Broadcasting House, Radio 4
Sometimes a voice on the radio stops you in your tracks.
Simon Boas, director of the Jersey Overseas Aid Commission, is one of those voices.
He is 46, he has cancer, but he’s taking a cue from Japanese emperor Hirohito, the master of the understatement.
In August 1945, following Japan’s defeats in every recent battle and following the devastation of two nuclear bombs, the emperor broadcast: “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”
Simon said he was making a somewhat similar announcement in relation to his throat cancer that has now spread to his lungs.
The message, he said, in a broadcast on Radio 4 last Sunday, was not necessarily “Don’t buy green bananas” but it’s pretty close to “Don’t start any long books”.
His is a warm, wry humour in the face of a tough prognosis.
He laughs in the face of danger; he shares with us all the wonderful things that life has gifted him… from dining with billionaires to breaking bread with the poorest people on earth.
He has travelled – up the Great Pyramid, across the Med and, indeed, he has chipped a chunk off Checkpoint Charlie.
It reminds me of an Indian journalist friend who was in Bucharest not long after the excecution of the Ceausescus. She was outside a huge palace when a Romanian soldier invited her in for a free tour, then reached up to a glass chandelier and broke off a crystal droplet, presenting it as a souvenir for her.
But it’s the living that Boas has packed into his 46 years that stand out, including getting off a trumped up murder charge in Vietnam – they wanted a bribe – by singing karaoke in a brothel.
He also points out that 46 years is more than most humans got in the 300,000-year history of the species.
If I whine that my life will have been shorter than many modern people’s, I am massively missing the point
— Simon Boas
His final thought is how lucky it is to have lived at all. “To exist is to have won the lottery.”
“If I whine that my life will have been shorter than many modern people’s, I am massively missing the point,” he says.
“I’ve existed for 46 years. It’s as churlish as winning the £92m Euromillions jackpot and then complaining bitterly that there’s another winning ticket and you only get half the money.”
You can listen again to the wise and courageous Mr Boas on Broadcasting House or read his words in the Jersey Evening Post.
Life is inordinately precious, unlikely and beautiful… never forget it. This should be prescribed daily reading for the rest of us.