An app that lets people know if you’re dead or still living has rather disappointingly been renamed for the sensitivities of the Western world. The Chinese app, Are You Dead, has been renamed ‘Demumu’ to make it ‘easier to expand globally’, and so now has a cute name for its place in a macabre world.

The popular app allows people who are living alone to check in each day by clicking a button to confirm that yes, you are still breathing. If you miss a check-in for two consecutive days, it sends an alert to an emergency contact for the economic sum of €0.99.

In France, since 2018 La Poste will (for a fee) check on your parents in a scheduled visit, and let you know by app or email that they are still living. There isn’t any data if the postman will tell you what your parents said about you, however. Perhaps we’re better off not knowing; some of us would pay not to know.

They really needn’t have renamed ‘Are You Dead’ here in Ireland, where we’re often more comfortable with death than the realities of living. Many people will meet more friends and relatives at funerals than anywhere else, and we can be comforted that there will be people we haven’t seen or spoken to in years gathered around our coffins at the end.

Literally and philosophically, we all die alone but some are more alone than others. What seems to have changed dramatically is that for a long time, those that died truly alone did so out of choice; perhaps that choice wasn’t a healthy one, but it was a choice.

Now the chance that you might die alone is an uncomfortable truth, and feel-good organisations will tell us that we need to ‘get out more’ and join a club or build a network or sing our heart out but it’s all such effort. Such sustained effort when all we need a is a ‘hello’ once in a while and a gripe about the weather.

There are numerous grants and financial supports for tech startups and entrepreneurs through the government and the EU, but no notion of such support for the bricks and mortar post office, or the small newsagents. Any one of us can develop an app for loneliness, and can get ample support from nice men in suits and ties.

The architects of this way of living and dying will pass alone too just like us. Their inevitable deathbed epiphany will, however, be the ultimate case of too little, too late.

Wellies and weed

Well, it never ends. While we’re grappling with the thoughts of Brazilian beef on the shelves, now we have to live with the fact that the cannabis on these shores is imported too.

The legalisation of the drug in the USA, Canada, and Thailand means they now have too much of it, so it is being exported and is flooding the local market. Apparently, most of the weed here used to be cultivated in grow houses in the 26 counties (awaiting the Bord Bia mark of approval), but now that’s changed.

There’s a broader conversation not being had about the time and resources that are used nationally to combat a drug that, by any measure, is only at least as harmful as alcohol and possibly less. However, there are agricultural implications too. The female plant is the fun one, but the male is still a valuable commodity for hemp fibre. When the IFA are done with CAP and Mercosur, perhaps they can set their sights on Irish hemp production. What a protest that would be: farmers and crusties, side-by-side, blocking the M50 with tractors and bongs.