Story Who Wants To Live Forever

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Story Who Wants To Live Forever? There was a man in England, by the name of Alan Philips. He assumed he would live forever. He could eat and drink al he wanted, barely exercised, and in living off the millions he inherited from his industrialist father, he had no real idea what a day’s work actually meant. When he hit fifty-six, he felt ill for the first time in his life and reluctantly went to the Doctor. He found that he was ten stone overweight, had diabetes and hadn’t even noticed that he had suffered at least one mild heart attack. His blood pressure was dangerously high. His dream of living forever was so shattered that he considered suicide for a while, but by chance while slobbing in self-pity in front of the TV set, he saw a wildlife documentary that changed his mind. The show was about a tortoise that had lived for over two hundred years. Alan suddenly knew how to prolong his life way beyond what he quacks suggested, namely exercise, work, insulin and less alcohol. He would instead eat tortoise meat every day. It was so simple he wondered why no one else did it. Alan bought a tortoise from the pet shop, took it home, killed it, with no regard for being humane about the task and cooked it. The tortoise tasted like muddy boot leather, but he coped with it. Alan went back to the pet shop to buy more tortoises, and over the next month, he ate the lot. He went for more but after about six months the pet shop owner grew suspicious and refused to sell them to him so he used other pet shops until they too became concerned and banned him. Alan now started having tortoises smuggled in through the black market and ate them every day, sometimes for breakfast, dinner and tea. When he learned that his blood pressure was actually even higher than before, Alan got frightened. Fortunately, the TV came to his aid again. He learned of living Spruce trees in Finland that were 8,500 years old. 8,500 years! Clearly, he couldn’t get such trees in England, so Alan moved to Finland, found the trees and started drinking the wood sap he tapped from them. It tasted vile, like sour milk, but needs must. Alan lived near the woods, drinking Spruce sap and eating smuggled tortoises. A mild stroke told him it might not be working, so he had to speed things up. He started drinking sap by the gallon, sucking it from the tree directly through drinking straws. Unfortunately, you can only take so much sap from a tree without killing it just as you can only take a limited amount of blood from a human body. The Spruce he fed from the most, 8,500 years old as it might have been, died and fell over. Alan should have been able to jump clear easily as the tree started to topple but he could only move very slowly, like a tortoise. The doomed tree crushed him, and his dream of immortality too. Arthur Chappell