Radio 4 want to attend the Death Cafe I'm holding in November, but both the Producer that contacted me and I were very aware of the ethical problems of exposing potentially vulnerable narratives and identities. 

So I've created a Death Cafe specifically for people who know they will be recorded and are perhaps more confident talking about death.

If you'd like to be part of this event, please contact me ASAP. If you're recently bereaved this is possibly not for you, but if you've moved through loss and have insights and wisdom that others might find useful, it would be great to hear from you. If you work with death, or if you believe that talking as clearly about death as you do life is important, get in touch. 

Tickets are limited to 15, so get in touch sooner rather than later.

This Death Cafe will be on 23 October 6.30 to 8pm 

Email clare.slaneydavis@btinternet.com or call 07717 845 115

I went to lunch with a friend this afternoon and talked about how much more sane she felt having left her work. Marian used to work for a large organisation moving terribly important bits of paper around, something that added very little to the sum of joy or convenience to the world. When she joined the organisation she had to opt out of the Working Time Directive which would limit her working week to an average of 48 hours. Predictably, she began experiencing racing thoughts, became anxious, started having panic attacks, felt paranoid (although her employers really were out to get her.) got insomnia, began drinking too much alcohol in order to regulate her mood and sleep, lost friends, got exhausted and crashed. Her ex-employer provides a GP something Marian believed to be altruistic until she realised that this GP was contracted to let HR know about staff ailments. And so Marian was unable to see an actual GP rather than a sinister informant for some weeks, and then, not surprisingly, was signed off work for 3 weeks. 

To cut a depressingly common story short, her life was made hell and so she left.

There's something punitive and smug about employers who, in the 21st century, believe their staff should work more than 48 hours a week. Is their company so disfunctional, so incompetent, that people have to work this many hours? And yet an increasing number of people are buying into this nonsense. There's been a very sharp increase in the numbers of people I'm seeing who are suffering not so much workplace stress as workplace abuse, being asked to sign away their lives and privacy to organisations that bleat loudly about how awful The State is and then behave like a Statist dictatorship.

The rhetoric around Hard Working Tax Payers has become pathetic. If hard work is the route to success then the recent immigrant with three low status jobs or the pensioner who can't afford to give up work should be living the high life. The LSE agrees.

I'm seeing people on the verge of serious mental illness because their employer treats them like a disposable machine part. This has a lot to do with status - somehow it's become high status to work like a donkey as long as money is thrown at you. Let me say this clearly: having lots of money doesn't make you better than anyone else. Time and again, it's been proven to make people behave very badly. 

I tried to find an image to illustrate this blog and searched images for "Hard Working Tax Payer." Endless snarky pictures about how the poor are milking tax payers came up. There are a growing number of people who are very content to punch down, to hate and fear people who are vulnerable, and they're useful to people and organisations who like to keep employees hard at work. But it's poison to the soul. 

If you want to be happy then behave like a human being. Spend time with your friends and family. Get some sunlight in the fresh air - if you can't spend an hour a day outdoors then your life is way out of balance. When you leave work, leave work. Get some exercise, not a three minute blast in the gym but a pleasant run or walk. Do something that you enjoy and give yourself enough time to enjoy it. And for goodness sake, do something meaningfully useful for someone who can't pay you.

It may be that you lose status if you stop commuting (in conditions that are illegal to transport cattle) to your ace job and take up something less exciting closer to home. You may have to move house if you take a lower-stress job but that's much better than making an emergency sale when you're thrown away because you can't handle the pressure. Yes, you won't be working in the same glossy environment, but you will be able to take a leisurely lunch with a friend, soak up a bit of autumn sunlight and think about how much more human you've become.

On Wednesday November 6th I'll be facilitating Portobello Road's first Death Cafe.

The connection between this late autumn and death is long established for both our Christian and pre-Christian Ancestors. During the Christian All Soul's Day the names of the remembered dead are solemnly read out, a tense and moving ritual, and Pagans celebrate Samhain for 3 days at the end of October and beginning of November. This year as every other year, late autumn heralds the cold and damp that will kill the vulnerable, whether that's garden birds, homeless people, stray animals, the elderly, poor and unwell. 

The fear and fascination of death creates religion and often brings people to counselling, sometimes by direct cause of bereavement or a grave diagnosis and often because of another shocking loss, like a redundancy or divorce, which brutally rubs a persons nose in how fragile we are. The existential fear of not-being rocks us as children, makes our adolescence darkly enchanting, is largely ignored during our 20's, 30's and 40's and then re-establishes as we reach our 50's. Illness brings it all forward.

As a society we're pretty unique in ignoring our Ancestors, in every other place and time the Beloved Dead have been acknowledged as a source of wisdom and order. If we lose contact with our lineage we lose connection with who we actually are.

Take a look at the Death Cafe website and consider coming along, or visiting one closer to you. Bring photo's of your Beloved Dead and your less-Beloved Dead. Bring your memories and questions, thoughts and experiences and share them with people in your community who are ready to face up to our last great adventure.