... Is not to prolong it as long as possible.

Sorry if that was a bit anti-climactic, I realise my clickbaity headline might have suggested a slightly more sensational revelation, but reading the never-ending doom-mongering headlines in the press about "mystery pneumonias" (eek!), "100-day coughs" (argh!) and - but of course, more frequent than the local buses, these - a "new Covid variant" (zut alors!), I thought it was a point worth delving into a little more deeply...

Ever since the first act of the pantomime plague began back in 2020, all official responses have ostensibly been geared around preserving and prolonging life. Needless to say, they didn't do that, but that was the justification given by governments around the world, and that was why millions/billions globally agreed to comply with various "rules": that imprisoning yourself in your house, wrapping a grubby hanky around your face, and leaping out of the way of passing strangers should you dare to venture outside, would "save granny", protect the vulnerable, and so on.

Literally every single measure forcefully applied in the name of Covid was designed to exploit people's fear of death and to promise them, if they complied with whatever piece of ludicrous, lunatic nonsense the government had come up with most recently (remember the power of the Scotch Egg to halt the spread of the deadly plague?), they could keep the loan of life for a little longer, and delay the inevitable debt of death indefinitely.

So it's important to note that this rhetoric was doubly dishonest, first in that none of the "restrictions" did anything to improve anyone's health or longevity (on the contrary), but also in that we were constantly bombarded with highly emotive messaging about "saving lives".

The thing is, though, you can't ever "save" anyone's life: you can only prolong it. So even if any of the preposterous pantomime props associated with Covid had delivered on their initial promises - that, if we complied with them, they would improve people's health and help them avoid serious illness - still nobody's life would have been "saved", only prolonged, which leads us back to the original premise of the article:

The meaning of life is not to prolong it as long as possible.

It's a really important point to address, because when the next "pandemic" rolls around (and looks to me as if the stage is well and truly set already), we anti-restriction activists will be tempted to argue, as we did last time, from a perspective of, "the restrictions don't work to extend anyone's life so they're not legitimate", whereas I think we this time need to be firm and unambiguous that, "even if they did work, they're still not legitimate, because the meaning of life is not to prolong it at all costs" (and the costs of lockdown and attendant restrictions are, as we all know only too well, shattering).

That's a bold position which will, initially, generate a lot of enraged outrage and vitriol, along the lines of,

"You monster! You swine! Don't you care about saving granny? Don't you care about the children?!"

I most certainly do - but caring about other people's wellbeing means hoping they have a full, rich and rewarding life, not merely a long one.

Locking a child up in their home, for instance, away from their friends, extended family, and real-world adventures, and telling them instead to live their whole lives online because it's "safer", is not caring about children.

Even though technically - fantasy plagues aside - it is safer. A child under permanent house arrest is far less likely to start smoking behind the bike sheds or to sneak off to the park to get drunk or to encounter all manner of other risk factors the real world presents and that we all had to negotiate growing up.

Therefore, an "indoor child" (as opposed to a "free range" one) will likely have a longer average life expectancy avoiding all these hazards - much as an "indoor cat" has, for similar reasons.

Yet a cat is not built to live entirely inside, it is built to roam freely in the world, with all the attendant risks and opportunities that offers - a lesson that was very powerfully underlined for me earlier this year when my beloved cat, Tiger, unexpectedly died.

Tiger had just turned nine years old, and was in exceptionally good health, as well as being devastatingly handsome (and this is not just my being biased, everybody said so - well, either that or, "wow, he's huge!" - he weighed nearly two stone, but he was just big-furred, not fat).

Although he also spent plenty of time snoozing on the sofa, Tiger was very much an outdoor cat. He adored being outside, sunning himself in the long grass, scampering through bushes, and meowing at me indignantly if ever I tried to leave the street as he patrolled up and down it (then I would be outside of my territory, you see, away from his guidance and protection, and he was very dubious about my abilities to cope with such a challenge - after all, my hunting prowess was clearly severely lacking, despite all the tutorial "gifts" he brought me).

One Sunday morning, towards the end of May, Tiger returned home from being outside, came and stood on the upstairs landing, and made a very strange meow - almost like a cry. At first, I thought he just had a fur-ball, but when he then slowly walked over to the attic stairs and lodged himself underneath them - where it was dark and quiet, and something he had never done before - I just instantly knew, "he's gone there to die".

I didn't know what had happened to him. but of course wanted to do everything possible to save my cat, so he was rushed to an emergency vet, who examined him ("wow, he's huge!"), couldn't find anything immediately wrong, but offered to keep him in for further tests. Tiger having had a scare a few years back when these tests ended up saving his life (he'd had acute kidney failure from which he made a full recovery), I agreed.

A few hours later, I got a call from the vet, explaining that Tiger had massive internal bleeding from his liver, caused by some sort of blunt force trauma. He had no broken bones, so they didn't think he'd been hit by a car: more likely he had misjudged a jump and fallen on something hard that had dug into his abdomen and injured his liver.

It was touch and go for a few hours and initially they thought they might be able to save him, but at around midnight, we got a call telling us to come in immediately because he was not going to make it and we would have to say goodbye.

We were with him when he passed away, not in any distress or pain (he was heavily sedated by then), in the early hours of May 22nd, just a few weeks after his ninth birthday in April (I had had him since he was ten months old).

Just minutes after this had happened, and when I was alone with his body, the vet came in, offered her condolences, and said:

"This is why I don't let my cats outside. I could never cope with this."

Reeling in shock and grief, I immediately internalised what she had said.

"She's right. I should never have let him go out. He would have been ok indoors. The main thing is, he would still be alive. This is my fault."

I learned later that vets are trained to talk to customers like this if an animal dies, to avoid the customer blaming them. They are taught to install guilt so that the animal's owner is so busy blaming themselves, they don't stop to consider the vet might have been at fault.

I don't know if the vet did anything wrong in the terms of the treatment they gave him, probably not, as I had already realised when we rushed Tiger to the vet that he was likely dying.

But to hit me with blame just minutes after he had passed away was fairly despicable... yet an approach that has become normalised and increasingly acceptable through "pandemic" protocols: that we should chastise people for going outside, or for letting their loved ones outside, when keeping them cooped up at home would be so much "safer".

I related this story to a friend, about what the vet had said to me after Tiger had just died, and said, "can you imagine if you had a loved one die in a car accident, and the doctor scornfully said, "well, what do you expect if you let him go outside? You should have just kept him in and then you wouldn't be in this position!"

Sounds ludicrous put like that, yet that is lockdown "logic": minimise any and all risk factors associated with being alive, because then you'll live longer and that is all that matters.

So: would Tiger have lived longer as an indoor cat? Yes. Indubitably. He had a number of close calls associated with going outside, including fairly regularly getting into fights with other cats, once eating something poisonous which led to the kidney failure episode, and then of course sustaining the liver injury that killed him.

But he also got to freely roam the Yorkshire countryside, exploring long grass and secret passageways, feeling the sun on his whiskers and the grass on his paws, and this was for hours every single day over nearly a decade. He was able to have a full cat life, doing everything a cat is built to do, and he was never bored or depressed, except for the one occasion when I briefly lived in a third-floor flat and he couldn't go out. He hated it and would pace the floors in utter boredom and frustration. It was very clear the "indoor life" was not for him.

So, once the shock of the vet's stupid, sly remarks had worn off, I recalibrated. I thought, no, Tiger had the life that he wanted. If he could speak, and I had asked him, "would you rather have had the shorter life as an outdoor cat that you had, rather than a longer one lived entirely indoors?", I know what the answer would have been (the same emphatic answer I got if ever I asked him his favourite question, "are you hungry?").

By the time this happened to Tiger, I was already vehemently opposed to any idea of "lockdown" measures, but I hadn't seen it in such visceral close perspective in terms of realising just how easily trained professionals can manipulate and exploit our fear of death and desire to protect our loved ones (of all species), by insisting they will be "safer" if you just keep them in.

Prior to 2020, there was really no concept of an "indoor human"... but there is now. Just as vets now fairly unanimously parrot that it's "healthier" for a cat to live indoors, purely because the cat's life expectancy is longer (meaning the vet bills will be bigger), that same rhetoric has begun to be applied to humans. It was applied in pantomime plague 1 (why go to the office when you can work from home? Why go shopping when you can get deliveries? Why go out to socialise when you've got Zoom? It's all so much SAFER!), and it will be applied again - and not just because of perennial plagues (formerly known as ordinary winter bugs), but because of all the other scary, life-threatening things that might be out there (climate change, aliens, etc).

That is why it's so fundamental and vital that we fight the ever-escalating cultural shift to living life entirely indoors (whilst being an "outdoor human" is a privilege solely reserved for the moneyed elites), not merely by pointing out that this isn't good for our health, but by identifying that even if it was - even if it is true that never going outside prolongs your life - that's not why we're here. We're not here merely to stretch out our residency on Earth as long as we possibly can, we are here to actually live, and to do everything a human is built to do - and yes, many of those things are risky. But as I had printed on a sign I took to an anti-lockdown protest:

"The point is not to "stay safe". The point is to stay human."

Lockdown life will never be worth all the colossal sacrifices it entails, and ultimately, it entails the sacrifice of the very nature of what it means to be a human being, a being who is designed - like all beings are - to live in the world, with all its attendant risks and opportunities.

Not long after Tiger died, I knew - and as all cat-loving friends advised - that I had to get a new cat as soon as possible... and that there was only one thing better than getting one new cat, and that was getting two...

So, a little over six months ago, fraternal felines Cleo and Jack joined the household. They are, of course, a delight - thoroughly cute and clever and funny and adorable (even if they have wrecked the blinds...). But, of course, their arrival provoked some anxiety. Because I knew there was the option to keep them "safe" inside, with the vet's ominous chastisement still inevitably ringing in my ears.

But, I thought, no. I would not put myself on lockdown. I would not put family and friends on lockdown. I will not do it to my cats.

So, Cleo and Jack are outdoor cats, and they love playing and exploring outside just as much as Tiger did - and just as much as we all do, too, despite the ever-present and sometimes unavoidable risks, that are part and parcel of being alive.

As the various "danger" narratives referenced at the beginning of this piece continue to escalate over the coming weeks and months, and we're hit with all sorts of devious new challenges designed to terrify us into sacrificing our rights and freedoms in the name of "safety", we must always keep firmly and loudly telling our oppressors:

The point of our lives is not merely to prolong them. We are not here to "stay safe". We are here to stay human.

In memory of Tiger, pictured, in all his free, handsome, and huge glory. April 2014 - May 22nd, 2023.

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