Open letter to Pedro Ros, chairman of Taylor Nelson Sofres

Possibly you don't have cancer. So, you are not to be found a day after your fourth chemotherapy treatment, resting, your face bloated, your hair gone, no visible eyebrows, just a few eyelashes remaining, struggling to contain the rising nausea, with an urgent and overwhelming desire to empty the inside of your wretched being of the poison and humiliation of your condition.

Possibly, as you are no doubt a man capable of compassion, and even once had a mother who showed you tenderness, you would leave such suffering alone, to rest, to take what comfort can be taken from the warm and tranquil weekend afternoon. You, yourself, would not take kindly, would you, to the insistent knock of a ragged beggar on your tinted windows?

Possibly, you are unaware, although I doubt it given the exalted heights to which you have risen, with much effort and drive but very little responsibility, that daily, hourly, minute by minute, the company for which you are responsible knocks on the windows and the doors of those who exist under the misapprehension that their lives, their property, their home, their bedrooms are their own, private, available at invitation but not invasion.

Possibly, when you reflect on the dying embers of your life, when that time comes, you will not see a life of great achievement, you will not indulge in the satisfaction of having left the world a better place than the one to which your mother introduced you. Rather, you will realise that the barbed and lacerating arrows that you caused to travel to places where they were not sought, or welcomed, or justified, places of privacy, sometimes of torment, that those arrows, that disturbance, that dissemination of misery is your true legacy.

Possibly...