The great conductor’s decision to end his life in Zurich with Dignitas still doesn’t make me think assisted suicide is right

The Verdi and Wagner operas that Sir Edward Downes conducted with such distinction throughout his long career often featured lovers who couldn’t bear the thought of life without each other – Aida without Radames, Gilda without the Duke of Mantua, Brünnhilde without Siegfried, Isolde without Tristan. Sir Edward’s death in a suicide pact with his devoted wife, Joan, reminds one of such operas. She had terminal cancer; he was unwell and couldn’t imagine living without her. So they decided to depart this world together.

Theirs was a poignant, even uplifting, decision, but it’s a shame it had to be carried out in a tacky Zurich apartment with the assistance of Dignitas staff grimly videoing them as they swallowed poison, hoping thereby to protect themselves from any subsequent accusations of encouraging them to die.

In opera, heroes don’t think twice about plunging daggers into their own hearts, and their lovers, overcome by grief, often spontaneously drop dead beside them. In real life, such scenarios are less easily available. Those wishing to take their lives are often driven, like the Downeses, to seek the help of the rather creepy Ludwig Minelli, the founder of Dignitas, and his equally creepy minions. And the deaths of British citizens at Dignitas are always succeeded by mundane police investigations to determine whether any crime was committed by anyone under English law – eg by any family members who might have accompanied them to Switzerland.

This is not the kind of ending that Sir Edward could ideally have desired. His love and understanding of Verdi confirms him as a romantic (as do the exotic names, Caractacus and Boudicca, that he gave his children), and there is nothing so unromantic as a Dignitas-assisted suicide and a subsequent British police inquiry. But this doesn’t in my view strengthen the case, rejected the other day by the House of Lords, for a change in the law to allow friends or relatives to play an active part in the suicide arrangements. Assisted suicide is too close to murder for the law to be able to distinguish clearly between them. The possibility of prosecution should continue to exist as a protection for the old and vulnerable against those who might wish them dead, though nobody has yet been prosecuted and, I hope, will ever have to be.

In last year’s Sky television documentary showing the Dignitas-assisted suicide of Craig Ewert, an American computer-science professor suffering from motor neurone disease, we saw him slipping away to music from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. I wonder if Sir Edward and his wife also asked for music to be played during their deaths; and if so, I wonder what it would have been. I like to think it might have been the last scene from Aida in which she and Radames, sealed in a tomb from which there is no escape, resign themselves to death and welcome it – Morir! Si pura e bella. It is the loveliest and most moving of death duets, and one that would have put Dignitas firmly in its place.

Alfred Hitchcock was clever to recognise that few things are scarier than an aggressive bird. We don’t expect birds to attack us. We think of them as shy and fearful, usually unapproachable by anybody without the stealth and cunning of David Attenborough. But for more than two months now, I have been living in fear of a pheasant. So, too, have my neighbours in the Northamptonshire hamlet where I live. So, even, has my jack russell terrier, Polly, who previously didn’t know the meaning of fear. We are a terrorised community.

At the moment of writing, hope is slowly returning because it is now four or five days since anyone has seen the hateful bird. But before then it was out and about every day, wandering from house to house in search of food and making a ferocious little charge at any human or animal it encountered along the way. Maybe someone (I hope so, frankly) has secretly murdered it.

It was no ordinary pheasant. It had a white head with a black band across its eyes, which gave it the menacing look of a mafioso in dark glasses; and its body plumage was golden, flecked with white. Research on the internet has convinced me that it must have been a Reeves’s pheasant – a breed introduced from China in the 1830s by the English naturalist John Reeves – for it fitted internet descriptions of the breed in both appearance and character, with Wikipedia stating, for example, that “Reeves’s pheasants are known to be aggressive towards humans, animals and other pheasants.”

When I took Polly for a walk, the pheasant would follow along close behind, awaiting its opportunity to attack. It was like being tailed by a mugger in an inner city. Every now and then it would launch itself, bristling, towards Polly, who would cower away in disbelief. It was the improbability of her assailant that unnerved her. Confronted by a pit bull or doberman pincher, she always stands her ground.

The pheasant was probably a refugee from the great country estate of Easton Neston four miles away, where the pheasants bred for sport have always included a smattering of exotic specimens. Since the estate was sold by its sport-loving ancestral owners to an American fashion king, Leon Max, a few years ago, the pheasants may have been left to their own devices more than they were previously. But that can’t really explain this pheasant’s relentless hostility to everyone and everything; there must just be something bitter and twisted in its nature. Anyway, I pray it has gone for good, for my cleaning lady warns me that if it comes back, she won’t.