It is common knowledge that during the course of my wonderful life I have unfortunately been involved in the death of several men. What may surprise my many detractors, however, is that on one occasion my involvement was a purely merciful one.
His name was Quentin, and he was my best friend during my years at Nonceford School for Boys. We bonded over a shared propensity for Bulgarian erotic novels and our mutual tendency to shit the bed on a nightly basis, and we did everything together: hide from Mr Gadd, the P.E. teacher, as he stalked the dormitories in the dead of night driven paedo-mad by whisky and football; spy on the changing rooms of the female cleaning staff to catch illicit glimpses of their putrefying breasts; we even once reported the school bully to the headmaster for masturbating a donkey (it turned out the school bully was mentally unwell and died alone and unloved in an asylum about ten years later. Justice).
But one day that beautiful friendship turned ugly. We were running across the school playing fields in an effort to escape a particularly priapic Mr Gadd, when we came to a fence topped with vicious barbed wire. I jumped first, clearing it by just a few inches, and landed safely on the other side. Quentin, however, was a little more portly than me (his mother used to send him a weekly food parcel that consisted entirely of double cream) and his attempt to hurdle the fence did not go so well. As he was half way across, a noise which I can only liken to that of the devil himself doing up his fly filled the summer air; with a shriek of such extraordinary pitch that dogs in neighbouring villages inexplicably savaged the nearest baby they could find, Quentin slumped to the ground clutching his bloodied crotch. There, dangling from the barbed wire, were the remnants of his once-flourishing testicles. Catching his scrotum on a savage barb as he attempted to leap the fence, he had ripped his unfortunate ball-sack completely open and rendered his pre-pubescent undercarriage utterly useless. Looking into my eyes, he told me very tenderly and very calmly what I had to do: kill him before Mr Gadd caught up with us (when Quentin would probably have been buggered to death anyway).
Grabbing the biggest stone I could find, I set about caving my beloved friend’s skull in. It took quite a while, and sometimes he’d make a sort of begging sound like he wanted me to stop; I knew, deep down, he didn’t really want me to, and just in the nick of time Quentin slipped away to the blissful peace of death.
I fled Nonceford and never went back.
My point is this: euthanasia is clearly to be encouraged, and if some old man wants to smother people with aids live on the BBC (which is, I am quite sure, what all the controversy is about) then let him. The sooner the British government adopts a pro-death stance, the better.