Life's cycle continues as new era slips in

By PETER CALDER

Gazing from the fourth-floor window across the tidy tiled roofs of Epsom, the old man can barely see the museum, high on the green hill. Scudding rain lashes the best-laid plans of millennium-night organisers, and the squat white block is almost obscured in the squalls.

If nature's indifference to human plans seems a shade ironic, you can forgive the old man for not seeing the funny side. He knows about the indifference of nature. He's reminded of it every day as the cancer in his lungs pushes him a little closer to his last breath.

Outside, the world waits for midnight to start racing round the globe in a rolling wave of fireworks. In his tidy and comfortable room at St Joseph's Hospice, the old man eyes a time more distant than midnight.

"All the time," he barks, when I wonder if the prospect of death makes him frightened. "But you don't show it. You don't know when it's going to happen."

It's an uncertainty he shares with everyone else, of course. But the old man who grabs my hand between bony fingers is face to face with death this fateful Friday night: a little closer to knowing than the rest of us.

He has not come to the hospice to die - the end, his doctors say, is weeks, if not months, away - but to let them monitor and adjust the pain relief which is his constant companion. He may, in the end, die at home, but St Joseph's aims to see that he dies well.

"I've seen my father out," he says with evident triumph. "He died at 78 and I'll be 80 in June, the oldest in the family. I beat them all."

New life seems equally indifferent to the date and the time down in the compact brick building in Gillies Ave that houses the Birthcare maternity hospital. Only nine of its dozen beds are full on New Year's Eve, and those contain mothers recovering from labour. They enjoy their new babies as partners sit close and siblings mooch with studied indifference in the corridor.

The delivery unit is idle - the first few babies of the new century will be born in the busy maternity wings of public hospitals - but the air still rings from time to time with the frail squawks or outraged howls of newborns.

Nurse manager Karen Hodge holds a small swaddled bundle - a soundly sleeping baby whose life could still reasonably be counted in hours. The parents are at a nearby restaurant and the highly qualified babysitter is a great advertisement for the service her unit professes to offer - "a bit of time out for mothers and a chance for mums and dads to ease into parenting."

One day the child she holds will be an adult, born just before the turn of the century. For now, though, just another baby, it sniffles fitfully and settles into a deeper sleep.

Two young ambulancewomen stride up the corridor, here to pick up an expectant mother who needs transferring to more high-tech care. They're jovial and relaxed, perhaps aware that there are plenty worse callouts awaiting those on New Year's Eve duty.

The father ferries bags back and forth through the rain to the ambulance. He's frowning as he walks. The end of the millennium seems like the last thing on this mind.