If ever there's a planetary conjunction featuring a Monday morning and projects not going to plan, it's probably the time I'm most likely to Google 'quickest way to end it all now'. Disappointingly for a search engine, it throws up 88 million reasons for not doing so, as if you'd entered 'Where can I buy a Mercedes' and have it return a million pizza parlours.
This is the guy ~ don't forget ~ who took a girl on a first date in London many years ago so as to see a film about Yukio Mishima committing Hara Kiri, a favourite method of the samurai wanting like the cherry-blossom to fall at the point of perfection. She fell asleep during though (the film and not our disembowelment).
There's not even a Dummy's Guide to Suicide out there, but I'd wager I'd make its best author. But given the option I imagine the guillotine is the means of choice. Luckily for most of us, however, we don't have one ready on a Monday morning. In the 21st century I guess the closest we get is the train (Avanti West Coast, Clean, quick and we won't even stop to pick up the pieces... ), although as Mr Clarkson suggested, it does rather inconvenience everyone else.
Turns out though that it wasn't even invented by the French, and that the British were already using it as a humane means of knocking off aristocratic criminals. Which itself begs the question of why you need to consider crime as an aristocrat... boredom? The only question is, I suppose, whether or not the likes of Charles the First remained conscious after the event, and for how long. Maybe they should have stuck a tube up his windpipe and asked him to sing There's no business like show business for as long as he was able, if only in the interests of scientific research?
But interestingly, the Korean director of Squid Game (where contestants with nothing to lose and everything to gain compete in playground games at the cost of elimination by death) said recently that ten years ago he couldn't interest anyone in so bizarre and morbid a notion. Now, in contrast, he says not only are there people queuing up to join in, but that much of the global population believe it is happening some place already. Where? On some James Bond island with an arena the size of Wembley, which no law enforcement agency is able to spot despite being able to detect a fart from space?
But it gets worse, for In twenty-one countries suicide is still punishable. What with? Death? Thus a remaining obstacle to the guillotine is the one our vicar used at school, which is needing to ask someone to press the button (or pull the lever, I imagine, given French Revolutionary tech).
I have an answer to that, in the form of the 'quantum guillotine" which like the cat in the box, is wholly whimsical. If said quantum is having a bad Monday, then so are you.
*Colin Hilton is not actively contemplating suicide but merely window-shopping, and he does not condone the use of quantum guillotines.
