke, sunbathe, drink beer, eat cheese, processed ham, open a fridge, or expose yourself to plastic bags you stand a risk of suffering from this malady. Personally, I think you stand a greater risk of this great disease if you see a doctor.

One chap I used to know from work made a very simple choice. He wasn't interested in the various treatments available for cancer with all their requirements for close observation and undesirable side effects, Instead, he told me he wanted to live out what life he had. Spending the last few years of his existence in and out of hospital beds and a slow decline despite the attentions and privations of modern medecine didn't appeal to him. I can understand his viewpoint.

Is he right to do that? Well, personally I believe he has the right to decide that for himself. Some might then draw parallels with the current trend toward legally assisted suicide, but I wouldn't go that far. There's a callousness you sometimes see in human beings and I wouldn't like to see a future where people are persuaded or cajoled into ending their lives to suit others.

Philosophy of the Week

The news that two hundred and four British soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan is saddening. The personal loss and grief of friends and family is obvious, and a part of me dislikes the posturings of politicians who go to great lengths to praise them. We know they're risking their lives out there.

These men and women though are risking their lives partly by choice, in that they volunteered for service, and partly to serve their countries interests as defined by the Government. Whether the decision to send soldiers there is right or wrong, and these things are always a matter of opinion and perspective, war is a part of human nature and the need to defend your freedom ever-present.

It reminds me though of a news item some years back. An American soldier refused point blank to go to Iraq because he didn't agree with thew war. I genuinely admire that man for standing up for his beliefs. However, I also see that he swore an oath to serve his countries interests. He has therefore broken that oath and so off to jail he must go. Such is the price of self-determination within an ordered and regulated world.

Martin Luther King once said that a man who is not prepared to die for something does not deserve to live. Harsh words indeed. But how right was he? In the literal sense, death is that final encounter with the Grim Reaper. Perhaps in a more philosophical sense, death is the end of that rewarding experience we casually term as 'A Life'. How many of us bend under pressure for an easy existence? In my experience, freedom is a very fragile thing and whilst we make a great deal of the ending of slavery in the civilisied world since the nineteenth century, the truth is that human beings often like to enslave others by other means. Religion, politics, working enviroment, fashion, lifestyle.... There's always someone telling you how you should live your life.

To what extent should you be individualistic? It seems attractive to pursue self-expression, but how many people are prepared to live with the consequences of setting themselves apart from their peers who survive in comfortable conformity?