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Questa maledetta porta si blòcca.
Questa maledetta porta si blòcca comunque diàvolo lo faccio.
C’è scritto 'tirare', e io sto tirando.
Forse dovrebbe esserci scritto 'spingere'?

This damn door sticks.
This damn door sticks no matter what the hell I do.
It’s marked "pull", and indeed I am pulling.
Perhaps it should be marked "push"?

This is an amazing piece of writing from a master of the written word regarding his life since the diagnosis of a rare form of Alzheimer's.

Sir Terry Pratchett was asked by the family of the late Richard Dimbleby in 2009 if he would give the annual address televised by the BBC. Given the nature of his condition it was a monumental task and he rose to the challenge with the help of family and close friends. The result is this fantastic essay on how he felt at the diagnosis, the anger that threatened to consume him, the fear of an undignified exit and the pain that his family would endure throughout. He speaks passionately for the option of assisted death being legalised to allow everyone the right to decide how far they went on the road to losing themselves.

This is a piece of work that will pitch people from one side of the argument against the opposite faction quite literally. He speaks out about the reality of the condition and how it affects even the smallest things we take for granted being able to do. His fervent wish to be allowed the dignity of physical death before the cognitive death that Alzheimer's grants its victims is heartbreaking coming from a man who has entertained us for many years with his brilliant works about the disc world and others.

It's better than many regular, prehumous fantasy books, too.

You might quibble that showing him mostly in the context of his hardcore fans makes him look more like a cult hero and less what he truly was: a novelist for everyone, for all ages and for the ages. Certainly, Terry did yearn at times to be taken more seriously by the literati. But then after a clip of one of its more gormless members declaring that “no woman would ever read” him, there is a clip of crowds of Pratchett’s female fans dressed up as his brilliant and bracing feminist hero, Granny Weatherwax.

Val McDermid pointing out that, in Sam Vimes, Pratchett created one of the great detectives is a nice moment of recognition beyond the fantasy fandom, but the greatest and most important of all his characters is surely Death. In a society that avoids discussing the subject, Pratchett made Death – with his horse Binky – his central creation, and his favourite. Seven of his books were written in the terrible interval between his being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and finally walking away with his most beloved character.

There is an image in what I think is Pratchett’s masterpiece – the Bromeliad Trilogy, one of his children’s series – of a tree frog that has lived inside a bromeliad all its life, believing it to be the whole world. One day he climbs out and sees the entire rainforest canopy, with its constellations of other unexplored bromeliads. It’s an image he kept coming back to. I can think of few thinkers and writers who have explored so eloquently the dialectic between belief and knowledge, between faith and reason. Time and again, in both his adult and children’s books, we find that a ludicrous idea or mad tradition – the Thing that will lead us home – turns out to be true in some surprising way.