But some people are deeply disturbed by what they call "creeping euthanasia". Life, an anti-euthanasia pressure group, argues that the BMA's guidelines will create new fears for patients and "corrupt the medical profession, turning doctors into dispatchers".The BMA steering group on advance statements believes that they are needed to protect health professionals as well as to allow patients to express their wishes in the event of incapacity."We have been in favour of patients making advance statements for a long time," says a spokesman. After years of discussion, the BMA has finally reached agreement with the Law Commission that such statements should be legally binding.The move has been welcomed by the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, Exit. In a world where death is concealed and sanitised in hospitals, we have lost the ancient ars moriendi, the art of dying.Tomorrow, the British Medical Association will announce new guidelines to health professionals on drawing up "living wills", advance statements by patients on their treatment before death. Neither had indicated how they wished to die.Death has been high in the British consciousness for some months, with reports that mourners are not given enough privacy and the very public death of a Dutchman by euthanasia on television. He had suffered a major stroke and had deteriorated through the night.

In the morning, two nurses arrived at his bed to give him physiotherapy. His family, certain that death was near, pleaded with them not to move him. They insisted it was a necessary part of his programme of care. Only after an appeal to the house doctor did they agree that he was too ill to be taken from his bed for manipulation and exercises He died within two hours. A year later, an elderly man lay in another hospital ward, exhausted and uncommunicating in the final stages of Alzheimer's disease He was peaceful and ready for death For some days, he had refused to eat. In the end, the nursing staff, who had been diligent in their task of keeping him comfortable and alive, allowed him to die. These men were my father and my grandfather. A man aged 61 was close to death.

They have to breathe this kind of air."We all nodded and smiled enthusiastically at each other, as if that really nailed it.. They should understand what we love and what are our passions. We want people to know who we are and to transmit our tastes and our ways of working. People entering the shop should share and understand this atmosphere. I wondered what the setting of the shop was intended to convey to the shopper, entering for the first time.

Both spoke at once on this theme, with Carla presenting a kind of edited remix."We are very much tied to traditions, but we are very young and modern at the same time. They tell me that the smallest changes made to the design of the main store are directly and faithfully echoed in the other shops. We're talking hand- decorated, light-coloured marble flooring, patterned with rampant lions; palazzo-style room succession; sandstone walls and ceilings in terra rossa and pastel ochre; and white plaster cornicing which, according to the literature handed out at last week's opening, "exalts and embodies the impetuous whiteness of the other rooms".Clearly some shoppers are at home here, but it's the kind of surrounding that can also make for a buttock-clenchingly intimidatory experience There's only so much impetuous whiteness a person can take. Some of them we had made thinking about the music of the Fifties, because we knew that she could sometimes look like Elvis and was interested in dressing in a masculine way But she chose this one.