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The modern world is one of both convenience and inconvenience. For example, you can buy an air ticket in a trice (who remembers travel agents, airline offices, and laboriously filled tickets?), but you are enjoined to arrive ever earlier and wait ever longer at the airport.

One secret of contentment in the modern world, as I suppose in every other, is knowing how to employ the wasted time that is otherwise enforced upon you. I learned a long time ago to take a book with me wherever I went. It was very useful to have a book at isolated African land borders, for example, where I discovered that settling down to read contentedly would so exasperate the immigration officials who were hoping that prolonged delay would cause me to offer a bribe, that they would wave me through gratis. (It was also the only way that I could ever get through Moby-Dick.)

Recently I had an enforced waste of time at Istanbul Airport. Say what you like about Erdogan, but the Turks certainly know how to build an airport and other infrastructure (an art completely lost in our own country). Our airports by comparison with Istanbul are a shabby, incompetent mess.

Books and computers take the wasting out of waiting, but it is also instructive to look around at one’s fellow passengers. Opposite me, for example, was a mute man in a wheelchair of about 40, dressed in a tracksuit and a Muslim cap, who was terribly deformed and who writhed continually without any external stimulus. He looked around him with what appeared to be an uncomprehending, vacant stare.

His aging mother, in Muslim dress, sat beside him. She must have devoted most of her life to looking after him.

It so happened that in the same week, I spoke to a Dutch doctor about euthanasia and assisted suicide. The subject had been on my mind because I am soon to give a talk on that subject. He told me that a person who resembled the young man in the wheelchair had just been euthanized (at his own request) in his area. There was also a doctor in the area who had come out of retirement to do that sort of thing.

The mother of the handicapped man said something to him (of course, I could not understand what), and he replied with a luminous smile that lit up his entire face, an illumination that was lasting. Her face expressed tenderness.

How easy it is to conclude that the lives of others are not worth living—intrinsically not worth living! I thought of the horrible book by a lawyer, Karl Binding, and a psychiatrist, Alfred Hoche, Authorisation of the Elimination of Life Unworthy of Life, published in 1920, not long after the end of one of the greatest mass slaughters in history. It was in the same year that, perhaps not surprisingly, Freud introduced his concept of the death instinct.

Our own Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill does not, of course, propose anything nearly so terrible. For myself, I can easily think of situations in which I would wish for easeful death. On the other hand, in my own case, it is difficult to see how the provisions of the proposed act could be conscientiously complied with, at least without a considerable expenditure of doctors’ and officialdom’s time.

Not since I was about 10, when our family doctor, Dr. S., performed home visits and looked down at me through his gold-rimmed half-moon spectacles in such a way that I dared not fail to improve, has any doctor known anything about me, apart from the results of my blood tests and X-rays. Who is my doctor? I cannot say. If I go to the doctors’ surgery, which is rarely, I feel fortunate if I am granted an appointment, and then usually to consult a doctor whom I have never seen before and will never see again. How are the provisions of the act to be carried out in such circumstances (which I assume to be far from unique)? In my case, the law will either be a dead letter or not properly complied with.

I turned from thoughts of death to those of life, from the unfortunate handicapped man to the Russian prostitute sitting beside him on the other side, to be exact. We were all bound for a country in the Gulf, and she was clutching her Russian passport.

How did I know that she was a prostitute, you might ask? She was very blonde, heavily made-up, and dressed in a white tracksuit with gold piping. Her trainers sparkled with paste diamonds. Her lips had been improved by silicon or some other filler, to give her what I have been told is now called the “trout pout.” Even Dr. Watson would not have mistaken her for a geologist or an oil executive.

In such a situation, I always remember the lines by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz taught me forty years ago by a taxi driver in Mexico City: O who is more to blame, though both do wrong: She who sins for pay, or he who pays for sin?

Her vulgar getup could not disguise the fact that she was no great beauty. At first I was repelled, but then felt sorrow for her. What abuse or exploitation must she have suffered at both ends of her trajectory? Her value as a commodity would soon decline; she would have to make whatever dirhams, dinars, or rials while the sun shone and then return to some dismal flat in Russia.

I was told by friends in the Gulf that on the return journey of the prostitutes to Russia and other such places, one could tell how successful returning prostitutes had been by the number of suitcases they checked in at the airport: as a rule of thumb, one suitcase for every ten clients. How this was known or calculated, I do not know. And every Friday, a hundred thousand Saudis crossed the border to take advantage of the looser rules relating to alcohol, and other things.

The world remains not without interest.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).