Common Sense died today.
He finally succumbed to the cancer that had been threatening his life for more than a decade.
And he will be sadly missed worldwide by those who lived by his teachings.
The death comes as a shock to many who had expected death from one of his frequent flights out of the window.
In the past few years he was in and out of the window with the frequency of a fiddler's elbow. Eventually, few of us noticed the duration of the flights as the cancer took hold and the short-haul journeys became long-haul ones.
No-one thought he was finding it harder and harder to return as the cancer took hold.
Common Sense's fight against the insidious disease began more than a decade ago when his teaching of Say What You Mean and Do What You Say became politically incorrect.
As the world accepted the new way of speaking, he took his first flight out of the window.
Yet he recovered and took many more flights as more of his teachings were made obsolete.
He almost died when his great friend the Three Rs was kicked out of the British schools' curriculum. But he recovered which is more than can be said for the children that came through that education system.
He must have wondered if the lack of schooling in the three Rs is the cause of the world being given mixed messages by those in power. We are told that plastic carrier bags are bad yet are encouraged to use plastic doggy bags to pick up dog mess.
Has the lack of schooling in arithmetic led to the loss of pensions or the fact that even our bankers can't do their sums and are having to be bailed out by taxpayers?
So we bail them out and then PAY THEM to LEND our money back to us.
Well, Common Sense's death has shocked some of us into action. We're standing by his old teaching of watching the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves and are not approaching the banks for the money we need to sustain a business, expand a business or start a business. We're raising the funds ourselves.
Anyone can join us and raise their own business capital without approaching a bank, without taking out a loan, without any credit.
You can find out more about how many of us are raising our own business capital here http://virl.ws/s/dipple