a doctor's view

Always aim high

2010-11-19T13:07:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the absence....still can't get online for more than about 10 seconds at a time despite new router, new filters, multiple calls to BT, shouting matches with Virgin Broadband, visits from various computer experts and now awaiting psychotherapist and possible strait-jacket.

Anyway, a mate of mine is well miffed, as we say in academia, about the forthcoming nuptials between an Old Marlburian girl and a well-known man-about-St. James's. He has two daughters you see, and he's spent a shed-load of money sending them to Marlborough and what did he get? Oxford University, that's what. Neither of them is going to be a Queen or even a Duchess. You wonder what you pay your money for don't you? I blame all those stupid textbooks they read when when they could be out snogging the scions of the aristocracy, or at least kissing a frog or two.

My mate had sooo set his mind on being the grandfather of a future King of England! And now all he'll probably get is a couple of bloody professors.

His wife tried her best. Apparently they went up to the Open Day festivities and when they saw their daughter disappearing unsteadily into the bushes surrounding the sports field with a suitable young gentleman,alcohol having been taken, she followed them discreetly into the thicket, hid behind a rhododendron bush and at the appropriate moment whispered urgently "Arch your back, darling, don't let his Lordship have to dangle his testicles on that damp grass!".

(Acknowledgement: Thank you Legend-in-his-own-lunchtime for that last line)

Weird or what?

2010-11-15T02:52:00.000-08:00

According to New Scientist (Nov.13, p.42), people who read or write blogs are likely to be WEIRD. They make this claim because such people are likely to be Educated and Rich (compared with peasants in underdeveloped countries), and they live in a Western-style society which is Industrialized and Democratic; shuffle the letters and there you are:- WEIRD.

What you may not realize is that compared with most of the world's population you are also weird in the accepted dictionary sense of the word, meaning strange, unusual, and incomprehensible. This is because WEIRD people like us think differently to the vast majority of the world population.

Psychologists now realize that 96% of the people they have studied in the past have been from the WEIRD population, and in fact more than two thirds of the subjects who have taken part in psychology experiments have been university students. Recent studies in many different cultures have shown that this WEIRD minority has very different ideas about their sense of self, their sensory perceptions and their views of morality compared with the majority of non-WEIRD people.

WEIRD folk like us almost always fall for optical illusions, of the type such as the one with two lines of equal length which appear different because of the way the arrows on the end are oriented. San bushmen just don't get it, the lines are exactly the same length, it's obvious, and most 'primitive' tribesmen throughout the world are less susceptible to visual illusions than we are. Other experiments have shown that rural peasants regard themselves as just a part of Nature as a whole, whereas WEIRD people are much more egocentric. WEIRD children taught a dance-routine that involves a sequence of hand movements such as right-left-right-right will still perform it in the same way when they are asked to turn around 180 degrees, whereas non-WEIRD desert-dwelling children will change the routine to left-right-left-left when they turn around. The WEIRD kids orientate things in relation to themselves, whereas the desert-dwellers relate directions to nearby rocks or bushes. Much more useful if you're going to spend most of the day looking for water or sticks or food in a vast territory with no sign-posts.

There are many other important differences. Weird people think analytically and want to distinguish themselves from others, whereas non-Weird people tend to accept things as they are, and want to fit into the natural pattern. Weird people are concerned about justice and their rights, whereas non-Weird people are more concerned with their obligations to their community and their gods. In some I.Q. tests, the only 'right'answers depend on analytical thinking, whereas there may be other holistic ways of looking at a problem and reaching a different answer.

I recall a wonderful TV programme in which a team of aborigines agreed to participate in a gruelling 5-day race around the Australian desert, pitting themselves against aa crack team of soldiers carrying food and water supplies and with modern navigation and survival equipment. The tough soldiers won of course, because the aborigines only travelled slowly to the nearest water-hole, where they killed a kangaroo and then they rested for 5 days. They just couldn't see the point of it. How could you get lost or thirsty in the desert, and why would you want to show off?

Can you believe it!

2010-11-12T12:37:00.000-08:00

The Internet is getting more and more bizarre. It's very difficult to decide who is pulling which bit of whose anatomy.

I was prepared to believe that a fake-tanning company might call itself Fake Bake, and they might even claim that their fake tan prevents ageing by stopping sunlight reaching the skin, but I find it incredible that they'd have the gall to declare that their product called Platinum Face Self Tan contains the "latest anti-ageing ingredient Phyto-CellTec Malus Domestica" . They claim that this was created from stem cells extracted from the rare Swiss apple called Uttwiler Spatlauber(see fakebake.co.uk/shop.html). The apple's totipotent cells have been "harnessed" it says. They're selling it at £29.95p a bottle.

I think it should be called Brass Neck rather than Platinum Face, though Bare-faced Robbery might be equally appropriate, especially from those pallid people who are Half-Baked enough to pay £30 for a Fake Bake apple, even a rare Swiss one with an umlaut. On the other hand a bit of totipotency might not go amiss at my age.

On the similar 'can you believe it!' theme, is the report at bit.ly/newageterror that "New Age terrorists have harnessed the power of homeopathy for evil".

"Homeopathic weapons represent a major threat to world peace" allegedly said President Obama, "they might not cause any actual damage but the placebo effect could be quite devastating".

The BBC's security correspondent Frank Gardner allegedy said "Large numbers of people would believe that they have been killed or injured and hospitals would be unable to cope".

These bombs are so very daangerous of course because, according to the laws of homeopathy, the more that the water-bomb is diluted, the more powerful it becomes. They are in effect Weapons of Mass Dilution, which could bring cities to a standstill.

Meanwhile, new security measures at airports will be needed so that all water will be tested to ensure that none of it is being used to smuggle the memory of an explosive onto a plane. The only defence is for everyone to remain calm, vigilant and to always wear a magic vibrating crystal.

Actually they're a bit late with this homeopathy story. We all learned years ago that if people taking homeopathic medication miss taking their medication for 3 days they can die of an overdose, and I distinctly remember giggling about 60 years ago when the Goon Show claimed that in World War Two we'd saved time and money by manufacturing masses of cardboard cut-out tanks, until the crafty Krauts saw through this wheeze and started dropped cardboard cut-out bombs.

Smiling pigs

2010-11-11T09:45:00.001-08:00

My little diatribe against self-centred politicians('Strictly' for the birds, 11.11.10) reminded me of John Sergeant's admirable efforts in the same programme some months ago. He knew he was sending himself up and in fact he called himself 'the Dancing Pig'. He was a good sport, we had a good laugh, he was extremely popular, and he then retired gracefully before it all became silly. The clumping Widdecombe obviously believes she's a winner and says she won't retire, but Widdecombe Fair she isn't, so I'll refrain from mentioning the grey mare, Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all.

But back to the subject of jolly pigs:

Here's one I made earlier.

One of the joys of living in the deep Dorset/Somerset countryside is the amazing breadth of talent that lurks in most of the small villages and hamlets. The area is stuffed with active artists, writers, potters, musicians, as well as a liberal share of retired headteachers, diplomats, doctors, dons, ex-colonial officers and assorted intellectuals.

So what's that to do with the pig, I hear you ask. Well, my next-door neighbour is an excellent potter and enamellist with his own kiln. He runs short pottery courses, so I went along to have a go at making a raku pot, or more accurately, a raku pig.

This is an ancient Japanese technique which involves making a clay pig, slicing it in two down the middle, hollowing it out, and then rejoining the two pieces, but leaving a vent for the air to escape as it expands when its in the kiln, otherwise you get an exploded pig and a damaged kiln. The tricky question was where to hide the vent so it wouldn't spoil the smooth contours of my pig. After some discussion we agreed there was only one reasonable place, underneath the curly tail.

The pig was fired in the kiln, glazed and then fired again in a dustbin filled with burning wood-shavings, before being quickly taken out and plunged into cold water, which crackles the glaze, thus producing the attractive crazed raku effect.

All went well, apart from some coughing from the smoke and a few singed eye-brows, but when piggy was plunged into the cold water, his body contracted and his internal gases escaped from the vent with a prolonged sequence of bubbling, noisy farts.

How's that for animation! No wonder he's smiling.

Language difficulties

2010-11-11T02:45:00.000-08:00

Being an old fogey I blame television for lots of things,quite apart from Anne Widdecombe's 'combs'. Younger readers may need to ask Granny exactly what 'combs' are (pronounced komms).

I blame television for making swearing respectable for instance, especially by young people. Sure, we all swore occasionally years ago, but we knew we shouldn't and if we did, we'd apologize. Nowadays, in this permissive age, if you don't like my language you can f*** off.

As a result, swearing hs lost its power, though one of my middle-aged friends took his aged mother on a Peace March some years and was amazed by what she shouted at a heavy-handed policeman, and by the result it had.

It can be quite amusing when old ladies swear (vide Catherine Tait on TV), but it's less amusing coming from a foul-mouthed, badly-behaved child.

My friend Jim told me about his grandsons, aged 4 and 7. Apparently they'd decided it was time they stuck up for themselves and they'd use swear-words whenever they felt like it. They decided they'd begin at breakfast-time the next morning.

"What would you like for breakfast this morning?" Mummy brightly asked the 7 year-old.
"Ah shit Mum, you never bloody learn do you, you know I always have the frigging Coco-Pops"

THWACK! He was sent flying across the kitchen floor with a clattering of chairs, then he painfully picked himself up and ran upstairs howling.

The pale,tight-lipped Mummy turned to her 4 year-old.

"And what would you like young man?"

His eyes filled with tears.

"I don't know Mummy, but it won't be f*cking Coco-Pops"

'Strictly' for the birds

2010-11-10T01:07:00.000-08:00

I'm not a great fan of 'Strictly Come Dancing' though where else could a respectable man of my age get a close-up view of girls like that wearing clothes like that?

That Anne Widdecombe is scary though, isn't she? I fear for poor Anton's life if she fell on him, not to mention the bilateral hernias he'll get with all that lifting, and if he swung her round and lost his grip she could demolish the studio.

The physical damage scares me less than the thought that she was once a politician, capable of influencing the policy decisions of the government. She appears to have no insight whatever. Her ego must be bigger than her bum. Fat and frumpy I forgive, but how could she not realize what an idiot she appears! "Vote for me, famous for being fatuous".

Come to think of it, she's not the only politician who might use that as a logo.

I can't bear BearShare.

2010-11-08T02:39:00.000-08:00

Speaking of computer problems, which we were in my last Post, I have to apologize for the relative dearth of my new Posts in the last week or two. I've been chattering away to myself in my head, as you do, but trying to transfer said thoughts into the ether via this stupid machine often defeats me.

Windows 7 always gives me problems, it's much too clever for my own good. I can usually be shown or eventually work out how to perform whatever limited repertoire I need, but when people tamper with the computer, I'm lost again, and it takes a long time to find out which buttons to click and when.

The latest nervous breakdowns, mine and the computer's, arose when my wife decided to check the words of a song and found she'd accidentally installed something called BearShare. The cute little fellow decided he liked our computer so much he'd take it over completely, popping up all over the place and replacing all our other programs and bookmarks etc. My wife tried desperately to uninstall him, but couldn't, though she did succeed in uninstalling almost everything else on our computer, which is always an over-excitable beast and tends to go off-line in a nervous sulk for hours or days at a time. (We're 7 miles from the telephone exchange, which apparently explains everything from slow Broadband to Offline and halitosis). We eventually consulted the BearShare Helpline and they told us that BearShare 'can be difficult to uninstall'. Tell me about it! We've tried to follow their gobbledegook and failed.

Anyway, life continues, with or without the stupid computer, and I've suddenly remembered that not only does life offer the usual grouting, with groaning and grumbling, but also many pleasanter half-finished tasks, such as the 'catalogue raisonnee' of my art-work (paintings, stone-carvings and bookbindings), memoirs for the yet-unborn great-grand-children, various new commissioned paintings to start, walks in the sunshine (if and when), trimming and repotting the bonsai trees and learning to cook.

The last one isn't actually true, it was just to falsely raise my wife's hopes (again) to pay her back for HerShare in the BearShare debacle. Oops! There's an idea...Hairshare. She's always having her's cut and I'm always trying to grow more so why can't we share, as we do when we eat a pear (PearShare?). Silly ideas? I have more than my FairShare. We once spent the night in a cave together (LairShare) and she often used to sit on my knee (ChairShare) but unlike some sophisticated couples we don't throw car-keys into a ring (PairShare) and unlike the Beckhams, we draw the line at the UnderwearShare.

So this possible Last Post is by way of an apology and an explanation for the fact that my Posts might, like the Cheshire cat, slowly fade away, leaving only, I hope, a grin, and not a bad smell. Thanks to everyone, particularly Alison and Legend, for your supportive and entertaining Comments.

Old age is a terrible thing

2010-11-03T12:04:00.000-07:00

One might think that I would have little in common with Benjamin Bopal. So far as I can ascertain from the Internet (but bearing in mind that my information from this source is always dubious, as I never know quite how the system works) Benjamin Bopal is a gay man who runs a guest-house in Greyton, South Africa and is trying to start a bowls club for gay men.

I have to admit that none of the above has been at the forefront of my list of ambitions, although I reckon I could if absolutely necessary have a go at running a guest-house in South Africa, but only along Basil Fawlty lines.

But Benjamin Bopal, it seems, is a man after my own heart, as shown by the following missive which I received from my friend Mike, who is a non-gay bowler, which was allegedly written by the said Benjamin Bopal, the gay bowler:

We Silver Surfers sometimes have trouble with our computers. I had a problem yesterday, so I called Eric, the 11 year old next door, whose bedroom looks like Mission Control and asked him to come over.
Eric clicked a couple of buttons and solved the problem. As he was walking away, I called after him, "So, what was wrong?".
He replied, "It was an ID ten T error".
I didn't want to appear stupid, but nonetheless inquired, "An, ID ten T error? What's that? In case I need to fix it again".
Eric grinned, "Haven't you ever heard of an ID ten T error before?"
"No", I replied.
"Write it down" he said, "and I think you'll figure it out".
So I wrote down: ID10T

I used to like Eric, the little bastard .......

Try again Harriet

2010-10-31T03:59:00.000-07:00

It was heartening to hear Harriet Harman, the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, trying to shed her image of po-faced sanctimoniousness by essaying a witticism at the expense of the Treasury Secretary by calling him "one ginger rodent who would not be welcome in Scotland". It was disappointing however to hear that she felt she had to apologize almost immediately afterwards, and even more disappointing for her when her victim came back with the immediate riposte that he was proud of being ginger and didn't mind being a rodent, who was busily engaged in clearing up the mess left by other people!

But Harriet was right, squirrels can be a blinking nuisance. Our neighbour has a thatched roof and a family of squirrels are busily engaged at present in chewing away most of the electric cables in his loft. They come for lunch to our house, eating whatever we put out for the birds now that they've stripped the hazelnut bushes and the walnut tree. In other words the Treasury Secretary won't be satisfied until he's had your nuts, and then he'll rob your bird.

I'm not sure though why people should think its an insult to be called ginger. I've heard people say that the most unbelieveable part of the Harry Potter films is the claim that it features 'a ginger' with two friends, but I think most chaps would have been very friendly indeed with the Pre-Raphaelite beauties, if they had the chance. It sounds to me as though this 'gingerism' is yet another regrettable '-ism' which we should strive to combat. After all people with no hair already suffer from 'baldism', brown-haired people from 'boring mouseyism', black-haired people are called spicks (in USA) or half-caste (in UK), and we all know about blondes, although it never worried Dolly Parton because, she said, she knows that blondes are really smart and she knows that she's not really blonde.

And I understand that red hair is already well established in Scotland, and the Celts may not like the epithet ginger rodent.

So, nice try, Harriet, but 'nil point'.

Catachresis, innit?

2010-10-28T03:21:00.000-07:00

We old fogeys love to drone on about abuse of the English language. Absolute nonsense of course because the English language has been changing every day since the Normans arrived in 1066, and this constant expansion and change of usage has made English the most expressive language in the world.

All the same, we old fogeys don't like our language to be abused, as I was reminded when I read about the recent review of the Baby P. case in which a child died as a result of "abuse". When I was a lad, abuse was what fish-wives did to each other, with a lot of shouting and swearing. It had nothing to do with beating babies to death. It was nothing to do with sex either, although I do recall there was a thing called self-abuse, which made you go blind. My Mum always used to get cross if she heard people in the street 'effing and blinding' but I'm pretty sure that was something different. As I say, language is a funny thing, but ours was a funny street, so funny things happened. Nowadays though it seems you can abuse anything, alcohol, drugs, cigarettes ...What would you have to do with a cigarette to abuse it? And don't mention Mars Bars.

My dictionary says 'abuse' means 'to make a bad use of'. I suppose you could say self-abuse would come under that heading, but I don't think we could reasonably describe the death of Baby P as 'making a bad use of a baby'.

I was intrigued to note that catachresis, misapplication of a word, is also defined as 'abuse of the language', which is where we came in. I find that catachresis happens all the time nowadays, usually due to a combination of my senility and my ignorance.

It happens to young people too, like the young man who set fire to his sister. He'd confused arson with incest. The Incendiary Magistrate who dealt with the case remaindered him in custard and asked for a psephologist's report. To be fair, he was Chinese, so he knew it was something to do with an election.

Doctors' views

2010-10-27T13:54:00.000-07:00

My friend Mike keeps a close eye on political developments and he has just sent me an analysis of Mr Osborne's recent proposal to make savage cuts to improve the health of the economy. It seems that the British Medical Association has taken a survey of doctor's opinions on this therapy, and since this column is called 'A Doctor's View' I thought I should pass these opinions on, even if they make you cringe.

The Dermatologists advised against any rash moves and wanted to scratch it.

The Gastroenterologists had a gut feeling it was going to hurt,

The Neurologists thought Osborne had a nerve.

The Obstetricians felt all politicians labour under a misconception.

Ophthalmologists felt it was short-sighted.

Pathologists yelled, "Over my dead body!" while the Paediatricians shouted, "Oh, just grow up!"

The Psychiatrists thought the whole idea was madness, while the Radiologists claimed to see right through it.

Surgeons knew plenty about cuts, and felt we should wash our hands of the whole thing.

The ENT specialists wouldn’t hear of it.

The Physicians thought it would be a bitter pill to swallow.

The Plastic Surgeons said, "This puts a whole new face on the matter...."

The Anaesthesiologists thought the whole idea was a gas, and the Cardiologists didn't have the heart to say no, but the Urologists were pissed off about it.

In the end, the BMA accepted the views of the Proctologists, and will leave the final decision to those a**eholes in Westminster.

Times are still hard

2010-10-26T12:31:00.000-07:00

Having spent most of my life as a townie, I had always assumed that fields and trees and hedges stayed the same for year after year unless you did something to them. When I retired and bought a house with a paddock and lots of trees and many hedges, I was unpleasantly surprised to discover that the opposite is true. Fields and trees and hedges only stay the same if you keep doing things to them. Nettles, thistles and brambles take over your paddock, your hedges turn into rampant 16-foot tall Triffids, and trees shed large rotten branches onto passers-by and grow into neighbouring power lines, thus cutting off the electricity supply to much of the village in windy weather.

There is a cure for all these ills, but it always involves backbreaking effort. Thomas Hardy in one of his novels based on life in Dorset mentions women who worked in the fields as scrattlers, digging out thistles for sixpence a day. Having tried a bit of scrattling myself, I now accept that the function of the gentleman is to provide employment for the worker, so now I always 'get a man in'.

This generally involves a haemorrhage of cash. I was quoted a price of £470 to trim my hedges recently. When I pointed out that the same job by the same firm last year had only cost £300, this required some explanation. It seems that it was all to do with VAT, which hadn't been added.
OK, VAT last year was 15%, so that would have made it £345 rather than £300.
Yes but VAT has gone up to 17% this year.
OK, so that's another 2%, making it £351, but that's still a long way short of £470 isn't it?
Ah, but petrol and wages have gone up a lot in the last year.
Oh dear, what a pity, because my pension hasn't gone up a lot, so I'll need to get more estimates.
OK, Let's call it £360 cash.

This nit-picking over the odd £100 contrasts with the documentary I heard on BBC 4 on the same day about Fine Art sales at Sotheby's. The obviously very well-connected young lady with the cut-glass accent explained that the art market is just about holding up in these straitened times. There are still plenty of people who can afford 3 million for a painting, but the number who can afford 30 million has sadly dwindled since the banks collapsed. Breaks you heart doesn't it!

This reminds me of the banker who ordered a new Porsche from the dealer and posted an enthusiastic message on Facebook to say that he couldn't wait for the new 911. It seems that about 500 Taliban members immediately added him to their list of Friends.

Only joking.....(Nervous laughter. Legend - don't be tempted).

It's a hard life

2010-10-24T14:56:00.000-07:00

I just love 'New Scientist'. No subject is too big or too small for them to tackle, and their writers can make it both interesting and amusing.

This week for example they range from the question of the constancy of constants throughout the Universe to the reason people like the smell of bacon. Most folk might be more interested in the latter subject, but the former is more important if you're intending to travel any distance, say to the other end of the Universe.

The thing is you see, that we have all assumed that the laws of physics are immutable throughout the Universe. You couldn't trust anybody if salt was suddenly found to be harder than diamonds in some far-flung galaxies, or Number 27 buses travelled faster than light in others.

An astronomer called John Webb has now produced data which appears to show that a very important constant called Alpha, which is known to determine how many photons of energy an atom will absorb, changes according to the direction in which you're looking. If you're keen on that sort of thing, and you should be, you can read it in the article by Michael Brooks at New Scientist, 23 Oct. 2010, p. 33. The generally accepted value of alpha is around 1/37, but Webb has shown that if you look in a particular direction across the Universe, which allows us to view photons of light emitted by quasars several billion years ago the value is around one part in a million smaller than it seems to be here on Earth.

How big is that compared with the forthcoming decrease in child-benefits I hear the middle-class Mums murmur. Well, its the principle of the thing. If Mr. Osborne decreases your annual income by 50% you may have to forego holidays, booze or even shoes, but if Alpha changes from one part of the Universe to another, which Webb claims it does, then the normal rules of physics don't apply and life would perhaps be impossible, because if you mess about with Alpha there might be no carbon atoms, and hence no life as we know it. Just keep your wits about you is all I'm saying.

Don't let it depress you. The good news is that we now understand why sizzling bacon smells so good (same issue, p. 65). Bacon is prepared by saturating it in 'curing brine', a solution of salt, nitrites, hydrolysed corn starch etc. and when this is heated to a high temperature it causes a Maillard reaction between the sugars in the brine and the amino acids in the meat, a process analogous to the caramelization of sweetened milk when it is heated for long enough.

The intriguing thing is that there is also a letter on this mouth-watering topic from Yonatan Silver of Jerusalem, who claims never to have tasted bacon, and when he smells bacon he does not find it appetising.

I wonder if he knows the joke about the Catholic priest and the Rabbi travelling in a railway carriage together. It was a long journey, and as they chatted they began to divulge confidences to each other about their religious faith and their personal lives.
"Tell me confidentially" asked the priest "Have you ever tasted bacon?"
"Well, yes I'm afraid I did once, and it was delicious" said the Rabbi "but tell me confidentially, have you ever slept with a woman?"
"I've afraid I did once" said the priest.
"Better than bacon isn't it!" said the Rabbi.

If any of you have a thought about the Maillard reaction in this context, please try to suppress it.

Bags of confidence is what you need

2010-10-22T07:17:00.000-07:00

Stately Homes always seem to have a crumbling facade in need of restoration. The Guides are often very little better, even those who have already been partially restored. When you enter those stately dimly-lit rooms there's always an effigy in the corner, which might just be the family ghost, but is more likely a Guide, who's been there for 5 hours already and is bored to tears because there's nothing to do but stare at a bombe commode and a couple of dismal portraits of the 6th and 10th Earls and their dreary wives.

I always try to chirp them up by egging them on to divulge scurrilous confidences about the present Earl and an actress or a choir-boy. "I did hear from a chum of mine who goes to the same London club as his Lordship..." I say, and then pause to judge their reaction before completing the sentence. Often the blue-rinsed response is decidedly frosty,which can be quite amusing in itself, if you adopt the naive but knowing, nudge-nudge Sacha Baron-Cohen ('Borat') approach, but its surprising what juicy details some little old ladies seem to know. I suspect some of them make it up, so in the end we don't know who is pulling who's leg. More fun than staring at Chippendale chairs though.

I went to Tyntesfield House recently, a Victorian Gothic extravaganza in North Somerset now owned by the National Trust. I'm not going to tell you what the Guide told me about the previous Earl of Wraxall, but the story of how the family made its fortune was very interesting.

Antony Gibbs, who started the business empire on which the splendour of Tyntesfield House was built, was the son of an Exeter surgeon, but he decided against following his father into medicine. Instead, he became a shipping trader, and eventually was attracted into the exciting world of guano, the droppings of sea-birds. Mountains of guano many feet deep could be found along the coast of South America. When the first shipment was made in 1842, it was a huge gamble, but the guano was an instant success and it rapidly became Britain's most popular fertiliser. The enormous edifice of Tyntesfield is thus in effect built on a sound financial foundation of guano.

The Guide told me that these shipments of manure had to be kept dry during the voyage, otherwise fermentation would occur and methane gas was formed. Then strike a match down there in the hold and BOOM! a sinking ship. So the bags of dry guano always had to be stamped with the instruction 'Stow High In Transit' so that the sailors would not stow it in the depths of the ship where the bilge-water could reach them.

And thus was evolved the acronym "S.H.I.T.".

I'd always thought it was a golfing term.

Mind how, and where, you go

2010-10-21T10:04:00.000-07:00

Schadenfreude, taking pleasure from the misfortunes of others, is a wonderful thing, even if it makes you feel bad to feel so good.

I had lunch a few weeks ago with my friend Roger, who lives in London for 6 months every year but has a small house in South Africa. It was a chilly day and he was at pains to point out that in a few weeks time he'd have left this miserable English weather behind and he'd be sitting in the mountains near Cape Town, in warm sunshine enjoying a splendid lunch with South African wines at a fraction of the price we'd just paid in Dorset. Yes,yes, that's great, lucky old you.

Today I had an E-mail saying that he and his wife were a bit under the weather, literally. They'd both caught colds on the flight to South Africa, as you do, the weather there is very cold and grey, the man they pay to look after their garden (now jungle) has done nothing for a year, the bathroom has some serious plumbing problems (maybe fatal, and certainly expensive), they've had a minor car crash and the other driver was not insured, and the S.A. bank has just charged them £150 for putting their own U.K. money into their own bank account.

As you'd expect, I've sent them a cheerful reply, pointing out that we deprived old folk in Somerset are feeling fine, we're enjoying lovely warm weather, and Mr. George Osborne has decided not to penalize us, so we'll be retaining the free TV licences, the heating allowance, the free bus pass etc. I did mention the need for continued fiscal restraint in the 'fat-cat' London area however, particularly with regard to taxation of second homes, and the heavy taxation penalties regarding non-declared overseas assets. I also felt it necessary to point out that Mr Osborne has decided that the £12 billion cost (billion, trillion, whatever, another few billions or so is small beer) of the Olympics will have to be met by London property owners, as they will benefit from the sport. It will be in the form of a toilet tax. Pay as you go.

The cut-backs in public services, particularly police manpower, are going to cause big problems though. I heard the other day that the police station at Weston-Super-Mare is only open intermittently and whilst it was closed, burglars broke in and stole the safe, the furniture and all the toilets. No arrests have yet been made. The embarrassed police spokesman explained that they have absolutely nothing to go on.

This is where I came in.

2010-10-20T02:57:00.000-07:00

One benefit which might follow from increasing the retirement age by 10 years or so, might be that the accumulated wisdom of the years might be listened to. It is of course well known that once people have retired, their opinion is not worth a bucket of spit. That's why the retired diplomats who advised against starting a war in Iraq were ignored. What did they know about modern American weapons and diplomacy! Old fuddy-duddies.

We're seeing it at present in the NHS. What goes round, comes round.

Shortly after I was appointed as a NHS consultant in 1973, Mrs Thatcher had the bright idea of asking an American expert on Health Care for his advice, and she then instituted the first of the many NHS Reforms which have cost the country so much money for so little benefit.

I remember one suggested reform was to fund hospital departments according to the number of patients they could attract. The more successful departments would then be able to afford more staff and they would see more patients, while the less successful ones would lose staff and would gradually dwindle away to nothing. It did not seem to occur to the managers that there was not an endless supply of experienced doctors and nurses just standing around waiting to be employed by the successful departments, and that the expensively trained doctors and nurses who were made redundant from the less successful departments would either go abroad or be re-employed in the more successful departments. It would take a lot of managers and administrators to make sure the system worked well though, so the plan was approved.

The money would follow the patients, who would choose where they wished to go. Market forces. Marvellous. In the South-West they appointed a senior manager from the airline industry to reorganize the NHS on these commercial lines. It was just a matter of putting people in the operating theatre at the scheduled 'take-off' time and giving the customers what they want. I think it took him about a year to learn it ain't that simple. (It took the military invaders in Iraq slightly longer to discover they should have listened to the old buffers).

Now, some 25 years later, I read in the Telegraph (October 18th) that Martha Lane Fox, the internet entrepreneur, is planning an 'information revolution' in the NHS. Patients will be able to compare doctors across Britain, and will be able to study survival rates in different hospitals. The article says "It is hoped this will help drive up hospital standards as patients choose not to use the services of poor doctors, who will then lose funding".

It isn't April 1st, is it?

The Telegraph does have a good sense of humour (sometimes).

Their final 'leader' in the same issue (A Christian Family) said We appreciate Homer Simpson for his sophisticated understanding of the power of prayer, demonstrated when he lifted up a plate of cookies with this appeal: "Lord, if you want me to eat them, give me no sign"

And may the Lord deliver the NHS from young internet entrepreneurs.

Time your babies.

2010-10-18T09:45:00.000-07:00

Statistics can be a pretty dreary subject and I promise not to go on and on about it, but greatly to my surprise I've just learnt something from the Sun newspaper, other than what Steven Gerrard's wife looks like in close-up in a very scanty swimsuit.

I wasn't really wanting to drool over a picture of Steven Gerrard's wife, of course not, but I was on a train last Saturday, and another man had been engrossed in it for 10 minutes or so, and when he reached his destination and left the paper behind it seemed a pity not to pick it up and see what he found so interesting. Hmmm!

Where was I? Oh yes, in the same newspaper there was an article (16.10.10, p. 21) saying that "Mum Barbara Soper beat odds of 50 million to one when her new baby was the third to be born on a date where all three numbers were the same". Baby Chloe arrived on 08.08.08, brother Cameron came on 09.09.09 and little Cearra Nicole arrived on 10.10.10. Barbara, of Rockford, Michigan is not, thank goodness, aiming to produce another child on 11.11.11.

According to the Sun journalist "Statistics experts say the odds of such an achievement are more then 50 million to one".

Well you don't need to be a statistics expert, and you don't even need to have a computer, though a pencil and a small piece of paper helps, to know that the odds are less than 50 million to one, they are in fact 48,627,125 to one.

But as Doug pointed out in his Comment with regard to my last Post in which I took issue with the Telegraph's wild over-estimate for 3 babies sharing the same birth date, the odds change greatly if you don't specify a particular couple and a particular birth date. The odds for a particular couple having 3 babies all born on the same date may be around 133,000 to one, but if you have 133,000 couples each having 3 babies, then you are very likely indeed to have one couple with 3 babies sharing a same birth date. Doug points out in his Comment that you only need 23 people in a room for there to be a more than 50% chance that two of them will share the same birth date. If you have 60 people in a room it is virtually certain that two of them will share the same birth date.

The Sun article illuminated this problem, and I now see why the Telegraph 'expert' claimed odds of 48 million to one, because he assumed they had chosen one particlar couple and one particular birth date, when the odds are indeed 48 million to one. And though the Sun figure is almost correct for a particular couple starting their family on 08.08.08, they haven't considered the possibility of a sequence of 3 babies starting on 03.03.03, 04.04.04, 05.05.05, and so on.

You can see why people talk about lies, damned lies and statistics.

I'm much more exercised by today's poser, which is to calculate the odds of babies being born at a particular time on a particular date so that they have a sequence of the same number. Supposing a child had been born at 20.02hr. on 20.02 in 2002. A woman lucky enough to have already had a baby at that exact time and date might like to try for her next to be born at 21.12hr. on 21.12.2112. Plenty of time to practice.

That should get the journalists' "expert statisticians" going. She'll make her fortune, if she can do it.

The National Debt

2010-10-15T01:23:00.000-07:00

I think I've discovered why we have such a huge national debt.

The Telegraph reported yesterday (14.10.10) that a couple were delighted that their third child had been born on October 7, exactly the same date as his two older siblings.
The Telegraph reporter was duly amazed and said "The odds of it happening are said to be 48 million to one"

I wondered who had reached this amazing estimate, because clearly the odds of two children having the same birthday are 365 to one and so the odds of three children being born on the same date are 365 x 365 = 133,225. Not exactly 48,000,000 is it?

How many people on the Telegraph staff read this before it was published?

They were probably the same people who used to order the new computers for the NHS or the Ministry of Defence.

"We've had a quote for the 365 computers, Sir Humphrey, they're £365 each. It comes to quite a lot of money I'm afraid".

"Let me just work it out! Oh yes, call it £48,000,000. That'll do"

Some things never change

2010-10-13T12:00:00.000-07:00

The Catholic Church is at it again! This time they are urging children to dress up as Saints on Hallowe'en rather than witches or devils. "It is time we reminded Christians of what Hallowe'en really is", said the Right Reverend Kieran Conry, the Bishop of Arundel and Brighton.

What it really is, according to historians, is the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain which pre-dated Christianity. The name is derived from Old Irish and means 'summer's end' and is sometimes regarded as the Celtic New Year. The ancient Celts believed that the barrier between this world and the next became thin on Samhain, allowing spirits to return to earth. The family's ancestors were invited home to join in the festivities, while harmful spirits could be warded off by wearing costumes and masks to disguise oneself as some kind of evil spirit.

Samhain was the time to take stock of food supplies and slaughter livestock for the winter stores. Bonfires played a large part in these festivities, and the bones of slaughtered livestock were cast into its flames.

Some games traditionally played at the festival could predict the future. A traditional Scottish way of divining one's future spouse is to carve an apple in one long strip, then toss the peel over one's shoulder. The peel is believed to land in the shape of the first letter of the future spouse's name. Unmarried women were told that if they sat in a darkened room and gazed into a mirror on Hallowe'en night, the face of their future husband would appear in the mirror. However, if they were destined to die before marriage, a skull would appear.

Nothing whatever to do with Catholic Saints!

There is however a long tradition of religious women praying to their personal female saint (woman to woman) with regard to their future (or even present) spouse.

My favourite is the prayer to St. Catherine, who listens to maidens at St. Catherine's Chapel on the hill near Abbotsbury in Dorset.

'St.Catherine, St Catherine, Oh, lend me thine aid,
And grant that I nivver should die an old maid.
A husband, St. Catherine,
A GOOD one, St. Catherine,
But arna-one better than narna-one St. Catherine.

Sweet St. Catherine,
A husband, St. Catherine!
HANDSOME, St. Catherine!
RICH, St. Catherine!
SOON, St. Catherine!!'

But don't go up there on Hallowe'en or the witches will get you.

The explanation

2010-10-13T02:00:00.000-07:00

Some of you will have heard this on the radio, but it's worth repeating, as it beautifully illustrates the enormous frustration I feel when I talk to devoutly religious people about their beliefs

Libby Purves was interviewing Derren Brown, the master illusionist, who for years has emphasized that none of his 'miracles' depends on supernatural forces, but they are all done by a wonderful combination of trickery, psychology, showmanship, distraction techniques etc.

He is fascinated by the gullibility of the public. While he was still a student he was doing some tricks for a group of his students friends, and when he'd finished, one of them came up to him and said "Yeah, I know they're tricks but it makes you think, doesn't it? There have to be forces we don't understand for these things to happen".

"No, no" said Derren "They're all just simple tricks, anybody could learn to do them" and he more or less told the guy how each trick was done.

"Yeah, you think you can explain it all, but there's more to it than you think. There's got to be something out there to explain it all" and he walked off, triumphant.

Bucolicky pains

2010-10-11T02:10:00.000-07:00

I had another embarrassing moment with a sheep yesterday.

It was one of those lovely Indian Summer days, with russet and red autumn tints in all directions, the early morning mists had burnt off, the sun was warm and there was an orchard full of rosy apples to be picked. I took out my large basket and my long ladder, climbed into the tallest apple-tree, and settled into a comfortable fork, having a gentle muse about the meaning of life, where's it all leading to, will String Theory explain everything in the Universe, does it matter that David Cameron is beginning to go bald, is it fair to cut child benefits, is Nigella really as insatiable as she looks, and so on...... Every now and again, I plucked an apple and added it to my apron pouch. The birds were singing, there was no pressure, this was the most perfect of worlds. If this was bucolic, I liked it. I did briefly wonder about the derivation of the word bucolic, as is my wont (to save you looking it up, I can tell you it relates to things pastoral, and comes from the Greek boukolikos, a herdsman, bous being the Greek for an ox). Nothing to do with colic from eating too many green apples.

This bit of trivia seemed very appropriate,since by this time I was aware that a few sheep were clustering around the tree, pushing each other aside to get at the fallen apples which I'd accidentally dislodged. As a trainee shepherd I also knew that if sheep eat too many apples it discombobulates their digestive system, with predictable results for the cleanliness of my orchard. So I shouted at them and threw a couple of apples at them to scare them away. Big mistake! It caused a frenzy of pushing and shoving and my ladder was sent flying.

So there I was, up a creek without a paddle, nobody within hailing distance and no sheep smart enough to put the ladder back in place for me to climb down.

There's always a solution to dilemmas if you're clever enough. My problem was that I wasn't clever enough. I sat and thought, and mused a bit, and thought a bit more, and then remembered that my wife had gone to Bristol for the whole day and wouldn't be back for lunch. When she did get back at 7 p.m., she wouldn't expect me to be sitting up a tree in the gloaming, she'd just start ringing round the neighbours, then various casualty departments and then the police.

There was a time, about 40 years ago, when I'd just have climbed down to the lowest branch, hung from it by my arms and dropped cat-like to my feet, Britain's answer to Johnny Weissmuller (or Johnny Depp in today's parlance).

I have now discovered that cat-like dropping to my feet is not one of my retained talents. I can still do 'sack of potatoes and multiple bruises' though.

Ouch! Bloody sheep!

What is a man?

2010-10-10T15:23:00.000-07:00

A feminist friend of mine tells me I have got the creation story all wrong (Bloody Awesome Sept 4th).

It seems that contrary to popular belief, Eve was there first, and one day she called to God to let him know she was not satisfied with life. She had a wonderful garden and more apples than she could eat and the snake was friendly and kinda cute, but she was just not happy.

"In that case, Eve" saith the Lord, "I shall create a man to keep you company".

"What is a man?", asked Eve.

"He is a large muscular animal with an inflated idea of his own abilities and an inability to see your point of view, and he won't listen to you properly, and ....(We can skip the next few paragraphs, most girls can make it up for themselves)...but he's good at throwing balls and hunting animals and lighting barbeques and opening cans and he'll be fun in bed.

"Hmm!" said Eve, not really convinced, as cans hadn't been invented (and not really understanding the bed bit either).

"Just one other thing", said God, "Because of his enormous ego you'll have to let him think I made him first. That will be our little secret, you know, woman to woman"

Have you got it yet?

2010-10-08T02:26:00.000-07:00

It strikes me that cancer of the colon is a bit like digital TV. If you haven't got it yet, you will eventually. Actually about 20% of people get it and half of these die from it. The bowel cancer I mean. For TV the figures are higher, but you'll die of boredom instead of secondary spread, although middle-aged spread due to TV is very common too.

I chose the word 'digital' because there was a time when the only way to detect cancer of the colon was by pushing a finger into the nearest orifice, which since the colon is more than a metre long was usually a waste of time and plastic gloves. Then they invented the colonoscope, which was a thick rigid metal tube. Colonoscopy was like having a telescope shoved up your backside and this led to some very unsavoury jokes which I don't need to repeat here.

The flexible colonoscope was a bit better at getting to the bottom of things, since it went round the bend, and it had a camera on the end to photograph your polyps. That's important because 90% of colon cancers start in large polyps in the wall of the large bowel, and they can then be removed before they turn malignant. Barium enema had been the standard investigation for many years, but it was fairly unpleasant, and missed 40% of polyps. The latest development, C.T. colonography is much safer, less painful, and is guaranteed to show your polyps in a new light.

The small bowel is even more difficult to investigate, since it is around 6 metres long, is unstable and has lots of loops. They're tackling this now with a spiral enteroscope which has screw-like flanges which enable it to get a grip and crawl up inside your innermost parts. I thought you'd like to know that they use a gloopy liquid called 'Probe personal lubricant' which was originally developed for the pornographic film industry.

Once the clever doctors have identified the problem in the pipe they call in the plumbers to fix it. These consultant surgeons used to be larger-than-life characters like Sir Lancelot Spratt of 'Doctor in the House' who would boom, "Key hole surgery boy! We shall open her from here to here" with an expansive sweep of the arm as the patient fainted.

Nowadays surgeons are thoughtful chaps who just use 2 or 3 tiny holes to poke their robotically controlled instruments inside. The ultimate goal is to avoid scars altogether since only natural orifices will be used. Tonsillectomy via the vagina is their target.

All my tasteless medical student jokes about plastic surgeons seem to be coming true!

A medical disaster

2010-10-07T01:43:00.000-07:00

One of the problems with being a retired doctor is that ageing friends still ask for your advice about medical matters, but Medicine changes so rapidly that it's hard to keep up, even when you're working at it full time. It can make you appear stupid if for example you're a dermatologist who has never used laser therapy, or you're a general surgeon who knows little about 'key-hole surgery'.

So it is a real joy when younger colleagues lay on a day's lectures on 'Recent Advances' for the Retired Consultant's Club, as they did at my local teaching hospital recently.

How things change when you've not been back for a while! We knew where all the car parks should be of course, but they'd somehow moved them all, and even worse filled them all, so that one drove round for 45 minutes or so looking for a space. We eventually parked somewhere in South Gloucestershire and then used a map to trek back to the hospital.

We remembered where all the different departments had been located but many of them are now building sites. The splendid new laboratories which were eventually built at a cost of several million pounds about 10 years ago have for some reason already been pulled down and something else is being built in their place. Offices for target administrators I expect.

But the consultants who gave the lectures were fantastic. Modern technology is scary though! And that's just the Power-point presentations.

When I was a lad we had blackboards and some of our most eminent Professors seemed to have developed a technique where they turned their backs to the audience to face the blackboard, then drew complicated chalk diagrams on the board with their right hand, which they then immediately erased with their left hand, meanwhile muttering to themselves in a low monotone. No wonder so many of us 'signed in' and then quietly left the lecture-theatre as soon as the Prof's back was turned. Some lecturers were up to that trick however. They posted a porter at the door whose job was to keep the register of attendees, then at the appointed time he locked the door to deny access to late-comers, and to prevent those inside from leaving.

It's very different now. The various buttons and knobs which control the lights, dual projection slides, videos, computers etc. make the control panel of a Jumbo-jet look simple. This does cause its own problems however.

There was a time when there were only 7 wrong ways to put a slide in a projector (upside down, on its side, reversed etc) but there's much more scope for disaster now.

One of the speakers began in fine style, smiling pleasantly as he said he'd never previously had the pleasure of addressing such a dense audience. We chuckled dutifully, although it would have been funnier if it had been less true. He then confidently switched the equipment on and when nothing happened he fiddled about, panicked and finally had to ask the audience to help him. It took 3 people 15 minutes of trying different combinations of the 20 or so leads and 30-odd switches before they got it right.

Never mind, it wasn't as bad as my effort when I was an Assistant Lecturer in Medicine in Edinburgh. The main lecture theatre then was an amphitheatre with very steeply sloping sides and wooden benches, and in the very centre of the steep slope was the projector, which had two carbon rods. These would only work to spark an arc-light if they were adjusted to the correct distance apart, but fortunately I had previously been shown how to undertake this delicate task.

The visiting speaker was a very distinguished cardiac surgeon from USA, and I had been delegated to shepherd him to the lecture theatre and to be responsible for showing his slides. These were in a box and he pointed out to me that they were not numbered but obviously it was essential to keep them in the right order. Moreover they had to be put back in exactly the same order as he was going to give the same lecture at several other medical centres throughout Britain.

We duly reached the lecture theatre, and the place was absolutely jam-packed with the glitterati of Edinburgh academia. I showed the speaker the switches at the podium and ascended the steep stairs to the level of the projector, carrying the precious box of slides. I had to struggle past a row of seated people to reach the projector and then I put the slides down on a small shelf while I twiddled the knobs to light up the carbon arc.

As I bent to my task somebody knocked the open box of slides off its shelf and they clattered noisily down several rows of seats. Of course people stood up to look for them and there was the sound of crunching glass in all directions.

I tried hari-kari but the surgeons resuscitated me, although several voted against it.

A place of mystery

2010-10-06T01:40:00.000-07:00

The Indian Sub-continent has always been a place of mystery and wonder, never less so than today, where it seems that they are holding the Commonwealth Games and are intending to lay the athletics track on the same day that the races are run.

They'll have to work terribly fast to stay ahead of the sprinters. The street-sweepers I've seen in Delhi wouldn't be up to it. They work at a leisurely pace and just move the dust from one place to another. But maybe this is a well-planned economy measure? Perhaps the track-layers will lay the red sand on one side of the track and as the last runner crosses each patch they'll sweep it up into buckets and nip smartly over to the other side of the circuit and lay it for the approach of the front runners who've had to go the long way round. It will be awfully tiring for them in the 10,000 metres though.

I think the wonder and the mystery works both ways. I had a phone call yesterday from a very pleasant young man who told me his name was David. I wouldn't dispute that but his Indian accent suggested he might also have had another name. He was very interested in my energy providers. I told him I recommended honey sandwiches.

No,no, he meant did I get my gas and electricity from the same supplier?

I explained to him that we don't have gas and electricity in our house.

"Oh, so you don't have gas, but who provides your electricity?"

"Well, we manage without electricity."

"Oh, (pause) but how do you run your television and your lights and your computers?"

"Well we have no TV or computer and we have candles at night."

"But how do you run your fan?"

That's when I knew for sure that he was calling from India.

"We have a punkah-wallah"

Only then did he know for sure that I was pulling his plonker.

Looking good

2010-10-03T03:04:00.000-07:00

People who really care what they look like need to know about skin-care.

The British Association of Dermatologists recently launched their own new beauty-brand called 'Ultimate Skin Care'. The product was marketed in a snazzy gold jar by Kindred, an agency known for its message-based marketing strategy, and the House of Fraser kindly allowed the product to be show-cased in the beauty hall of their prestigious Oxford Street store.

Each jar of 'Ultimate Skin Care' contained only a small mirror and instructions on how to carefully check the skin for signs of sun damage and possible pre-malignant changes.

The message is, don't waste your money on expensive moisturisers and nourishing creams, just stay out of the sun. My wife did that and she looks fantastic for (censored).

Of course, most people don't do that, so if you can't be good, be careful. Follow the Australian advice to 'Slip on a T-shirt, Slap on a hat and Slop on the sun-block'.

At least the British Association of Dermatologists know what they're talking about. I'm less confident about the scientific brains behind some other products on the market.

Delta Laboratories, for example, specializes in 'cosmetic formulations'. One of the products listed on their website at www.bit.ly/specialingredient is "Placental extract, vegetable or animal". Now which vegetables have a placenta, I wonder?

I suspect the British Association of Dermatologists is wasting its time. Beauty creams, like beautiful shoes, are essential for the female psyche. Some time ago my friend's wife pointed out to him that they had an overdraft and she made him promise to economize on his sizeable drinks bill. After a couple of months he noticed that though his drinks bill had drastically reduced, new beauty products were still cluttering up their bathroom. Not being a New Man (i.e. not yet deconstructed and reconstructed), and being in fact a brave Old Man, he felt he had to mention this discrepancy.

"Oh darling" she said "You don't want me to give up using beauty products do you? They're just to make me look beautiful for you".

"Yeah? What do you think the booze was for?"

I told you he was brave.

What's wrong with modern Britain

2010-10-01T13:47:00.000-07:00

One of the many things I may never understand is the female obsession with shoes. I don't think I'm the only man who is puzzled by this.

A few months ago, two of my male friends, both retired Professors, showed me a job-advert in the Guardian for a post-doctoral Senior Research Fellow to work in a British University to study the sociology of women's shoes. The advert was couched in the unique impenetrable jargon of sociologists, but so far as we could gather the intention of this 3 year project was to "explore issues of embodiment using focus groups to look at things through the lens of footwear". Glass slippers maybe? Clearly a burning issue.

The plan appeared to be for the Research Fellow to accompany women on shopping trips, making video-recordings of them choosing and wearing their shoes, asking them to take photographs of their shoe-collection, and "keep a diary of their shoe experiences". The Fellow would also carry out three qualitative interviews with each of the women to explore the part that shoes play in their everyday lives, how old shoes bring back memories of past experiences, how buying, storing and wearing shoes contributes to women's sense of who they are, and "what they are all about".

My two friends and I guffawed at this, even though it was sad to think that money was being spent in this way when sensible science departments were being closed down for lack of funds.

We were so amused by this advert that we decided that, since we all had doctorates and had a long experience of writing research grant applications, we should all three of us apply for the post, using fictitious female names. We felt confident that we could provide what they seemed to be looking for, namely enthusiasm, obscurantism, flannel, and verbosity. The hope was that we would all get as far as the interview stage, and then we would each turn up for the interview in drag, wearing wigs and refusing to give our age, gender,or sexual orientation, as is politically correct. We had great fun trying to envisage the expressions on the faces of the interviewing panel as the three 'lady' candidates minced in, one after the other, on improbably high heels, of the type which I believe a certain Ms. Greer described as F**k-Me shoes. Even if one of us was offered the post, the other two could then complain they were turned down because of the panel's institutional ageism, sexism or homophobia. Should look good in the newspapers!

We never did it of course, partly because of the sheer amount of dreary paperwork involved in filling in modern application forms, and partly because so many women we told of our plan said "No, this is a great research idea, its very important to us women". Really?

I'd almost forgotten all about it until I noticed a newspaper article on Sept. 22nd reporting the results of an entirely different research project from Northumbria University which had studied men's reaction to women in high-heels. I don't know how long the research took or what it cost, but they discovered that, wait for it... men don't notice what shoes women are wearing.

Of course they don't, you dimwits, they never get that far down.

No wonder the country's going to the dogs!

Lucky for some

2010-10-01T02:11:00.000-07:00

I suppose we can't really complain about crime in our little village when you hear about the dreadful happenings in other parts of the world.

I was hearing from my friend Richard the other day about a promising young footballer from Iraq who'd been brought over to England and signed up by one of the Premier League clubs. After sitting on the bench for a few months he was given his big chance to play for the last 20 minutes against Man. United.

He was sensational, scored two goals in ten minutes.

When he came off the pitch, he naturally rang home to tell his Mum of his amazing success.

She seemed less than elated. "Aren't you pleased for me Mum, is there something wrong? "

"I should say there is! Your father was shot in the street last night, your sister was gang-raped and beaten this morning and your young brother was caught dealing in drugs this afternoon".

"Oh, Mum I'm so sorry!"

"You should be sorry, it's your bloody fault we moved to Liverpool in the first place."

Lock up your compost

2010-09-30T01:19:00.000-07:00

Our village is a mercifully quiet backwater, and untoward events are rare, but things may be changing.

First we had the invasion of the atheists, and now we've had burglars. It started several weeks ago when the local Garden Centre had its perimeter wires cut one night, so obviously a planned professional job, and they took (wait for it)......several bags of compost!

The following week a man was disturbed one evening trying to break into one of our neighbour's garden sheds and he escaped over the back fence. Nothing was lost, but we wondered why ten sheep were in our garden the next day. It was because he had also cut our wire fence and the electric fence, ready for a quick get-away across the fields. If he hadn't been disturbed he might have got away with several empty plant-pots as well as a half empty bag of compost!

I thought this was all quite amusing until he came to our shed the following week in broad daylight and nicked a hedge-cutter and a strimmer. Ah well, that's what insurance is for. And the blonde lady police-person was rather attractive. But now I'm having to spend hours marking things and reinforcing doors and fitting extra bolts etc. Its worse than the grouting.

All this has given them something to talk about in the pub.

My favourite comment so far came when the old fellow in the corner emptied his glass, wiped his mouth and said "Ah, things bain't what they were! Oi remember the time when oi could go into town wi' two quid, and oi could come home wi' a 'alfpound of butter, a pot o' jam, pound o' bacon, forty cigarettes, an ounce o' baccy, and a box o' chocolates,...you couldn't do that now.....too many bloody security cameras".

Do looks count?

2010-09-28T04:10:00.000-07:00

Where did it all go wrong? My career as a television star, I mean.

I realized there was an image problem with my role in the televised thalidomide debate (Sept.27, Baying for Blood), as the audience were so obviously keen to lynch me and burn the studio down, but I didn't at first see why a personable young man like myself shouldn't eventually have a lucrative TV career, perhaps having cosy chats on a couch with, say, Felicity Kendall or Fiona Bruce (except she was still at school then). Move over Colin Firth (although he was also a schoolboy at that time). OK then, Erroll Flyn.

I should have known there was a problem with my image following my first televised appearance in about 1968. My Professor had been asked to make a programme about various forms of hair loss, and so I, as the bright young spark and general dogsbody of the Department, had been asked to gather together suitable patients and demonstrate the various features of their different diseases in the clinic, whilst my Professor spoke about the science of hair follicles from the studio.

This was clearly my big chance. At that time several doctors like Charles Fletcher had already become famous for presenting medical documentaries, and I could clearly see the potential for scientific stardom ahead. Think Howard Winston, Richard Dawkins, Brian Cox and many others in more recent years. I knew I was to be the star of the show because the crew had been following me around and filming me for days on end, from every conceivable angle, distant and close-up, as I dropped my pearls of medical wisdom. I knew that I just had to demonstrate my avuncular bedside manner, keep my good profile to the camera, exhibit my occasional shafts of wit, and I'd be made for life.

In those days television was not available in all households, and my mother had invited several neighbours in to watch her son, the famous doctor and television star, astound the world.

The great day came. The titles rolled, the programme was introduced, my Professor did his talking head bit and then the patients were introduced one by one. Then we had close-ups of their various bald patches, with an occasional glimpse of a hand (mine) parting the hair to show the distinctive 'exclamation mark' hairs or the scaly patches or the blue scars or whatever. This was accompanied by the voice-over of some twit with a dreadful monotonous whining Northern accent who thankfully never appeared on-screen. Unfortunately that was me!

Well, at least my mother's neighbours saw what my hands looked like.

To paraphrase Ali-G, "Is it cos I'se ugly?".

Baying for blood

2010-09-27T11:29:00.000-07:00

I began my debate with the vicar (The Big Debate) by saying that I was reminded of the story of Daniel in the lion's den, but it wouldn't be clear until question-time whether I or the vicar was to play the part of Daniel. I needn't have worried. There were only pussy-cats in the audience and the vicar and I were as friendly as a couple of Milibands. How long their brotherly love will persist is, however, debatable.

I had been nervous at the outset, since I was going to be critical of the Papal Edicts on birth-control, abortion etc. (remember that "Truth from a Divine Source is infallible") and I knew that Pontiffs have a bad reputation with regard to the punishment of heretics. Fortunately there were more pontificators than fire-brands in the audience.

Pontifex is a funny word isn't it? Nothing to do, it seems, with little flat black liquorice cakes made in Yorkshire. It seems that in Ancient Rome a pontifex was a member of a college of priests that had control of religion, their chief being known as the Pontiff. To be pontifical is thus to be pompously dogmatic, and a pontifical mass is nothing to do with a lorry load of Pomfret-cakes but it is a mass celebrated by a bishop wearing his full vestments. And you all know that the Latin pons, means 'a bridge', and facere means 'to build', hence the Pontiff is a bridge-builder, although I incline towards the alternative philological derivation of the old Umbrian word puntis meaning 'stupid bastard'.

Speaking of scary debates though, nothing was worse than my acceptance of a flattering invitation to take part in a televised debate in Birmingham on the modern use of the notorious drug thalidomide. Its use in women of child-bearing age had of course been banned many years previously but I and a few other dermatologists had found it useful to treat several uncommon diseases in men or post-menopausal women. Behcet's disease, for example causes painful vaginal ulceration, strokes and other complications, and it is potentially fatal as well as extremely painful. At that time (mid-1980s) no other treatment, even including large doses of steroids, was helpful for Behcet's disease.

Having had make-up applied and been briefly introduced to the television presenter, I was led to my chair on the front row of the audience, where I was somewhat dismayed to see that the majority of the audience was composed of young adults with vestigial arms and/or legs. In my naivete I'd assumed I was going to talk about my research with a group of doctors and sufferers from Behcet's disease or leprosy.

Too late, the cameras rolled and I realized I was the only doctor present, and my role was to represent all the 'power-crazed, immoral, greedy, drug-firm scientists' who had caused the thalidomide tragedy in the first place, and far worse, I was a doctor and I was still prescribing it. In vain did I try to explain that the thalidomide disaster had happened in 1962, when I was still a junior medical student, and it had only recently been re-introduced under special licence for dermatology consultants to use as a last resort, and only for men or post-menopausal women, and only when no other treatment had worked, and the drug was only to be given to responsible patients who could keep it in a locked cabinet.

One female patient with Behcet's disease spoke in my support saying thalidomide had "given her back her life". We were both lucky to escape with our lives. The howling and baying for our blood would have put a Jerry Springer audience to shame. 'Armless they were not.

So that's why I had no worries about standing in front of assorted vicars and telling them there is no God. In my opinion.

The Big Debate

2010-09-26T03:20:00.000-07:00

Well, the Big Event (Debate in Village Hall- 'Did Man Make God') has come and gone; no blood was shed and everybody escaped unharmed and happy. We had no idea how many people would turn up, and the population of our village is only about 300 but in the end we had a congregation of 60. The Vicar was pleased since he normally addresses a congregation of about 15 people.

The debate was good-humoured and sensible, since the audience included a number of philosophers, biochemists, headmasters and assorted clerics, as well as the regular church-goers and some village agnostics who normally keep quiet.

The two most aggressive arguments from the audience came from the opposing ends of the spectrum of views.

The religious aggression came from a man said that in his view there can be no such thing as an atheist, as you can't prove there is no God, and moreover all the most wicked people like Ghengis Khan, Hitler and Stalin were all atheists. Hmm! Just run that past me again. On second thoughts, don't.

The aggression from the atheist end came from a man who began by asking the vicar if he believed his personal God is All-Powerful and Benevolent. The vicar sensed a trap, and tried to avoid the issue by saying it depends on what you mean by All-Powerful and Benevolent. I sympathized with the vicar, as I am very familiar with that sensation of intellectual unease, having been questioned in court by barristers when I have acted as an expert medical witness. They have a nasty habit of asking you a string of simple questions with easy and perfectly obvious answers,and having led you round the houses in this way, they introduce a string of different but devious questions, before pointing out that you now appear to be contradicting what you said earlier. The vicar could see that this line was going to lead to difficult questions about cruelty in Nature, human suffering etc. and tried to side-step, but his tormentor wouldn't let go, until he had to admit that of course God is All-Powerful but He doesn't have to be all the time, so sometimes He isn't and of course He is Benevolent, but He doesn't have to be all the time and sometimes He seems not to be. To us humans, who don't understand. The atheist agreed he didn't understand the vicar, which was understandable.

I think I emerged relatively unscathed, unless you count being compared to Hitler and Ghengis Khan as a slight scathe. I did have an awkward time afterwards though, when the debate was over. Three young Catholic ladies approached me and asked for my medical opinion about miracles. I assured them that in 50 years of medical practice I had never seen any recovery that could be described as truly miraculous. St. Winifride, for example, in Wales had her head chopped off and it reattached itself simply by prayer. Today's miracles are more akin to the American pastor who prayed to the long-dead Cardinal Newman for relief from his back pain, and after an operation which is known to relieve back-pain, the back-pain disappeared, so now Newman can be beatified and is well on his way to Sainthood. The three young Catholic ladies seemed surprised at my lack of medical experience since all 3 of them had personally witnessed unrelated miracles.

As the vicar and I both know, you win some, you lose some!

Our debate did make people think though, and it does seem to have bonded the village. We both recommend it.

A new approach to infertility

2010-09-25T09:07:00.000-07:00

Knowing of my impending discussion with the Vicar, some of my friends have kindly been sending me 'suitable' jokes.

The Catholics always seem to be fair game,since the Pope's Edicts are founded on the idea that 'Truth from a Divine Source is Infallible' and so birth control is wicked. Ha,ha,ha!

Be that as it may, Father Donelly met Mary O'Connell, whose wedding he had sanctified some two years earlier. He wondered why there had been no babies, and asked whether there was a problem. "I couldn't say father, but we're doing the right thing and no babies have appeared yet" (You can do your own Irish accent).

"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that Mary, my child, but I'm visiting Our Holy Father in Rome next week and I shall light a candle for you"

Eight years went by and Father Donelly met Mary again, surrounded by her ten sceaming kids (two sets of twins and six singletons).

"Are these all yours?" asked his Reverence. "They are that. Father".

"Marvellous, I must congratulate your husband, is he around?". "He is not, Father, he's gone to Rome to blow the f*cking candle out"

Reigning cats and dogs

2010-09-22T02:08:00.000-07:00

Since my mind is currently filled with matters theological, this seems as good a time as any to tell you how God made Dog.

It seems that Adam and Eve were lonely and were being their usual whingeing, complaining human selves (see 'Sick Notes' by G.P. Dr Tony Copperfield, yesterday's Post), so God said "I will create a companion for you, and regardless of how selfish or childish or unlovable you may be, this companion will always love you as I do, and will always accept your many faults".

And so God created Dog, a reflection of his own name.

After a while an Angel came to God and said, "Lord, Adam and Eve have become filled with pride. They believe they are worthy of adoration, because Dog worships them".

And so God decided to create another companion for them, to remind them of their limitations. He wished to teach them that although Dog seemed to worship them, because they appeared Omnipotent and Omniscient (they often answered his prayers when he begged for a biscuit, they could open doors, and they punished him when he chewed expensive handbags), they were not in fact God.

And God created Cat.

And when Adam and Eve gazed into the eyes of Cat, they recognized that they were not the Supreme Beings on Earth.

And God was pleased.

And Dog wagged his tail.

And Cat didn't give a shit one way or the other.

Just a little reminder of the well-known fact that Dogs have owners and Cats have staff.

Sick Notes

2010-09-20T12:34:00.000-07:00

Still on a medical note, let me recommend a new book by a chum of mine, who writes under the pseudonym of Dr. Tony Copperfield (Sick Notes- True Stories from the Front Lines of Medicine, pub. Monday Books, 2010, ISBN 978-1-906308-14-8).

This really tells it like it is from the G.P.s viewpoint, and though 'Dr. Copperfield' comes across as a really cynical character, it strikes me as being very true to life as well as very amusing. Read this and you'll understand why GPs sometimes seem less than perfect. If you're thinking of becoming a medical student, then don't read this. You will immediately switch your University application to a less demanding and pleasanter course such as 'Waste Disposal with Dancing' (currently being offered by Northampton University; I'm thinking of going for that one myself, I can picture myself pirouetting down the middle of a hospital ward in my leotard, carrying the bedpans above my head).

A few examples from the B,C,D section Dr. Copperfield's glossary of medical acronyms (MedSpeak) will give you the flavour of the thing:

BAPS: British Association of Plastic Surgeons (How naive are they?)
BJGP: British Journal of General Practice. A monthly publication where GPs who wear sports jackets without irony pontificate about 'holistic care' and the patient's 'inner journey'.
CBT: Clot in a bow tie-a derogatory term for hospital consultant, used by angry GPs. Very angry GPs sometimes resort to the alternative, c**t in a bow tie.
CME: Continuing Medical Education. The requirement for doctors to attend promotional lectures while eating curry or stale vol-au-vents, both sponsored by the manufacturer of a new wonder drug, in the name of education.
DBI: Dirt bag index. A rough and ready estimation of the number of hours since a patient's last bath or shower calculated by multiplying the number of tattoos by the number of missing teeth.
DKDC: Don't know don't care. There comes a point, usually at the end of a 25-minute consultation with a heartsink patient about their peculiar aches and pains and their funny turns, when the doctor realizes that he doesn't know what's causing them and has frankly given up trying to make sense of the story. A prescription for vitamin tablets often follows.

Read the book.You'll learn a lot from it. It reminded me of the horror of front-line medicine, especially the DBI and the DKDC. You're not a real doctor until you've been called to certify death in a tramp brought into casualty and as you wrinkle your nose, open the layers of clothing and lean over the cold body to listen to the heart, you feel the fleas climbing up your arm to find a better host. Or been called to a house at 3 am to see a woman who is groaning in a locked toilet because she is constipated and hasn't 'been' for 24 hours.

When to use Allo.

2010-09-19T14:50:00.000-07:00

The Pope's visit and my ongoing brush with religion has perhaps led me to neglect my secular duty to give you the 'Doctor's View' of a recent interesting medical advance.

It seems that a small dose of the anti-depressant drug Prozac has been shown to prevent pre-menstrual tension (PMT). I wonder why that should remind me of yesterday's Post, entitled the Big Fight? The sex hormone progesterone increases just before menstruation and this decreases the level of another steroid hormone called allopregnanolone (known as Allo)which has a soothing effect and makes people feel calm. Prozac (fluoxetine) raises the level of Allo in the blood stream and thus decreases the symptoms of PMT. This might be another of those drugs, such as Ritaline for hyperactive kids, or Rohypnol-alcohol cocktails for young women, which benefit other people rather than the person taking the drug.

On a lighter note, a study by UCLA Dept. of Psychiatry has shown that the type of man which a woman finds attractive can depend on where she is in her menstrual cycle. For example, in mid-cycle, when she is ovulating, she is likely to be attracted by large, powerful men with rugged and masculine features. However just before menstruation or during the menopause, she prefers a small man with duct tape over his mouth, a kitchen-knife lodged in his chest and a hot poker up his arse.

It should not be necessary to point out that this new use of the word Allo to refer to a calming hormone should not be confused with other uses of the word, as in the phrase "'Allo sailor" and "Aloe Vera" which can occasionally lead to embarrassment in either sex.

This confusion might account for the sad tale of the policeman who came home early one day and found his wife in bed with three sailors. "'Allo, 'allo, 'allo!" he said flexing his knees and twirling his truncheon in accordance with the guidelines given in the Pantomime Police Handbook. His wife merely gave him a little wave and a coy smile and said "Aren't you going to say Hullo to me, darling?"

The Big Fight

2010-09-18T01:58:00.000-07:00

I may be a bit busy for the next few days.

The size of the congregation in our local church has apparently been decreasing steadily in recent years, and so our Vicar, a very pleasant and open-minded man, has suggested that we might have a public debate in the Village Hall next Saturday evening with the title 'Did Man Make God?'. I think his idea is that he normally 'preaches to the converted' (the elderly converted at that), and a few younger floating voters might drift back into the pews if they think about things properly.

The Hawking book and the visit of the Pope have occupied the media considerably in the last few weeks, and so religious faith is quite a 'sexy' subject all of a sudden. We're expecting a fair number of assorted clergy, fundamentalists and humanists to turn up as well as a few uncommitted blood-thirsty locals who like watching intellectual punch-ups, so I'll have to get into shape.

My debate with the vicar will I'm sure, be fine, as I've had several long and interesting discussions with him and we both enjoy our little jousts, but I'm not at all sure about the questions I'll get from some of the local 'muscular Christians'.

I had a warm-up bout with one of them recently, and he said to me "If everybody thought like you, everybody in the world would think like Hitler". He couldn't see anything offensive with what he'd implied, so I liberated my inner infant and said "And if everybody thought like you, everybody in the world would think like the members of the Spanish Inquisition". You can see it's not going to be high-powered philosophy!

The next day he sent me with a copy of the Church Times, with an article headed "Why Hawking is not far from God" written by Keith Ward, an Oxford Professor of Theology who was formerly a philosopher who taught Logic. Keith Ward now claims that Hawking believes the Universe came from Nothing, which apparently shows Ward that there is a God. God give me strength!

If ever you're feeling apathetic and want to get incensed, try Ward's book "Why there almost certainly is a God". The cover claims its a "devastating critique" of Dawkins. You can have my copy!

One of my medical friends recently sent me an E-mail about Cardinal Newman's beatification (many doctors are querying the medical miracle, relief of back pain by prayer to Newman) and said that rather than see Newman beatified, he would like to see the Pope atheistified. I know I really shouldn't, but I'm afraid I was compelled to point out that Catholic priests are all anti-atheist, so that would make the Pope a consultant anatheist- "Just count to 5 and then you'll feel this little prick and....".

I just can't resist them. They give me so much pleasure and it does no real harm (the cheap jibes that is, what did you think I meant?).

This medical reference and religious irreverance was highly relevant because my friend, who generally speaks in code, implied that he might have a bowel cancer which will have to be removed shortly, but as he said, a semi-colon will be better than a full stop. I couldn't resist asking him if he had to keep 'dashing', and if so, how hyphen?

High jinks in the high hurdles.

2010-09-17T02:14:00.000-07:00

To support my hypothesis that old age is not for wimps, I recently had an unpleasant experience.

It so happened that my wife had been very unfortunate with a frisky underground car park. One of the concrete pillars had unexpectedly leapt out at her and crashed into the front near-side wing. Probably attracted by the chatter of her female passenger who'd just bought a super top in a sale.

The man at the Auto-Body-Repair Shop said he'd lend me a courtesy car, and so he did. It was quite a nice car in some ways, apart from the rattles, the rust and the black smoke, but it was very small and had a ridiculously low bucket seat, the type that has a 6 inch ledge all round your thighs. With great difficulty I managed to manouevre myself into this ground-level driving seat, with my legs sticking horizontally forward into the well. I drove off, noticing as I did so that the car wouldn't go into second gear, and shortly afterwards, that the petrol gauge registered zero.

I pulled onto the next garage forecourt, parking close to the pump and another car then pulled up close behind me almost immediately, and since there was already a car immediately in front of me I was completely boxed in.

I managed to open the door slightly and tried to manouevre my right leg out through the space, but I've had a knee replacement and my leg only bends to 90 degrees. At this stage, I got cramp in my right thigh. Eventually, after considerable excrutiation, I managed to get that leg back into the car and realized I'd have to manouevre my bum out of the bucket seat and push it way over to the left into the passenger seat so I could get then straighten both legs on the driver's seat, lean backwards and push them both out together through the narrow gap, hoping the body would then follow naturally, limbo-style.

This was not easy. Particularly when I felt a sharp pain in the aforementiond bum and remembered that this was an old car with one of those long metal parking brakes that sticks up vertically. Being incredibly brave and stoical I merely grimaced and carried on straightening the right leg. At this point being in the 'high hurdles' position, I developed severe cramp in the left leg, causing a convulsive jerk which moved my body weight into just the right position for the hand-brake to change its position from buttock to orifice.

I suddenly remembered my student days, when a man with a sheepish smile would occasionally be brought into Casualty with his Willy stuck in a milking machine. Well accidents happen, don't they?

So there I was, stuck in this death-trap in an unusual yoga position, with severe cramp in both legs and a hand-brake trying to make its way up my Jacksie, thinking, "They'll have to send for the fire-brigade to cut me free, this is not going to look good in Casualty!"

But that kind of a day is normal for old people.

A friend of mine woke up recently and his wife said "Don't touch me, I'm dead".
"How do you know?" asked the husband. "Well I can't feel any pains", she said.

Playing at grannies and grandads.

2010-09-15T02:11:00.000-07:00

I've just returned from Derbyshire where I attended a School Reunion, sixty years on since our first day at Grammar School. It was a bit disappointing at first because none of my friends had attended; they'd all sent their grandparents along in their place.

After that disappointment, things improved considerably and I was very pleased to be told by one of the tastier grannies that she'd fancied me something rotten when I was 16, but nothing had happened. Now she bloody tells me!

To be fair, I was a bit slow in these matters and I expect it was my own fault that I didn't notice the dropped glove or whatever it was she was prepared to drop for me. I was busy mending my bicycle most of the time, or running round ploughed fields training for the cross-country team, and anyway I recall that I was definitely saving myself for Marilyn Monroe, who was at that time wasting her assets on an elderly playwright called Arthur Miller, who obviously wouldn't be around for very long, since he was over 35.

Although I do distinctly remember a film where Brigitte Bardot, in a tent, stripped to her bra and panties and climbed into a sleeping bag to join her boyfriend. I think she'd have been in with a chance. I recall discussing this scene with a mate and we agreed the lucky boy-friend's excitement would have been 'intents' (geddit? We were like that in those days).

So, what an opportunity I missed! Though the would-be-girl-friend-turned-granny reassured me that actually she and all her friends were virgins when they left school. There was no Pill in those days, and decent boys who 'got girls into trouble' had to marry hurriedly, leave school and start work in the steel mill or down a coal mine ('darn t'pit', in our dialect).

The type of frank conversation we had is one of the few advantages of old age, since you can both now have a laugh about it with none of the embarrassment, guilt or toe-curling humiliation that was such a regular and inevitable part of our adolescence.

Another advantage of reaching retirement age is that you can have a glass of wine at lunch time followed by a lovely snooze.

Apart from that its all downhill.

Now for the hard part

2010-09-15T01:52:00.000-07:00

I'm still droning on about publication today.

How times change! As a completely unknown Assistant Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh in 1969 I had an idea for a book. So I wrote a short letter to E. & S. Livingstone (who later became Churchill-Livingstone, who became Longman, who begat Pearson and then I lost count) with my idea. A week later the secretary to the Managing Director, Mr. Henderson, rang me and asked if I could possibly find time to be Mr. Henderson's luncheon guest at a smart Edinburgh restaurant. You bet I could, even if only for the meal! In those days Assistant Lecturers earned half of nothing and drug firms didn't provide doctors with posh meals. So we had a pleasant meal with a bit of a chat and a bottle of wine and he offered me a contract. Two days later the written contract arrived in the post, I signed, job done.

A shrewd decision Mr. Henderson! Over the next 30 years they made a lot of money from my books.

But here and now, having written a book which several publishers have rejected, you eventually decide that at this rate death will precede fame, and having opted for self-publication, you will then have three choices:

1. Find a couple of printers who will give you quotations for however many copies you choose to fill your garage with. This is relatively painless providing you have the soft-ware and computer skills to prepare the manuscript in PDF format and know how to fit it on the chosen page-size of your book. If you can't do this yourself, you'll find a young person who can (usually for a price). Scientific photographs and diagrams can be tricky for all sorts of reasons, but novelists don't need to worry about that.
If you need an ISBN number you'll have to pay £111 for a batch of 10 numbers from Nielsen's, even though you only need one number. Without an ISBN number most bookshops will refuse to stock your book and it won't be listed by Amazon.com. so how will you ever market it? But then you'll be a publisher and you'll have to register your business with the tax man and give a copy to the British Library.

2. Sign up with a print-to-order firm such as Lulu (search the Internet and read the small print). This has the great advantage that there often no capital outlay, and you can order as few copies as you like, but it has the the great disadvantage that each copy costs much more to produce, so sending out review copies or giving copies to all your friends and relatives becomes expensive. They will also, on request, provide you with an ISBN but this puts the price up again, and this will also give them certain legal rights with regard to subsequent editions, foreign translations etc.

3. Find a vanity publisher who will do all the work for you (maybe even edit or ghost-write it if necessary) and will then produce a few copies for an astronomical fee. This is the recommended route for multi-millionaires, or those writers who cannot write.

Option one sounds good, but there is a surprising amount of leg-work involved, and printer's questions to be answered, but if you persevere it happens, and every 20 years or so somebody self-publishes a book and makes a good profit. Every week somebody self-publishes a book and makes a loss. However it is quite exciting when the delivery-van arrives and the large cartons containing stacks of your tome are unpacked. And your Mum is thrilled.

So far so good. The writing of a book is great fun. The work involved in the manuscript preparation, printing and binding is interesting but time-consuming and there's a lot to learn and many mistakes to be made. The marketing however is murder.

Read the Writers' Year-Book, they'll tell you. Count the number of friends you have, count the number of work-colleagues, count the near neighbours, count the people whose book you bought because you once met them, add them up, divide by two, add five and that's the number of copies you can more or less guarantee to sell.If you're a blogger you might add the number of your 'followers'. Apart from that its a lottery!

Beauty hints

2010-09-13T23:15:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow, children, I shall tell you how to self-publish your pearls of wisdom and live happily ever after, but it's a big subject and today the sun is shining and there are many apples to be picked (about a ton so far as I can see) and fences to be painted (about 300 yards of them).

But first, while we are on the subject of the difficulty of getting your work published, allow me a brief rant.

Why do the Editors of prestigious daily newspapers continually publish such drivel in the Health and Beauty sections of the weekend supplements? On 12th. Sept. for example, the Sunday Telegraph had the following question on page 77 of their 'Stella' magazine.

"I had a facial recently and was told that I had a lot of water retention in my face. I had noticed that my face had been looking very puffy of late and my cheekbones seem to have become a lot less pronounced. Is there anything I can do to prevent it?"

The Nutritional Therapist, Melanie Brown, said:
"It might be that you are a bit dehydrated, which encourages water retention. Try drinking two litres of water a day and cut out caffeine, alcohol and salty processed foods"

Call me a pompous old silly-billy, but that is the most stupid answer I have heard for a long time. Naomi Campbell could have done better. Or Wayne Rooney.

Not only is it twaddle, its dangerous twaddle. The lady might for example be retaining water because she had the nephrotic syndrome (a form of kidney failure). Two litres of water a day might then push her into heart failure and if she kept it up without further medical advice, because the 'dehydration'(facial swelling) was getting more severe, she could die.

There are at least another 10 or so causes of facial swelling, most trivial, some severe. Ask any dermatologist.

I've written to Editors about similar loony advice on many occasions, asking for a correction, pointing out that I am a Professor of Dermatology, I've done research on that particular subject and I've written chapters on it for medical textbooks. Have I ever had a reply or even an acknowledgement? No.

I apologize if this sounds sexist, but even intelligent and educated women sometimes seem to become gullible fools whenever they are given advice about beauty products.

If I tell somebody that I've noticed that their petrol tank is overflowing and petrol is leaking out on the road, they're quite sensible. They'll switch the pump off. But if I tell them that I'm a Nutritional Therapist and therefore they should try putting in another two litres because their car needs more petrol, my invaluable advice will immediately be worth publishing, for a fee, in a major newspaper.

I enrolled for some private language tuition once, and the obese lady who was teaching me kept having to break off to go into her kitchen to fetch more drinking water. She said this was because, being divorced, she was trying to get back into shape. To help her to achieve this laudable goal she had been told by her 'personal fitness trainer' who visited her at home, that she must avoid salt and drink 8 pints of cold water every day. I explained to her that the total blood volume is about 8 pints, and in a cool climate with no vigorous exercise, you only need 2 or 3 pints of fluid daily (tea, coffee, fruit juice, whatever). Any extra and you just pee it out. Fat doesn't normally come out in urine.

So did she take my advice and stop trying to kill herself by over-hydration and hyponatraemia. No. She hadn't paid £50 an hour for it you see.

Try again, and again, and...

2010-09-13T09:14:00.001-07:00

Ali's 'Comment' of 11.9.2010 requesting information about my book sales reminds me that in fact I have had 40 years' experience of the publishing industry, and since the 'blogosphere' seems to be well-provided with J.K. Rowling 'wannabees', a few comments about my books might be of general interest.

My first book, a medical textbook (Aids to Postgraduate Medicine), was published in 1970, and the first year's royalty provided enough cash to buy a Citroen Dyane car, a sort of sewing machine on 4 wheels. Before that I had travelled to work on a bicycle for several years and had then saved up to buy a clapped-out van for £105. Often I was late for work as I'd had to push the van. So the Citroen (£600)was a big improvement and I decided I liked this author lark.

Over the next 30 years or so I wrote 6 successful textbooks, 2 of which each sold about 10,000 copies each year for 20 years, went into 6 editions and were translated into several languages. I also edited 3 editions of a multi-author 4-volume textbook, and for 5 years I edited an international medical journal. I must have sold over half a million copies of my medical books over the years. By the end of my career medical publishers would regularly approach me and ask me if I'd kindly write a textbook for them.

So 10 years after retirement, I thought I'd have no trouble publishing a book on an important general subject. Wrong! You start all over again with a completely different set of publishers who have never heard of you.

So I too became a JK Rowling look-alike, except for my appearance. I refer of course to the mental anguish of being a rejected author. I struggled for a year to write the best book I could and then couldn't find a publisher. You'd think 'God' would be a bigger name than 'Harry Potter', but no dice, even though my book, like hers, deals with miracles and metaphysics as well as theoretical physics and prayers, not to mention aliens, psychology, nuns, priests and altruistic animals (no owls delivering letters though).

And in addition my book had one important new idea, namely that God exists only in the human mind, and the reason that so many hundreds of gods have been invented by so many people in so many different cultures for so many millennia (Prehistoric Bushmen, Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Israelites, Scandinavians, Aboriginal Australians, Native Americans, Inuit, West Coast weirdos etc) is because religion has survival value in Darwinian evolutionary terms. The study of the evolution of human behaviour (evolutionary psychology) explains why this is, and shows that apes become altruistic for biological rather than spiritual reasons.

Nobody seemed to care.

If you are an unkown would-be author, the 'Writers and Artists Yearbook' published annually will help you to discover who is likely to care about you the least. It also has very helpful articles from 'failed' authors such as J K Rowling who detail their agonizing route to the summit. And if you still don't believe there's stiff competition, go into Waterstone's and look around.

In my experience, publishers are of three types. The vast majority won't even look at manuscripts unless they are submitted to them by a literary agent. Its worth a trying to get a literary agent, but they are not interested in big ideas about atheism unless your name is Dawkins or Hawking. I suspect that some of them aren't even interested in literature, despite the job-title. They are interested in making money from established best-selling authors, or in finding the next young J.K. Rowling, who will then make them a million a year for the next 10 years. (Could it be YOU????). Elderly people writing about science, even with jokes, don't interest them. They will reply to you, .....eventually. In some cases after 6 months,..... when repeatedly prodded. And the answer will be NO, sometimes gracious, sometimes curt, but still NO.

The second type of publisher will deign to receive a manuscript from A.N. Unknown, but will return it unopened within 48 hours, apologizing that your book doesn't quite fit their list.

The third type keeps your book for 3 to 6 months and then returns it saying that it's very interesting and well-written and they would have been interested last year, but there are rather a lot of books on cosmology and popular science and evolutionary psychology in press at the moment, and what with the recession and all, they couldn't guarantee to make a decent profit, but don't give up, why don't you try another publisher?

Meanwhile science is marching on and if you wait much longer the book will need revising. I don't think either Jane Austen or Barbara Cartland had that trouble. Blushes and bosoms are fairly durable topics, and they either suffuse delicate cheeks or heave, as the case may be, in much the same way from one millennium to the next. Okay, they might tend to sag a bit in individual cases as the years go by, but their influence as movers and shakers is less than that of the Large Hadron Collider when it comes to making the earth move. In some ways.

So after a disappointing year or so, you think "Stuff it, I'll publish it myself". I know several 'niche' writers (medical historians for example) who publish their own books and triple their annual royalties, so they make six peanuts p.a. instead of two. But they get the satisfaction of seeing their book in print rapidly, choosing the cover design and the retail price, there's no agent or publishing house taking his cut, and the taxman considers the profit and loss accounts for a small business in a different way to an author's royalty. Husbands or wives can be employed in various tasks for a reasonable stipend for example, and you will obviously need store-rooms and delivery vehicles and computers and stationery and staff parties and the use of your imagination.

And there's always the possibility that your book on 'A historical survey of methods of administering clysters' will then become an airport best-seller and all the profit will be yours. My own book entitled 'Six Hundred Miseries-the seventeenth century womb' (no kidding, it was published by RCOG, London, 2005, ISBN no.1-904752-13-6) almost made it, and I have high hopes for my planned sequel 'The Wombless of Wimbledon -a D.I.Y. guide to hysterectomy'...OK that was a joke, but there are precedents. Ever heard of Virginia Woolf's 'Womb with a View'? Or Hemingway's 'For Womb the Bell Tolls'?

I'll tell you tomorrow how to self-publish.

Waiting for Godot

2010-09-11T08:40:00.000-07:00

Really tired now. Just come back from a 3 hour book-signing at Waterstone's.

Sounds great, doesn't it? The reality though is rather different.

First of all it took weeks and weeks to arrange; an appointment with the manager to discuss the book, then fill in these forms, then wait for approval from head office, wait a bit longer, ring up once a week for 4 weeks until head office had deigned to respond, then choose a suitable Saturday morning, but no dice... "I'm afraid somebody important is coming that week" (Nigella? Who She?), and the next (SAS Hero) So choose today. Lug very heavy box of new books from home to shop, no parking nearby, so arrive in a muck-sweat and exhausted. Need not have hurried as nothing happens for a long time.

Sit at small table with pile of books and wait. Smile at customers as they pass by my table. Make eye-contact. Feel very like Rowan Atkinson playing the part of a pillock.

Wait some more. Walk round store, return to table, sit down, yawn, make more eye-contact. No takers. You could see the punters thinking 'Uh oh! Elderly gentleman selling book with God in the title, may be dangerous religous fanatic or other unsavoury character so best avoided' "Rachel come away from that table darling".

At last, a young man takes an interest in my book. He's going to University soon to read Philosophy. Intelligent conversation ensues, hurrah! But he's only browsing today as he has no money. Takes the details anyway.

Than another young man takes an interest. His father is a vicar and would, it seems, be very interested in my views. If only he were here.

Then two middle-aged ladies appear from nowhere, pick up the book and buy a copy each, just like that, no questions asked.

Then another lady appears to be fascinated by the title. "Is it about Dogs?" "Not really, its more about Gods" I say. "Oh, what a pity" she says,and walks off.

By this time I am sincerely wishing that religious protesters had threatened to fire-bomb the building and exterminate me if I turned up for a book signing, so then I would have been safely at home, relaxing and drinking coffee, a la Tony Blair.

Maybe I should ask the manager for a copy of the Koran and ceremonially burn it?

Finally a young man with long hair and a badge proclaiming 'I love (heart-shape) furry' stood nearby for a while, then plucked up courage to approach me and ask me what I thought about animals and their spirituality.

"Well that's a very interesting question and my book does discuss it" I said, so then he told in some considerable detail that he has great empathy with animals and in fact they talk to him, and even wild animals that nobody can train become docile in his presence, and a robin once fluttered nearby until he followed it to its nest and its mate was hurt and the robin was asking for his help, but unfortunately the lady robin was beyond help, which he managed to convey to the male robin with body-language, and another time he was in a cage with a sea-eagle which could tear barbed wire apart with its talons and ripped men to shreds and when I woke up it was half an hour later and he was still there with yet another empathetic animal anecdote. Then we moved onto the question of previous civilizations and nuclear wars before the time of Christ and his extensive research on the subject of radio-active ruined cities. Next we had space-fiction adventures as described in the Bible (rocket-ships, jet-planes etc.) Finally, Hallelujah, we moved onto the reason for our little discussion which was his ambition to become a writer. He has written nine science fiction novels so far (the first when he should have been working for GCSE), all with very, very complicated and interlocking plots, but he doesn't want to approach a publisher until the plot cycle has burnt itself out. Let me know if you're interested.

Oh, and if you ever think about publishing an important book about religion ....don't.

Never hesitate to do a favour for a friend, or a bathroom tap.

2010-09-07T23:12:00.001-07:00

My wife is pleased with the progress I'm making with my Domestic Gods course. I de-stoned some plums only yesterday while she was out shopping. And cooked them! And I thought to take them off the Aga hot-plate after the plums had boiled over and covered the surface in bubbling, brown, smelly goo. Not immediately of course because the computer isn't in the kitchen and it takes a while for smells to travel. And its not a bad smell really......at first. It was a tad unpleasant by the time the smoke-alarm went off though, I must admit.

She's so pleased with my work in the kitchen that in return she's offered to take on some of the DIY jobs about the house, grouting and stuff, man's work really. I don't like to over-load her, but if it makes her happy, what can one do?

I'm not sure, but I think her sudden interest in DIY might be because I bought a 50kg. bag of ready-mixed mortar the other day and I took it out of the car boot and put it down for a few minutes while I got my keys out. I must have left it on the door-step and it seems the idiot mortar-manufacturer had put it in a paper-bag which isn't waterproof, so that when it rained in the night, the mortar set solid, still in the bag on the door-step. I'd forgotten all about it until the next morning.

I didn't know she'd fall over it, did I?

They're only bruises.

I'm not sure I should be encouraging her to get involved in this DIY thing though. My neighbour, the one with the lovely old house and the beautiful young wife, is good at DIY. He was re-hanging their bathroom door the other day and he decided he needed a new hinge, so since his wife was just going into town to do some shopping he asked her to call at the hardware shop and pick up a new hinge.
In the hardware shop she asked the price of a set of beautiful bathroom taps which caught her eye. The assistant said "I'm afraid those taps are very expensive because they're plated in real gold. They price is £2,500". "Oh dear", she replied, downcast, "That's way out of my price range".
So the man went into the storeroom to get the hinges, and as he went he said over his shoulder "Do you wanna screw for the hinge?"
She hesitated for a moment and then shouted back, "No, but I will for the taps".

Cock-a-hoopery.

2010-09-07T12:50:00.001-07:00

'Oh Lord, My cup overfloweth....,' as the well-endowed nun said when her bra shrank.

Does that look right to you?

(I was hoping to insert at this point a tasteful picture of a well-endowed nun bustin' out all over, so that 'Legend-in-his-own-lunchtime' could smirk and say "Looks okay to me!" but as with my search for the flatulent nuns of a previous Post (Dead sheep and Green Energy, July 2nd. and ensuing Comments) you can't always find just the right nuns when you most need 'em).

Never mind, it was the 'shrank' I was doubtful about. I've spoken (speaked? spake?) a lot of English in my time but past participles still puzzle me. Come to that, quite a lot of things about my past puzzle me, and that would include participants and my principles as well as my participles. But 'shrank' worries me. Okay, ships sink and that ship sank, just as pigs stink and that pig stank, but philosophers think they don't thank, which is as I thought, so shrank should be shrought. (Quite the little poet this morning, aren't I? Those banana skins must be stronger than I thought). But when you think about it, if you think before you fight, then you thought before you fought, so why didn't you thank before you fank? And as for men who wink, .....let's not allow things to get out of hand. The whole thing is fraught, it stinks, I think.

(May I just point out to my more pedantic friends that fraught can in fact be a verb, though obsolete; it's means to carry or tote, as you do freight. If that gave you a fright, I'm afraid you might be frightened .... or affrighted?....or afraught? ....or affrank?).

But I confesss I digress, as one is wont to do after the banana skins.

The reason for my good humour is that I have had a letter published in the Telegraph (Mon. Sept 6th. p.23). The current interest in religion, cosmology and the origin of the Universe (Stephen Hawking, John Gribbin and all that) had prompted John Capel to write to the Telegraph to imply that God must exist because spontaneous faith is as old as mankind. I was able to point out smugly that this is in fact an argument against religion, for the many worshippers of so many different gods in so many cultures for so many millennia can't all be correct. A small triumph, but better than finding a penny when you've lost sixpence.

Mind you, to prevent an outbreak of cock-a-hoopery, the Western Gazette, based in Yeovil, recently gave my own God-book a write-up ..... about 4 cm of very narrow column-width, most of which was taken up with describing the work of the National Eczema Society (and only published in the Crewkerne edition). On the next page they devoted 9cm. of the same column-width to a police raid on a house in Yeovil in which nobody was at home, no crime had been committed and they found no drugs.

So much for the burning questions of our age and my fight to liberate the world from the shackles of religious dogma.

Damned with faint praise

2010-09-07T04:05:00.000-07:00

When I spoke about lunatics in California the other day (Is anybody out there?) I did not of course intend to slight the worthy citizens of the good old U.S.of A.

Even if I had so intended I couldn't possibly compete with the American comedian Rich Hall (he's the one that scowls lugubriously at everyone in the TV quiz show Q.I.). In his book 'Things Snowball' (ISBN 0349115109) he describes the denizens of Las Vegas (whom he earlier calls "fish-faced fossils") in these terms:-

'To walk the teeming pavements of this town is to battle a tide of slack-jawed human rodentia: a never-ending parade of grifters, drifters, alcoholics, hookers, scam artists, Prairie scum and California detritus, clutching their plastic cups of slot nickels, staring in bovine awe at the monuments of stucco and neon built for their Neanderthal amusement. Men in backwards-worn baseball caps, belt-buckles the size of bin lids, half-buried beneath cascading beer guts. Jiggly-arsed women with permanently toasted tumbleweeds of hair, frizzed out, teased up, bedecked in gold rope, their protoplasmic corpulent manatee-shaped bodies sheathed in shell suits...', and so on.

Gee-whiz, I'd love to hear him describe people he didn't like very much.

The fly-leaf of his book says that he now resides in London. I should think that's very wise.

Buy his book, we don't want to lose him.

Bloody awesome.

2010-09-04T11:25:00.000-07:00

My friend Mike cannot really be described as a religious person but he is clearly intrigued by my recent explanation of (he calls them rants about) the finer points of the Creation of the Universes because he's sent me an account of the Australian Creation story, which I had failed to mention. I'd expected it to be about Aboriginal Songlines and Dreamtime and Giant Serpents but there's more to it than that.

In the beginning,it seems, on the First Day of Creation, God created Day and Night. The Day was for footy matches and barbeques and going to the beach, and the Night was for going prawning and sleeping; and God saw that it was good.

On the Second Day God created the oceans for surfing and swimming; and God saw that it was good.

On the Third Day God created the Earth, to bring forth plants and provide food, and malt and hops for beer, and wood for barbeques; and God saw that it was good.

On the Fourth Day God created animals to provide chops, sausages, steak and prawns for barbeques; and God saw that it was good.

On the Fifth Day God created a Bloke to go to the footy,enjoy the beach, drink the beer and eat the meat and prawns at the barbie; and God saw that it was good.

On the Sixth Day God saw the Bloke was a bit lonely and needed a soulmate to share his pleasures on the beach and around the barbie. So God created Mates and they were all good Blokes; and God saw that it was good.

On the Seventh Day God looked around at the twinkling barbie fires on the beach. He heard the gentle roar of the surf, the hiss of the opening beer cans and the raucous laughter of the Blokes. He smelled the aroma of the grilled chops and the sizzling prawns and he saw that it was good,...BUT He saw that the Blokes were too tired to clean up. So God created Sheilas, to clean up the barbie, to bear and look after the children, to wash, to cook, to sew and to do the shopping, and then God saw that it was not just good, it was Bloody Awesome!

It was AUSTRALIA!!!

The Magnificent Seven

2010-09-04T01:56:00.000-07:00

I had another of my blinding insights this morning. I used to get them nearly every weekend, but they don't seem to come so often since I came off the red wine.

It's all to do with this blooming Windows 7 computer.

You see, when I was a lad we used to have a thing called a wireless, something of a misnomer since it didn't work without a wire which went from the back into an electric socket. You quickly learnt though that the 'wireless' bit referred to the magic radio-waves that came through the ether into your wireless set. It was best not to think too deeply about the ether, but our science teacher said it had no real substance to it and was everywhere (rather like Nick Clegg nowadays, the Leader of the Liberal Party). Later on we learnt much more about these things and we realized that there is no such thing as the ether (ditto the Liberal Party?). How the heck the radio waves get here is still a complete mystery to me but I have slowly learnt to live with it.

Anyway a bright young chap like me quickly fathomed that a wireless has 3 knobs on the front. There was the ON/OFF knob, the TUNING knob and the VOLUME knob, all of which worked every time, resulting in predictable satisfaction and happiness as we sat in a family group listening to 'Dick Barton Special Agent' or 'The Goons'.

As I became adolescent and entered adult life, things gradually became much more complicated. The wireless became a radio and radios started having timers and alarms, and bass and treble controls, stereo, woofers, tweeters, and a place to stick your tapes in a slot, but I persevered. Eventually I more or less understood what most of the controls did and I usually got some sort of gratification if I persevered long enough.

Then late in my life came computers, and I more or less gave up. They sometimes do what you want, but more often they don't, and they tend to cause tremendous frustration and annoyance.

'So where's the blinding insight in that?' you may reasonably ask.

Well I realize now that my gradual understanding and mastery of the new-fangled wireless of my youth, followed by my long and increasing bewilderment about the ever-more complicated electronic gizmos and computers, exactly reflects my experience of the female sex.

It happens to any adolescent lad when he discovers girls. He thinks he understands them but they tend to get more and more complicated as time goes by. When you first get a girl-friend, one your friends who has already got one will explain that there are fairly obvious knobs on the front, which you must twiddle to try to get whatever gratification you're looking for. I don't think I need to pursue this analogy much further but we all know that slots to take your CDs come at a later stage.

But you'd think after a lifetime of experience, you'd have got the hang of things, wouldn't you? But the internal workings will remain forever a mystery. Windows 7 is really, really complicated and there's no instruction book. It seems to have its own agenda, it rarely does exactly what you want, it often causes frustration, even annoyance, but there's no chance you'll ever understand it because it has an unfathomable mind of its own and by God its clever. Need I say more?

I'd better go now and do some grouting before I get into trouble.

Out of the mouths of babes....

2010-09-03T11:44:00.000-07:00

In my last two Posts I covered 'Domestic Gods' and discussed 'Creation and Gods', so I thought we could now tackle some deeper theological thoughts. Those of you still young enough to remember as far back as June 2010 will recall that my first Post was a 'Letter to God', which I was pleased with at the time, but I have just bought a small book for 30p from a Charity Shop entitled 'Children's Letters to God' (edited by Marshall and Hample)and I now realize I am a complete novice at putting God on the spot. Try these as a random sample:-

Dear God, Can you show me how to get paint off? Howard.

Dear God, I would like all the bad things to stop. Debbie.

Dear God, I lost my glove again and I'm going to get heck unless somebody sticks up for me. Will you? Martha.

Dear God, My father is mean. Please get him not to be. But don't hurt him. Martin

Dear God, My father can never get a fire started. Could you make a burning bush in our yard? Sherry

Dear God, O.K. I kept my half of the deal. Where's the bike? Bert.

Dear God, My father is very smart. Maybe he could help you? Margo.

Dear God, Are boys better than girls? I know you are one but try to be fair, Sylvia.

My personal favourite though, as a would-be writer looking for tips to producing a best-seller, is:

Dear God, I read your book and I like it. Where do you get your ideas? John.

There are dozens of them, all good, with lots of funny illustrations and I strongly recommend you to buy the book......a snip at 30p. Or I'll sell you my copy for 20p.

Have the aliens come?

2010-09-02T13:03:00.000-07:00

There was the most amazing article in the staid, God-fearing, right-wing old Daily Telegraph on August 31st. p. 25 . The author, John Gribbin, is a respected scientist with a Cambridge Ph.D. in astronomy and he is an author and editor who has worked for two of the most prestigious scientific journals, Nature and New Scientist.

The startling idea he has promoted is to do with Black Holes, those mysterious things in deep space which suck things in and then possibly transport them to another region of space and time or even to another Universe. There's a big one in the centre of most galaxies and they are constantly sucking in huge objects like stars which are never seen again, at least not by us. Critics of expensive physics research have said that the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva which produces highly energetic particle acceleration could create a man-made Black Hole that could suck in our world, which would thus effectively disappear, but people who understand such things say this could not happen, as such a tiny manufactured Black Hole would be too small to suck in an atom,let alone the Earth.

So far, so well known (especially if you've read my book), but Gribbin now points out that gravity has negative energy and so matter can literally arise from nothing at all, and therefore no energy would be needed to form a Universe. It seems likely that this happened at the Big Bang which formed our own Universe. In other words our Universe popped into being at the other end of a Black Hole which existed in a galaxy in another Universe.

It's been thought for some time, for complex mathematical reasons we won't go into, that there might be multiple Universes which either follow on from each other or are present simultaneously, and that new Universes might be in the process of being created all the time. Nobody knows how many there might be, but there could be an infinite number, in which case all possible events could happen on one or other of them, and the development of many different forms of intelligent life would be inevitable on many planets in many Universes.

Gribbins claims that if a human intelligence can produce a small Black Hole in a laboratory, it is theoretically possible that with a bit more time, a bit more power, and a bit more knowledge and intelligence, humans or their descendants might one day be able to make a Black Hole large enough to spawn a new Universe. Alan Guth of M.I.T. has investigated this possibility and concluded that the laws of physics do, in principle, make it possible.

In my book 'Why Man Made Gods and Dogs' (order from perrottpress@hotmail.com) I took Richard Dawkins' atheist views in his book 'The God Delusion' one stage further by explaining how gods are psychologically manufactured by humans as an inevitable product of the evolution of the human intellect, because belief in the supernatural has survival value. Gribbins is now suggesting that our entire Universe could have been kick-started into life by some alien intellect which might have been only slightly in advance of the human.

The theologians will be rubbing their hands in glee. Maybe Dawkins and I will now have to write another book admitting that the Earth could indeed be part of a Universe that was created by a superior intellect to ours, and the laws of physics and chemistry being what they are, we could perhaps even be built along similar biochemical lines, even in the same image! Now where have I heard that before?

Even more worrying is the question of why should those aliens want to do such a thing? Perhaps to try to escape from their own Universe which is becoming uninhabitable? Scary isn't it!!

Unless of course the alien intelligence is God Himself who came through the Black Hole and is now everywhere, as most theologians would aver. And a right mess he's making of it!

Or did Satan come through the Hole with Him? I think I can feel a science fiction book coming on. I must go and lie down.

I like a challenge.

2010-09-01T14:34:00.000-07:00

When our daughter and her family came to stay with us last week, my son-in-law and I were as helpful about the house as we usually are. So close are we to being Domestic Gods that my wife and my daughter have signed the pair of us up for an advanced course in Domestic Goddery. I've seen the programme and it looks quite good actually.

It takes the form a series of evening classes and is run by an organization called WIC (Women in charge). They're limiting the classes to a maximum of 8 participants owing to the complexity and difficulty of the course.

The subjects which will be covered, according to the brochure, are:

1. How to fill ice-cube trays: A step-by-step guide with a slide presentation.

2. Toilet rolls- Where do they come from, or do they grow on the holders?: A round-table discussion.

3. Differences between the laundry basket and the floor: Initial practise with models and graphics and later with a real basket.

4. Dirty dishes and coffee cups- do they levitate and fly into the dishwasher by themselves? Debate among a panel of experts.

5. Finding things- how to look in the right place without turning the house upside down, yelling, swearing and blaming other people.

6. Empty milk and orange juice cartons - Part 1: Do they belong in the fridge?
Part 2. Should one ever notify a competent authority if a carton is ever found to be empty?
Group discussion and role play.

7. Health watch - Will bringing her flowers for her birthday or anniversary damage your health?

8. Is it genetically possible for a real man to sit quietly whilst she reverses into a tight parking space? Breathing techniques during driving simulation.

9. The ideal shopping companion.
Part 1. What is patience?- A psychologist explains, with meditation and relaxation exercises.
Part 2. Appropriate and inappropriate comments in a variety of situations.

10. How to remember important dates. Bring a calendar and a pencil.

I think I shall learn a lot from it, even though I've already had some experience; I did a beginner's course where I learnt that a woman's place is in the kitchen and a man's place is in the wrong.

Cock and bull stories

2010-08-30T09:00:00.000-07:00

As Alison pointed out in her Comment yesterday, agricultural shows provide entertainment for all ages.

Where else would you see middle-aged men of a military bearing, dressed in dark suits, bowler hats and green wellingtons, running across a muddy field and carrying a clipboard? And wearing big red rosettes in their lapels, as though they were prize-winning sheep. Such a sight should be (and maybe was) the subject of a Monty Python sketch. Actually they are the Show Judges, or Vice-Presidents, or even Lord Lieutenants of somewhere or other, and they have the crucial vote in deciding who has the best plate of pickled gherkins and who is the best bitch in show in her first season and not exceeding 19 hands.

Then you can guarantee there will be a plethora of dogs and their owners,most of whom are barking. Some of are there for a legitimate purpose such as hareing across the field chasing a small piece of fur on a long elastic rope, but others seem to be there solely for the socializing. The latter seem to spend a lot of time yapping and trying to mount each other. And that's just the owners. The dogs are usually better behaved but their hair-styles are equally ludicrous.

Our family entered into the spirit of things with gusto, and our shepherd won lots of prizes and cups for his flock of Texels (despite my previous faux pas with the judges (http://profjohnb.blogspot.com/2010/07/stepping-in-it.html.), and the two older grandchildren, who had entered for more or less everything in the children's Art, Decorated Eggs, Miniature Gardens, Make-A-Crown and Vegetable Monsters line, guided by their granny, won £2 each at 50p. per prize. Our budding entrepreneur, aged 4, has decided that this will be his future career and he will live on his earnings from agricultural shows around the country, but since the various deformed vegetables and art materials, 'diamonds', silver foil and other bits and bobs cost about £25 it doesn't seem to me to be a viable proposition.

The beer tent always provides good entertainment, particularly towards closing time, when the farm lads who've been sinking the cider steadily for about 6 hours leave the tent and try to walk proudly through the mud in a stately fashion and in a straight line, burping periodically and trying to remember where the exit is and whether they'd brought a cow with them. "Oh, there you are, Jenny, Hic!". Jenny is not always best pleased, unless she'd been on the cider too.

Which reminds me of one of my favourite Agricultural Show stories:
The Lord Lieutenant's wife (see above) was inspecting the prize bulls, while his Lordship was with his mates ogling the barmaids in the beer-tent. The wife was very impressed by the champion bull's physique, and she could see from the size of his rosettes and his accoutrements that he was obviously kept for stud purposes. She asked the stockman how many times the bull could perform his duties in a year. "Oh I should think well over 400 Madam" he said.
Her eyes widened, "Really! Would you mind just popping over to the beer tent and telling that to my husband".
Five minutes later he was back "Excuse me madam, His Lordship sends his compliments and told me to ask you if its the same cow every time?"

Whoosh, crash, bang, wallop!

2010-08-29T13:46:00.000-07:00

Three of our grandchildren, aged 2,4 and 6 came to stay last week, so we're a bit worn.

The main entertainment was the local Agricultural Show, which has all kinds of fun things on offer, in particular large tents full of farm animals doing various types of poos, farts and wees. This of course is hugely attractive to a 4 year old boy, whose most successful Christmas present ever has been a Whoopee cushion. It's one thing to see your Mummy sitting decorously on the loo, but its quite another to see a cow in full flow. The 2 year-old of course was simply delighted to discover that piggies do actually go 'Oink Oink'. (No, I know they don't really, but I can't spell that wonderful, snuffling up the nose, incarnation of pigginess that our 2 year old can mimic so well, including the smell).

Then there are those enormous tractors which pull cars and horse-boxes out of trenches of lovely sticky, gooey mud. And diggers! And quad bikes you can sit on!! And when all these attractions pale, there's always candy-floss. And then we're all very tired and getting a bit grizzly so let's get home quickly before total melt-down occurs.

We had to steer them away from the fairground rides though, because they are a health hazard for grandfathers.I well remember my effort some years ago with our other three grandchildren, when the eldest boy was accompanied up a rickety and dangerous-looking helter-skelter by his father and the smaller one was left howling at the bottom. Such deprivations hit two-year-olds pretty hard. So hero grandad volunteered to carry him up the very steep ladder and escort him safely down, sharing a mat.

What I hadn't allowed for was the weight of the coconut matting they gave me at the bottom, which I then had to carry to the top. The heavy toddler in one arm and the heavy mat in the other then left no hands free for holding the ladder. A sensible person would have given up then, but how much howling would that have provoked? Anyway I'm still a Northerner at heart and I'd paid my money.

Helter skelters don't look very high from the bottom, but once you get three- quarters of the way up carrying a toddler in one arm and a heavy mat in the other you realize that it's a long way to fall. You also remember at that stage that you have a pacemaker and palpitations and you get very breathless on exertion. One's balance deteriorates as one gets older and dizziness can be a problem too. Moreover there's a queue of little urchins on the ladder immediately behind you so there is no possibility of reversing down.

Fortunately I had read many books about Everest climbs and so I knew that the technique is to climb one step and then pant for about 2 minutes, and then take another step, pant for another 2 minutes and so on. I was greatly handicapped by the fact that I had no ice-axe to lean on and the altitude sickness was pretty bad in the thin air. The pain in the arms from carrying the heavy equipment was quite severe too. It worried me that neither of us had left a farewell note for our family. After about 3,000 feet of this, the South Col hove into view and I began to have a small hope that we might not both perish after all.

One last temendous effort up the Hillary Step and we reached the small platform at the summit, with its totally inadequate guard rail. The problem then was to position the mat on the top of the helter-skelter slide with one hand whilst stopping the toddler falling over the wobbly rail, then sitting on the mat without it swooshing down, taking me with it and thus leaving the toddler stranded at the top. I did eventually manage this feat, with a lot of anxiety and a modicum of muttered profanity, then I had to lift the toddler onto my lap and it was 'Chocks away'.....

Unfortunately the Laws of Physics dictate that acceleration increases dramatically with the mass of the falling body and when there are two bodies, one of them fairly large, the acceleration is amazing and the G-forces on the bends are colossal.

Moreover there is always a crowd of solicitous Mums gathered at the foot of a helter-skelter to encourage and welcome their little ones, who normally weigh about 2 stones and arrive at the bottom at a speed of about 10 m.p.h. My grandson and I, with a combined weight of 16 stones, arrived like a bob-sleigh at the foot of the Cresta Run and scattered these maternal skittles at about 90 m.p.h.

You can imagine the carnage.

Is anybody there?

2010-08-27T23:11:00.000-07:00

While we're on the subject of philosophy, and just in case a cab-driver ever asks your opinion on mechanistic determinism, I thought I should mention that the philosopher George Berkeley (1685-1753) was of the opinion that matter does not exist at all, and things only exist when they are being perceived.

It is doubtful whether he was a lunatic but then again a town in California was named after him, so we can't be sure, although I think the Hippy/Dippy/Gay/Fey/Happy/Clappy crowd only arrived at a much later date,and the University crowd are not mad, although some do seem a trifle strange. Anyway, in George Berkeley's opinion the fact that there is no such thing as matter was a weighty argument in favour of the existence of God, who would be required to perceive everything at all times, because if He didn't, we'd be forever coming and going and things would have a very jerky existence indeed.

The Catholic theologian Monsignor Ronald Knox summarized this view as follows:

There was a young man who said "God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree,
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad".

REPLY

Dear Sir,
Your astonishment's odd:
I am always about in the Quad,
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be, since observed by
Yours faithfully,
GOD

Well, I always knew Catholics priests had a sense of humour. That's why they had the sale of Indulgences (remission of sins for a cash payment). My, how they laughed!

Taxi-drivers and mechanistic determinism

2010-08-27T11:24:00.000-07:00

The taxi driver who asked the philosopher Bertrand Russell what Life and the Universe is all about ('The old trouble returns', August 23rd) should really have known better than to look for guidance from such a source. Taxi drivers generally have a pretty good notion of what things are about, whereas no philosopher can distinguish his arras from a doorway in less than 3 chapters and 25 footnotes.

This may seem a trifle harsh, but it is I believe a widely held view, witness this week's New Scientist (28th August p.64) in which Richard Sutcliffe reports that his favourite road sign, often to be seen in Colorado is "Icy conditions may exist". He suggests this should be followed by the sign "Next philosopher 500 miles".

When I was in the Sixth form at school we used to have a subject called General Studies, where we were encouraged to ponder whether the statement "This sentence is false" is true or false, presumably to stop us thinking about big girls and their blouses.

It didn't work, and I retained a passing interest in both subjects until 1961 when I happened to be reading Philosophy XXXVI, pp.112- 127 by J.R. Lucas (as you do),and I came across the following arresting thought.

"Godel's theorem states that in any consistent system which is strong enough to produce simple arithmetic there are formulae which cannot be proved-in-the-system, but which we can see to be true. Essentially we consider the formula which says in effect 'This formula is unprovable-in-the-system.' If this formula were provable-in- the-system we should have a contradiction, for if it were provable-in-the-system then it would not be unprovable-in-the-system so that 'This formula is unprovable-in -the-system' would be false: equally if it were provable-in-the-system then it would not be false, but would be true since in any consistent system nothing false can be proved-in-the-system, but only truths. So the formula 'This formula is unprovable-in-the-system is not provable-in-the-system but unprovable-in-the-system. Further, if the formula 'This formula is unprovable in the system' is unprovable in the system, then it is true that that formula is unprovable in the system, that is 'This formula is unprovable' in the system is true".

It went on of course,.. and on,...and on, but after that I concentrated on the blouses.

I only mention this because some theologians now seem to be saying that since "the bogey of mechanistic determinism" has been overcome(see Philosopy XXXVI, p.112 if you're that interested) this shows there is a God! Crikey!

Another brick wall

2010-08-27T01:57:00.000-07:00

In my little rant against first cousin marriages (Monday 23 August) I said that in trying to educate a Pakistani religious leader about the dangers of recessive genes, Tazeen Ahmad 'might as well have talked to the proverbial brick wall'.

My friend Morris has now sent me a story about a CNN journalist who was doing a feature on the power of prayer. The journalist went to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and there she met a very old Jewish man who had been to the Wall to pray twice daily for more than 60 years. She asked him what kind of thing he prayed for.

"I pray for peace between the Christians, Jews and Muslims. I pray for all the wars and the hatred to stop. I pray for all our children to grow up safely as responsible adults and to love their fellow man".

"And how do you feel after doing this for 60 years?"

"I feel like I'm talking to a f*cking brick wall!"

Queues and pees.

2010-08-25T09:50:00.000-07:00

One of my minor pleasures when I was still alive, and writing serious articles for scientific journals (well that's what I used to tell people), was trying to embellish a serious paper with a risque quip and somehow slip it past the Editor's blue pencil and into print.

For example, if a drug firm published a paper in a scientific journal claiming success for their only marginally useful product on the basis of some 'iffy' statistics, a common enough event, they would then train their drug reps. to visit health centres across the country and belabour the poor general practitioners with a flood of pseudo-scientific claptrap about the P (probablility) values which allegedly showed how extremely effective their product was. It is well-known that there are lies, damned lies and statistics and so my subsequent article demolishing their statistics and advocating the need to look at the number of patients in the study as well as the exact statistical tests used would perhaps be entitled 'Let's take the P out of sales talk'.

I rarely succeeded in getting that sort of thing past the fuddy-duddy old editors, and I began to think that I was the peculiar one. Hence I was pleasantly surprised to learn that 'Can I have a P please, Bob?'(from the ITV show Blockbusters) has just been voted the nation's favourite TV catchphrase.

With all this recent talk of deteriorating educational standards and annual inflation of exam. results, I had thought there would be few people left who could still recognize a double entendre when they heard one, but I was obviously mistaken.

Only last week I was in the local pub and this beautiful girl came in wearing a short skirt and a tight sweater, perched herself on a high stool, and said to the the barman 'Can I have a double entendre please?' The barman winked at me, and replied 'Yeah, I'll give you one'.

First cousin marriages

2010-08-23T17:30:00.000-07:00

There was another deeply disturbing programme on TV last night (Dispatches: When Cousins Marry, Channel 4, 23rd. August, 8pm).

Doctors have known for many years that when first cousins marry they share the same grandparents and this greatly increases the risk that their children will develop one or more of various genetic diseases due to the inheritance of two recessive genes for that disease. This is not a hypothesis, it's a proven fact, on a par with the idea that water tends to run downhill, except that we understand the causative mechanism of recessive genetic disease much better, since gravity remains a mystery.

More than half of British Pakistanis marry their first cousins, and their children thus have a greatly increased incidence of rare genetic diseases. Their children account for 30% of all such cases in Britain, and children of first cousin marriages have three times the rate of learning disabilities seen in other British children. Having personally witnessed many such cases at medical meetings I can testify that some of these tragedies are heart-wrenching in the terrible physical and mental problems they produce.

Yet many Pakistani parents and their religious leaders continue to be in denial about it, and seem to believe that any criticism of the practice is an insult to their culture and religion. The presenter Tazeen Ahmad interviewed such a married couple, three of whose six children had degenerative diseases. They frankly refused to believe it was a genetic problem, but felt it must the fault of the doctors and it was a ' test from God'.

When she met Pakistani community leaders Tazeen pointed out (in vain) that hostility to first cousin marriages was nothing to do with skin colour or race or ethnic minorities or religion, but was simply to do with trying to prevent suffering due to horrible and largely preventible diseases. She could have made the additional point that inherited diseases due to inbreeding also used to occur in the European aristocracy before they stopped marrying their near relatives. Queen Victoria, for example, passed the recessive gene for haemophilia to the royal families of Spain, Germany and Russia.

It seems very unlikely that education will make any impression on the Pakistani community. Tazeen might as well have talked to the proverbial brick wall.

Ye Gods! Little Green Chickens! Mary, Mary Quite Contrary! or whatever other blasphemous profanity you wish to use, why cannot our lily-livered politicians pluck up the courage to do some good in the world by passing a law against first cousin marriages?

The Health and Safety people already have enough laws against almost everything else.

Please feel free to bring this Post to the attention of your local MP.

The old trouble returns

2010-08-23T01:43:00.000-07:00

I'm feeling a bit peeliwally today (Whaddaya mean it's not in your dictionary? It's a perfectly good Scottish word isn't it?).

Anyway I'm usually perky but today I'm peaky, the reason being that I was unable to go to the blog yesterday. I had another bout of the old trouble, contingent syllogisms, and very painful they are too.

It started, as it so often does, with reading Christopher Howse discussing 'argument from design', which is the notion that since Nature is so complex and yet so orderly it must therefore be intelligently designed ('Bertrand Russell versus faith in God', Telegraph, Saturday August 21st, p 27). His general message seemed to be, insofar as any message at all could be gleaned from the philosophical flim-flam, that argument from design shows the need for an extra-cosmic intelligence and that sounds to him like 'God, our Lord'.

Well, that's a perfectly reasonable view, even though it's erroneous, but in order to reach it he had to take us on a tour of several intellectual punch-ups which various distinguished philosophers have had with Bertrand Russell, and that's what brought my old trouble back. At first I thought it was just a lack of moral fibre in my diet, but apparently it's all to do with whether one can 'deduce a necessary conclusion from a contingent premiss'.

Russell, you may recall, was the greatest philospher/mathematician of his age, but even he didn't have all the answers. A taxi-driver with a grasp of such matters, and they're more numerous than you might think, once remarked 'You know I had that Bertrand Russell in my cab yesterday and I said to him " Hallo, Bertie, Wot's it all abaht then?" and do you know he'd no bleeding idea!'

He was however fairly hot stuff on the question of syllogisms (see his 'History of Western Philosophy', pub. Allen and Unwin, 1946, p. 218).

Now a syllogism, as we all know, (and indeed in our Somerset village we talk of little else), is an incontrovertible logical deduction of the form

A+B = C+A, therefore B=C, or if you prefer 1+ 3 = x + 1, therefore x= 3.

You can't argue with that, can you? But was that good enough for Bertie? Oh no, he had to give us various forms of the wretched thing, thus:

1a. 'All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal'.

1b. 'All men are mortal, all Greeks are men, therefore all Greeks are mortal'.

Then clever-clogs Bertie points out that Aristotle was mistaken because he did not distinguish between these two forms. Of course!

He goes on to distinguish between:

2. 'No fishes are rational, all sharks are fishes, therefore no sharks are rational'.

3. 'All men are rational, some animals are men, therefore some animals are rational'

4. 'No Greeks are black, some men are Greeks, therefore some men are not black'.

These four make up the 'first figure' to which Aristotle added a second and a third figure, and other philosophers later added a fourth although the three later figures, according to Bertie, can be reduced to the first by various devices.

You can see how my intellectual sphincter tightened, can't you.

I'm not entirely convinced Christopher Howse understands it either, but he should read my book 'Why Man Made Gods and Dogs' (ISBN 978-0-9565588-0-0) then he would at least understand the Anthropic Principle.

Tell it like it is.

2010-08-21T10:45:00.001-07:00

I mentioned the 'no frills' approach of Ryanair the other day (How to reduce the gap, Aug. 18th) and a friend of mine in the airline industry now tells me that Kulula, an African airline, has taken it even further. Their aeroplanes have all the important features such as wings, doors and engines clearly labelled so that they can dispense with engineers and stewardesses and the passengers can more or less look after the aircraft themselves.

Just joking. In fact it is a very respected airline with an excellent record and a great sense of humour. When their pilots and crew make jokes over the PA system the management congratulates them instead of suspending them, as would probably happen in USA or UK.

A few examples will illustrate this refreshing approach:

Flight attendant 'To operate the seat belt, insert the metal tab into the buckle and pull it tight. It works just like any other seat belt and if you have difficulty with this you probably shouldn't be travelling alone'.

'In the event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure, masks will descend from the ceiling. Stop screaming, grab the mask and pull it over your face. If you have a small child travelling with you, secure your mask before assisting with theirs. If you are travelling with more than one child, pick your favourite'.

'In the event of an emergency landing over water, your seat cushions can be used for flotation. Please feel free to paddle ashore and keep them with our compliments'.

Captain (on a flight with rather senior hostesses): 'Ladies and gentlemen, we've reached out cruising altitude and will now be turning down the cabin lights to enhance the appearance of your flight attendants'.

After a bumpy landing in a thunder-storm, a voice came over the loudspeaker 'Whoa, big fella, WHOA!'

After this the flight attendant announced, 'Please take care when opening your overhead lockers as after a landing like that, sure as hell, everything will have shifted'.

This relaxed approach can have its drawbacks though, like the time when the captain was giving his usual soothing announcement over the intercom.
'....the weather is good and we anticipate a smooth and uneventful flight to Cape Town, arriving at approximately JESUS CHRIST, HOLY SH*T, ...OW, ..OOH'.... and the plane went into a steep nose dive, banking to the left.

After a few moments the plane straightened up and resumed a stable course and the captain said.
'So sorry, ladies and gentlemen. While I was talking to you the flight attendant brought in my hot coffee and spilt it into my lap. You should just see the front of my trousers.'

At which a passenger shouted out 'That's nothing, you should see the back of mine!'

Farmers can think fast.

2010-08-21T01:52:00.000-07:00

A hoaxer recently reported the sighting of a crocodile in the English Channel off the coast of Boulogne, and the French authorities cleared the beaches.

Very wise too. These 'salties' as they call them in Northern Australia, can thresh out of the water in seconds, grab you by the leg and there may just be time for one short scream before you're dragged into the depths and held there until you drown. If you're really lucky your friends will find an arm some weeks later.

With global warming and changing currents who knows where they'll get to. Before you know it English farmers will start breeding them for shoes and handbags, as they did with ostriches a few years ago.

If you've ever seen the terrible feeding frenzy in a crocodile-farm pond when twenty crocs come tearing in for their daily buckets of dead chickens to be thrown in to them, you'll have no difficulty in thinking 'Jurassic Park'. Compared with that, 'Jaws' is just a film about a sweet little pet goldfish.

Its not all doom and gloom though. An old farmer friend of mine in South Africa has a small lake on his farm, and he was going to his orchard with a large bucket to pick some avocadoes one day when he heard splashing and girlish squeals of delight coming from the direction of his lake. As he peered through the trees he was surprised and delighted to see 3 lovely young women frolicking in the water. They'd been hiking across his land and as it was a hot day they'd paused for a little skinny-dipping. To his disappointment they spotted him almost immediately and quickly moved into the deep water, and one of them shouted, 'We're not coming out until you go away'.

'Oh, don't mind me, girls' he said, 'I've just come down to feed my crocodiles'

Brussels not swayed by pseudo-Swedes.

2010-08-20T01:39:00.000-07:00

The Brussels bureaucrats are sprouting and spouting again. They're shooting out dictatorial directives in all directions.

The latest one concerns traditional Cornish pasties, which must contain only beef, potato, onion and swede. The problem is that the Cornish people, bless them, say turnip when they mean swede, and these are two entirely different vegetables. This means that Cornish people can advertize their genuine pasties as containing turnips, so long as they contain swedes and no turnips, but they cannot claim their pasties are Cornish if they actually contain the turnips as advertized.

Albena Dimitrova-Borisova, the European Commission spokesman said "It will be for the control authorities in the U.K. to put in place the necessary enforcement".

I'm not sure whether the European Commission has yet dealt with Scotland. The haggis, which is defined in my Concise Oxford Dictionary as 'minced heart, lungs, liver of sheep etc. (I love that 'etc', the mind boggles) boiled in maw or artificial bag with suet, oatmeal etc. (I love that 'etc.' too)' where a maw is the last of a ruminant's four stomachs. Sounds delightful doesn't it, now if you'll excuse me while I just run to the loo and ........Oooch, yurgh, uuuurgh, uuuuuurgh, ugh, that's better, the rotten thing about vomiting is that you always have to do it again when you think you've finished. Where were we, oh yes, the Scots and their problems (how long have you got?). Well as I recall from my 2 year stint in Edinburgh the haggis is traditionally served with neeps, which can be either turnips or swedes. Or even 'etc.' if you can't afford shoes for the bairn.

And although I'm no expert on these quaint linguistic traditions, I expect the traditional Melton Mowbray pork pie contains diced cucumbers called swedes and Bakewell tarts sometimes have Swedes filling their soft centres, even though they're called tricks. So how will you inspect that, Mr. Dimitrova-Borisova?

Swedes have a long history of causing confusion. I was in a pharmacy once and a Swedish tourist came in and asked the shop assistant, in his wonderful lilting Swedish accent (easy to mimic, but almost impossible to write), for a deodorant.

"Certainly sir", she said with a helpful smile "Ball or aerosol?"

He blushed "Well neither, its joost for my arrmpits actually"

Thought for the day

2010-08-19T01:21:00.000-07:00

Just a small 'Thought for the day' prompted by two articles on the front page of today's Telegraph.

A judge has criticized a council for trying to force contraception on a woman with an IQ of 53 who has already had two babies, both of whom were taken from her by the social services because she could not look after them. The judge warned that the move would have "shades of social engineering".

On the same page, Nick Clegg said that the Coalition Government is to introduce changes to University funding "to promote greater social mobility".

Good to know that members of the Establishment are all reading from the same hymn-sheet.

It's no laughing matter

2010-08-19T00:28:00.000-07:00

Richard Dawkins presented a TV programme recently which I found profoundly depressing ('Faith-schools, a hidden menace?' More4, August 19th, 9pm). He was trying to make the point that children should receive a broad education about all types of religion as well as a good scientific education and then eventually make up their own minds, rather than being segregated and brain-washed from an early age, as happens in many faith-schools.

He interviewed a science teacher in a Moslem girls' school who assured him that she taught all her students about evolution as well as the Koran and they were free to make up their own minds once they knew all the facts. She said she had around 60 students who had all decided that the story of evolution was wrong and the creation story given in the Koran was correct. The girls supported this claim and asked Dawkins why, if Man came from apes, were there still apes here on Earth.

Dawkins turned to the teacher and asked her how she would answer this question. She smiled helpfully and shrugged. It was clear to her that there was no answer. Dawkins tried to clarify the situation by saying that we are all apes. You could see the girls and their teacher thinking 'What a load of cobblers, the man's an idiot'.

The Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland wouldn't even let him film the children in their science classes. A rotund rubicund gentleman in clerical garb was interviewed and was as unctuous and avuncular as such clerics often are.

A headmaster of a faith-school then appeared to demolish Dawkins simply by repeatedly asking him, Paxman-style, 'Do you not agree that parents have the human right to educate their children in their own way according to their own faith?' Dawkins has so often been accused of being an angry polemicist that on this occasion he leant over backward to be reasonable and see the other fellow's point of view and so he seemed to agree with this idea. However he didn't make the point that parents have the duty to educate their children, full stop, and children can't be said to be properly educated if they only know about one religion or have been taught that all other religions are wicked, and they have been given a very sparse or even erroneous scientific education. Then there's the small question of tolerance.

Now just remind me what time the King Billy Marching Bands start their procession, because I don't want to miss the art lesson on how to spray-paint a mural with 'F*ck the Pope' in letters six feet high. Then we're taking the grandchildren off to Saudi for the weekend to see the stoning.

How to reduce the gap.

2010-08-18T07:41:00.000-07:00

My pedantic friend Richard has pointed out that the learned Fellows of the Royal Society would be unlikely to use the word 'chuffed' except in its literal meaning (see 'Christmas came early', Aug. 18th.), and he has kindly given me an example of the correct use of the word. It seems that many years ago, he had a friend who was suicidally depressed, but was uncertain how to go about it, so Richard pushed him in front of an old-fashioned steam train and he was chuffed to bits.

On a more serious note, I thought I should give the Government some advice on how to, as Nick Clegg put it yesterday, 'reduce the gap between the rich and the poor', which is of course politician-speak for 'make the rich poorer'.

They simply need to follow the example of Ryanair and other cheap airlines who charge extra for the provision of basic services such as air-traffic controllers, food, water, baggage, seats, seat-belts, and use of the toilet.

The Government have a golden opportunity here, because we all know that Google Earth is already invading our privacy by photographing our homes and gardens from outer space and the police have a great deal of experience in the strategic placing of CCTV cameras.

By combining the skills of the Ryanair marketing team, Google Earth and the CCTV controllers they could repay the National Debt by simply giving us all the option of paying extra for a bit of privacy. They could have a sliding scale - say £100 pa. not to be photographed in your own garden, £500 not to be continually photographed in your kitchen, £1000 not to be filmed in your own bedroom or toilet, and so on.

Those exhibitionists who normally appear on Big Brother and similar reality T.V. shows would of course be willing to pay to have the cameras fitted everywhere in their homes and the rest of us would gladly pay in order not to have to watch the ensuing footage.

It was just a joke, dear.

2010-08-18T03:43:00.000-07:00

I met an old friend at a party recently who has recently retired from the Research and Development Dept. at Hewlett Packard.

I reminded him that about 20 years ago, when computers were slow, clumping, great things that did mental arithmetic for you, and telephones were bulky black objects, found only indoors or in telephone boxes, I had asked him to predict future developments in the world of computer science. He had explained that computers would become progressively smaller and faster, and telephones would become portable, so that no wires were needed. 'Oh, that would be interesting' I said.

'Yes, and then eventually computers with a huge memory capacity will be linked into mobile telephones so that you can carry them around in your pocket with all your contact numbers and E-mail addresses in one neat package'. 'That would be amazing' I said.

'Yes, and one day you might be able to get a type of very small telephone that would fit in your pocket and do everything a computer does now but also plays music'. 'No, really?' I laughed nervously.

'Yes, and it would also show television programmes and do library searches and take photographs and store them and send them to your friends, and...'. 'Ha, ha,' I said 'What a joker you are, and I expect it will unpack your groceries too'. 'Just wait and see' he said.

So, meeting him 20 years later I congratulated him on his prescience, and asked him what he would predict for the next 20 years.

He was thoughtful for a while, and then said that in another 20 years time, we should simply have to think of a task in order for it to be done by a superior form of intelligence with no effort on our part, and some jobs such as household chores and the ordering, taking delivery and unpacking of groceries, would be done before we'd even thought of them for ourselves. 'But I've already got one of those' I said 'it's called a wife'.

Actually I wish I hadn't said that now because, if I may be permitted to mix my metaphors, I've just shot myself in the foot by stepping into the Catch-22 trap. I've been trained, you see, to avoid sexist or 'Little Woman' jokes. So that if the above remark was a joke, I'm in trouble and if it wasn't, then I'm in trouble. Perhaps I should have stressed the superior intelligence part?

Christmas came early

2010-08-17T10:29:00.000-07:00

When I opened my morning post yesterday I was not surprised to receive the usual pile of tat that most retired persons receive, namely bills you'd rather not pay, offers of credit you don't need, special offers you can refuse only too readily, appeals for donations from charities you have no particular desire to support, and occasionally a letter from her Majesty's Customs and Revenue Officer, which is either replying evasively to a question you had asked them 6 months ago, or asking you a question about something you thought you'd done and dusted 3 years ago.

And then, mirabile dictu, Christmas and the Good Fairy arrived simultaneously in the form of a cream envelope containing a letter from the Astronomer Royal, who also happens to be the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge and the President of the Royal Society, telling me that he had found that my "most engaging book" had resonated with the views he had expressed in his recent Reith Lectures.

Wow, how big a name can one drop! I was, as they probably say in the Royal Society, 'well chuffed'.

So folks, we still have a few copies left. Just E-mail your delivery address, asking for a copy of 'Why Man Made Gods and Dogs' to perrottpress@hotmail.com and it will be sent to you with an invoice asking for payment of £9 (this includes postage in UK).

Always keep your eggs safe

2010-08-16T07:18:00.000-07:00

My little adventure in Brighton (see yesterday's blog, 'Almost a night on a bear mountain), where I narrowly avoided a night of bare mounting due to my uncanny resemblance to gay icons such as George Clooney (when I'm dressed in a wet anorak and seen from a distance in the dark), showed me how threatened attractive women must often feel when they walk alone in deserted streets.

My protagonist readily accepted my courteous refusal of his kind proposal, aided no doubt by my 6ft.4in. of bone and muscle and a really ugly scowl, but a petite female in similar circumstances might not be so lucky.

I suppose girls get used to it and have a number of ploys at their disposal. I was very impressed by a true story I heard when I was attending a medical conference in Cairo. One of the delegates was a small but perfectly formed lady doctor who was walking alone along the banks of the Nile, when she was accosted by a large Arab, who parted his djellaba in classic 'dirty grey raincoat' style to reveal his true intentions. Annie simply opened her handbag, fished out her reading specs, put them on, peered closely and then said disdainfully 'And is that the best you can do?'
Fortunately his English was good enough for him to feel totally humiliated and he fled.

Unlike the wee virgin who was once carrying a basket of eggs home from the market when she met the adventurer-poet Robert Burns on a lonely mountain path in the Scottish Highlands. She recognized him immediately from his manly swagger and his beautiful jaunty sporran. 'Are ye the famous Rabbie Burns?' she asked in some trepidation. 'Aye, I am that lassie' came the proud reply. 'Oh dear' she said breathlessly 'And are ye the terrible man they say y'are, that goes round the country seducing young women and then having his wicked way with them no matter how much they resist and call for help'. 'Aye, well it has been known to happen in the heat of the moment'. 'Och, ye wicked man, ye'd best just wait a second while I find a safe place to put down my basket'.

Almost 'A Night on a Bear Mountain'

2010-08-13T23:17:00.000-07:00

My wife tells me I need a new raincoat. There is, as usual, something in what she says, although I personally don't think my wardrobe looks as much as though a hurricane has blown through a charity shop as she claims. She hasn't yet realized that anoraks and antique trainers are the new Paul Smith polo-necks and Gucci (or whoever).

Anoraks have so many uses too. There was a story on the radio a few days about a hiker in the Rocky Mountains who came face to face with a large bear as he came round a corner on a forest trail. He knew that bears can run faster than humans, and they tend to knock you down, place an enormous paw on your chest and then eat you slowly, savouring every large mouthful. They don't care how loud you scream. Sometimes they leave you still alive and come back the next day, following the trail of blood, to finish their meal.

This situation, where you have surprised a bear many miles away from anywhere and you have no gun, is where you are glad you wore your anorak. What you should do, as the bear sniffs the air, licks his lips, and moves purposefully towards you, is to quickly remove your rucksack and anorak, jam the tips of your walking-sticks or ski-poles into the two wrist-bands of the anorak, then raise the two poles as high as possible above your head so that you are transformed into a flapping 10 feet-tall monster. You then walk steadily towards the bear, shaking your anorak and emitting your loudest possible blood-curdling yells. The bear will look at you in a puzzled way and as you continue towards him, he will quickly turn around and run away, tucking his hindquarters well in under his tail, as bears do when they are trying to avoid a painful bite on the bum.

I wish I'd known the anorak trick some years ago when I attended a conference in Brighton. A group of us had met for a meal in the evening, and it was pouring with rain when we finally emerged from the restaurant at about 11pm. to go our separate ways. The dark streets were totally deserted, and my hotel was some way away and as I splashed lonely and morosely through the puddles, I saw a man on the other side of the road who spotted me and came weaving unsteadily across the road towards me. I expected him to say 'Have you got a light, mate', or 'Can you lend me the train-fare to Bournemouth' but what he actually said was 'Are you looking for anal sex?' You can guess what I did next ..... looked puzzled for a moment, then quickly turned and ran, tucking my hindquarters well in under my tail.

Don't be pushed around, Richard

2010-08-13T22:16:00.000-07:00

My friend Richard is a brave man.

He lives in London and he tells me that he is going to start a campaign to improve the manners of the London populace. He is tired of being elbowed into the gutter on Oxford Street, and when he holds the door open for young people entering shops, they sweep past him in jabbering herds without an acknowledgment, as though he wasn't there. He remembers the time when the English were a quiet, polite race and he is determined to restore this courteous behaviour.

The mainstay of his campaign method is to trip them up as they go by. I think he's learnt this subtle technique from Match of the Day. A judicious clip of the ankle is all it takes. Apparently they often apologize to him, as they stumble into the path of an oncoming taxi.

I have strongly recommended that he continues this campaign as I think the mental exercise will be good for him, and the ensuing fisticuffs which will regularly ensue will keep him fit. And there is a good chance that his widow will get compensation from the Criminal Injuries Board.

I have however also pointed out to him that London is no longer England, and the vast majority of people in Oxford Street are not even British. He should come to live here in Somerset where total strangers will not only thank you for holding the door open, they'll stop for a prolonged chat about tractors or mole-traps.

Unless you're in a queue at the Post Office, in which case it will be an old lady chatting to the assistant about her grandchildren and their recent holidays. If after 10 minutes you cough loudly enough they'll sometimes look round, and if you keep coughing they'll look round again with a frown and drop their change on the floor, which rolls in several directions under the crowded stands displaying sweets and bath salts. It then takes 20 minutes to get every penny back in the purse before the next customer can be served. And even then she won't move from the counter until she's said "Did you give me the stamps, dear? Now, where did I put them?..... Oh yes! well bye-bye dear, remember me to your mother".

What goes round, comes round.

2010-08-13T11:47:00.000-07:00

As Boris Johnson well knows, there's nothing like a classical quotation for giving orotundity the spurious impression of great learning, so here's my attempt to tell Gordon Brown where he went wrong

'The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must learn to work instead of living on public assistance'.

Cicero said that in 55 B.C. At least I was told he did, but how many of us can be bothered to check our references?

I used to like quoting Petronius (c. 50 A.D.) whenever the subject of NHS Reforms cropped up:

'We trained hard … but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization'.

It now appears that this quotation is not from Petronius (according to some hero who claims to have read his entire works) and it is now thought that it originated among disgruntled British soldiers occupying post-1945 Germany (Petronian Society Newsletter, May 1981). The true author is unknown. Never mind, the sentiment is true.

As one of the dwindling band of doctors who practiced in the NHS before Margaret Thatcher started the fashion for Reforming the NHS every 5 years or so, I can testify to the fact that more managers have not produced more efficient health care. So far as I am concerned the definition of a manager as 'a person who ages men' is spot on. The 3 greatest lies of all time are
1. 'I'll be working late at the office tonight darling, so don't wait up'
2. 'The cheque is in the post'.
3. 'I am your new manager and I am here to help you'

If I can't rely on Petronius, I shall just have to re-tell the story of the boat race between the NHS team and a team of novice rowers from Oxford. The NHS team were experienced rowers who trained hard and tried their best, but they lost by 10 lengths. They were discouraged and morale sagged, so a working party was set up to investigate the failure. It seems that the Oxford team had 8 people rowing and 1 steering, but the NHS team had 4 people rowing and 5 people steering. A team of management consultants was therefore asked to investigate this further and several million pounds and many months later they concluded that there were too many people steering. Accordingly they recommended that there should be only 3 people steering and 3 rowing, but there would be a director of steering services to ensure they were all steering in the same direction, a performance manager to appraise and audit the work of the rowers, and a chief executive officer to provide motivation and ensure that targets were met.

Another race was arranged and this time the NHS team lost by 20 lengths.The chief executive took immediate firm and decisive action. He suspended one rower whose work-rate was slightly below the average of the other two, sold his oar and spent the money on a 'blue-skies' think-tank.

Now wash your hands.

2010-08-12T08:25:00.000-07:00

The Daily Telegraph printed a letter today from Brian Reece saying that he was delighted to discover, in the gents' lavatories in the Advocates' Robing Room at the Central Criminal Court,a notice giving detailed instructions for the process of hand washing, namely 'Wet, soap, wash, rinse, dry'.
"How did we manage before?" he asks.

Doctors are well aware of this educational problem. It is said that two eminent consultants, examiners for the MRCP examination, once chatted to each other as they stood at the urinal in the Royal College of Physicians. As they left, one of them paused to wash his hands and the other didn't. MRCP examiners are a competitive bunch, always trying to score off each other, and the hygienic one couldn't resist muttering "At Guy's we teach our students to wash their hands after micturition" to which his rival replied "Oh really? At Bart's we teach our students not to pee on their fingers".

Actually they would both have known that normal urine is sterile and in the absence of a clean water supply can in an emergency can be used perfectly safely to irrigate (i.e. wash out) accidental wounds or burns which are contaminated by soil or toxic liquids.

Have things improved?

2010-08-10T13:26:00.000-07:00

I heard today that my old friend Charles died recently, in his 90s. He was a GP. of the old school, who would cheerfully get up in the middle of the night to attend to his patients. He wouldn't need notes because he already knew all their medical details. Few G.P.s seem to offer that service any more, and many don't even offer a Saturday surgery. If you need attention 'out of hours' you must first run the gauntlet of the NHS Helpline where a nurse will eventually tell you either that you need an aspirin or you should go to Casualty with a painful grimace and a good book to while away the hours until relief is at hand.

Charles also once told me that good G.P.s of his generation would routinely help patients with painful terminal cancer by giving them increasing doses of morphine and if that shortened their lives by a day or two, that was regarded as a blessing by the patients and their families. Few GPs in the wake of the Harold Shipman case are brave enough to take that risk nowadays, more's the pity. You can beg to be allowed to die and doctors still won't help you.

When I was a junior doctor, earning pea-nuts, I used to earn extra money in my 'holidays' by doing locums for a G.P. in my home town, who worked as a single-handed practitioner. He was on call for all his patients 24 hours a day, for 50 weeks every year, taking only an annual 2-week breaks. I asked him how on earth he managed to cope with this incessant work-load and he explained that all his patients had learnt not to waste his time. The first time they wasted his time, he educated them with a short lecture about the appropriate use of a doctor's time. Then if they wasted his time for a second time he would simply cross them off his list of patients. The next G.P. was 5 miles away and most time-wasters would not have a car!
Amazing how quickly they learnt what was not appropriate.

Another tip he gave me was always to visit any sick person at their home at about 10 p.m. if you felt they might call you out in the night. This would allow you adjust their painkillers, sleeping-pills etc. and answer any questions they had. If the patient had been sent home from hospital to die (another good idea) you would explain to the spouse that death was a possibility and if the worst should happen they need not ring you until after 8 a.m. when you would attend to sign the death certificate. We rarely had more than one night call each week.

He had been the brightest medical student in his year at Edinburgh University, but his parents couldn't afford to support him for the many years of poorly paid training required to become a hospital consultant and so he had 'gone into practice'. I realized how good he was when I once did a locum for him and saw one of his patients with indigestion who happened coincidentally to have a rare inherited skin condition called incontinentia pigmenti, also known as Bloch-Sulzberger syndrome. I only recognized it because I was specializing in dermatology and I'd recently seen a case presented at the Royal Society of Medicine in London. Eagerly I scanned through the notes to see whether a dermatologist had ever seen the patient and whether they agreed with my erudite diagnosis. There was no record of it.

When I saw the G.P. at the end of my stint as a locum I mentioned that I'd seen Mrs. So-and-so and I'd been fascinated to notice that she had a rare skin disease, but she had never been referred to hospital. "Oh, you mean the woman with Bloch-Sulzberger disease, I noticed that but there's no treatment for it, so what's the point?"

Even he wasn't perfect though. He told me that he'd once been consulted by a middle-aged man complaining of central chest pains, made worse by eating certain foods. He did his usual thorough examination, and detecting no cardiac abnormality he reassured the patient that it was probably indigestion and prescribed the statutory antacid mixture. In those days there was not an ECG machine in every surgery and reassurance is often the best medicine. The patient left, pleased and relieved that it was nothing serious.

Our first-class GP, then noticed through the window that the patient, as he walked from the surgery door and down the path, stopped, clutched his chest, leaned forward and fell forward into the rose-bushes, stone-dead.

Mrs. Malaprop

2010-08-08T23:07:00.000-07:00

Speaking of non-PC (see blog of 8th Aug.) ), I have to confess that I have a problem with some of the great '-isms' of our time, and I wonder how history will view them.

Racism for example is clearly a heinous thing, and I speak as one who has lived in the Southern USA in the 1962 during segregation and also in South Africa just after the end of apartheid. Racism born of ignorance was also common in my home town in the UK during the 1950s, even though the only black people in town were the white men who emerged from the coal mine covered in black coal dust. That type of racism, born of prejudice, anger or ignorance, must clearly be eradicated whenever possible by legislation and education.

This type of hostile racism is however, in my opinion, quite different to friendly jokes about foreigners' difficulties with the English language. Indeed this type of language-superiority humour is not confined to the difficulties of foreigners, as shown by Sheridan's Mrs. Malaprop, who consistently amused people by using the inappropriate word....("forget the fellow, - illiterate him from your memory" and "I laid Sir Anthony's preposition before her"). This may be cruel humour (as much humour is) and it may be supercilious, but we know that we are all capable of promulgating and indeed culpable of propitiating Malapropisms which may be amusing or embarrassing depending on the circumstances, but they are not racist. Not nearly as bad as prosopagnosia for example, another of my failings (they all look the same to me). And when I try to speak a foreign language, my every third word is likely to be a Malapropism, though my fault could be something as simple as a properispomenon.

My point is that a lot of 'racist' jokes are not really racist, though I accept that many are the thin end of a very fat wedge (Bernard Manning being at the fat end).

As an example, I quote the Polish man who came to work in England and married an English girl.
("Nah, don't get me wrong, guvnor, some of my best friend are Poles, but I don't see what they're doin' in the middle of them lap-dancin' clubs with half-naked girls twined rahnd 'em".)

Seriously though, Poles are very popular in this many parts of UK. They're mainly hard-working, intelligent, polite and humorous, and many of them are beautiful blondes (oops! more '-ism' problems).

Anyway this Pole had only been married for three weeks when he went to a solicitor and asked for a divorce.
"Are there any grounds?" asked the lawyer.
"Yes, ve hev an acre and a half and a nice little bungalow".
"No, I mean does either of you have a grudge?"
"Vot for do we need grudge? Ve hev carport and plenty street parking".
"Are there any difficulties with the relationship"
"No, no, they all in Poland"
"No, I mean is there any problem with infidelity"
"No, no, ve hev hi-fidelity stereo and DVD"
"Are there any problems with your marriage, does your wife beat you up, for instance?"
"No,no, I start vork early so I always up first"
"Is your wife a nagger?"
"No, no, she white girl"
"So why are you considering divorce"
"Because she trying to kill me"
"That's a very serious allegation. Have you any evidence?".
"She trying to poison me. She went to drug store, bought small bottle and put it on her special shelf in bathroom. I read English pretty good now and it say 'Polish Remover'!

I don't think that's racist, is it? Perhaps we need a new word for language difficulties which cause mirth in others.

What to do if it rains.

2010-08-08T08:14:00.000-07:00

Quite coincidentally, after yesterday's blog about conversations overheard in quiet pubs, I was reading 'Down Under' by the inimitable Bill Bryson and I came across this phrase, which he overheard from the people at the next table while he was sitting in a hotel bar in Canberra:

'I tell you, Barry, he was farting sparks!'

Bryson says he believes this was "a colourful Aussie turn of phrase rather than a refence to any actual manifestation of flatulence of an electrical nature". Priceless isn't he!

I suppose most of us hear similar, less colourful but nevertheless intriguing, snippets all the time, often from shop assistants when they're standing chatting to each other instead of serving you. I recently heard a shop assistant say to her colleague "I told her the green ones had more legs but she said that wasn't what she was looking for". I didn't dare ask.

My mother produced a pearl some years ago. My wife and I had taken both our respective mothers to dinner in a boarding-house in Weymouth. Both our mothers were over 90 and both were very deaf, so they had to shout to each other. This being the height of the holiday season, the tables were crowded and close together and it soon became apparent to my wife and me that most of the other guests were following the conversation with fascination. We had a few embarrassing close calls with remarks about other guests as they left the room, such as 'I wouldn't wear that if I were that shape, would you Mary? followed by 'What does she think she looks like!' These caused surreptitious titters but my mother took the prize. The dining-room overlooked the bowling green and as it started to rain heavily the bowlers scurried off the green.

'Oh look, its coming down quite heavily now. They'll have to run'.
'Yes, it is a nuisance for them, George used to play bowls you know and he hated the rain. The first thing he did when he got back in wet weather was get a cloth and rub his balls dry".

Soup on tablecloths everywhere!

In cider veritas

2010-08-08T04:17:00.000-07:00

You can learn a lot by sitting quietly in the corner of a country pub. Politicans should do it more often, then they'd be in touch with what the voters (rather than the media and their Party chairmen) really think.

The 'facts' you overhear are sometimes inaccurate and the opinions based on these factoids are frightfully non-PC, but we're all entitled to our opinions and some farmers do have a very dry sense of humour.

Three little gems from last night:-

1. Jim. "Is it just me or does anybody else find it amazing that during the mad cow epidemic our Government could track every single cow and calf and tell exactly where it was being transported to, even if you took it in a truck at dead of night, and yet now we've got 150,000 illegal immigrants and the Government has got no idea where they are".
Fred. "Maybe they should give them all a cow as they arrive".

2. Fred. "They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for other countries, why don't they just give them ours, it's worked well for 500 years and now we never use it"

3. Jim. "Did you know that there's a law that says they can't put the Ten Commandments up in the House of Commons, and yet you can teach the Koran in schools".
Fred. "That'll be because you couldn't put up a notice that said 'Thou shalt no steal' and 'Thou shalt not commit adultery' and 'Thou shalt not lie' and 'Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's ox' in a building full of politicians. It would create a hostile work environment".

The pressure of life at the top.

2010-08-06T07:36:00.000-07:00

The headline 'Does Concorde cause skin cancer?' didn't worry me unduly, because we can treat most skin cancers, but I was slightly worried that I might have played a part in extinguishing all mammalian life by encouraging the Americans to allow Concorde to overfly their air-space (see yesterday's blog).

In the end though Boeing had their way and kept Concorde out, and it later transpired that it was freons (used in refrigerators) that were depleting the ozone layer, rather than aircraft exhaust fumes. It is often said that science is too important to be left to the scientists, but that episode and many others like it (smoking and health, global warming, home births, vaccination, stem cell research, genetic engineering, animal cloning etc) make me think that politicians and joournalists shouldn't be allowed to take part in any discussions or decisions involving science until they've had appropriate tuition in the subject from acknowledged scientific experts.

The Concorde experience did however give me three small joys:

1. As a reward for my efforts I was given a free trip on Concorde on one of the earliest proving flights to Gander. My co-passengers were journalists, politicians, and assorted influential business leaders who might be persuaded to use or even purchase Concorde. Naturally we were given free drinks before the flight for an hour or so in the First Class lounge at Heathrow. Naturally we were given unlimited champagne immediately we settled into our seats and then naturally we also took wines, coffee and brandy with the meal. And naturally we all needed the loo long before we reached Canada. The problem was that Concorde is constructed like a cigar, with rows of two seats on either side of a very long central gangway and since the drinks trolley was always moving slowly up and down in the very narrow aisle, it was impossible to squeeze round it. The strained look on the faces of the great and the good (not to mention the journalists) was worth seeing, especially as we neared the end of the two and a half hour flight. The obstacle race when the doors opened and they all raced or fell down the steps and then raced (staggered) towards the distant loo in the terminal building was worthy of description by Tom Sharpe (author of 'Blott on the Landscape').

PS. If you're thinking of taking a holiday in Gander, don't. It has some bungalows and a small air terminal, and is surrounded by miles and miles of conifer forest. You can drive for several hours to St. John's where there is a cinema, or you can drive even further in the opposite direction to Twillingate, where there is a whaling museum. Or you can pick berries. If they're in season.

2. The second joy provided by my Concorde experience was the story that the Minister for Aviation had visited Filton one day to see the work in progress on the Great White Elephant and he'd asked whether bird strikes would be more dangerous in a supersonic aircraft. The engineers had thought of that of course and they knew that the engines could withstand the impact of a large bird such as a seagull. This was demonstrated by firing a chicken from a sort of cannon directly into the roaring engine. The chicken was duly converted into a smear of blood and feathers.
The Minister was so impressed by this that he asked for the demonstration to be repeated, and after a short delay the cannon was fired again. But the first chicken had been fresh, the second chicken was deep-frozen. How expensive a chicken was that!

3. The third little chuckle was when I enquired about the great blast of flame which I once observed shoot out of the rear of Concorde's engine during take-off, which then caused a blaze on the tarmac which the fire engines had to extinguish. Apparently it is not a cause for alarm, it is due to petrol spewing out onto the tarmac and igniting. "It's called a 'wet take-off'" said the stewardess, blushing. The things you learn!

Decisions, decisions.

2010-08-05T13:24:00.000-07:00

We went to the Fleet Air Museum at Yeovilton yesterday, because one of our friends has just written a book about her father's experiences as a pilot in World War II ('Bomber Jack', by Valerie Ashton). As a result she has recently met a number of younger men, handsome, charming, hospitable RAF types in smart uniforms, and so she's now developed an insatiable interest in everything and anything to do with aeroplanes. I managed to summon up a certain amount of interest in rotary air-cooled engines and the difference between aerofoils and flaps, but what really interested me was the Concorde, which had been used in the early tests at Filton.

As a junior doctor I'd once been told by Professor Ken Donald that the Government often took important decisions on the whim of one person who was totally unqualified to reach such a decision. He gave as an example his own experience in World War II when, as a junior medical officer in the Navy with a modicum of research experience with regard to 'the bends' (nitrogen bubbles in the blood stream), he'd been sent from London to Portsmouth to inspect a new type of escape hatch for submarines which had just been invented. The Government was going to install the new system in all our submarines if he approved the design, but if it was installed and did not work well, then many sailors might die from 'the bends' as a result. He was duly met at Portsmouth station, driven to the barracks to meet the senior officers, given a drink or three before, during and after lunch in the officers' mess, and by 4 p.m. when the escape hatch was finally inspected and discussed he was in no state to understand the finer points of a wooden door, let alone novel escape hatches. And he had to catch the last train back to London. Nevertheless he cobbled together some sort of a Report and some faceless Whitehall wonk then advised the Minister who took this momentous decision based entirely on young Ken's befuddled recollections.

Of course I took this story with a pinch of salt. The Government don't take important decision just like that, do they? Surely the Government is full of clever, caring people and they have masses of well-informed advisors. Haven't they?

Shortly after I became a hospital consultant in 1973 I received a telephone call from the part-time medical officer for the British Aerospace factory at Filton, which was hoping to manufacture Concorde and fly it daily from London to California. The doctor had been asked by the management to advise them about skin cancer because the Americans (i.e. their rivals, Boeing) were claiming that the exhaust gases from Concorde would deplete the ozone layer in the statosphere and this would increase the incidence of skin cancer because it would let through more of the damaging UVR wavelengths. He wanted to know if I could advise him how to reply, as it was a very long document, it involved a lot of technical data, and if he didn't produce a satisfactory written reply to the American Senate hearing within 10 days it seemed likely that they wouldn't be allowed to overfly American airspace. All that Anglo-French Concorde development money would be wasted!

In those days our great nation was affluent, but some people thought Concorde would be a great White Elephant, and so we urgently needed to know whether this effluent from the affluent elephant was really damaging or was this just American bull-shit?

So I was presented with this great tome, around 2000 pages, to read, digest and riposte within 10 days. The skin cancer bit was easy, because I understood it. It was written by all the recognized U.S.A. experts on the causation and epidemiology of skin cancer and what they said was perfectly correct. But there was a much more complicated section on the production and chemical composition of aircraft exhaust gases (gulp), another on the formation of stratospheric ozone and all the possible reactions of oxygen and ozone with numerous nitrates and nitrites (blimey), another on the meteorology, real and hypothetical, of the various layers of the atmosphere all round the world (crikey), another on the effects of previous atomic explosions in the stratosphere (heck), another saying Texas farmers would go bankrupt because of cancer of the conjunctiva in their cattle (this is serious!). Also, almost as an after-thought, it seemed that bees would not be able to pollinate plants because of the UVR disturbance, so crops would fail, palnts would die out and so all mammalian life on earth would probably become extinct (Oh dear!). And I have 10 whole days to criticize this Report, which has taken many of the finest scientists in USA more than 2 years to produce! Of course, said the factory doctor, the whole thing was politically motivated. Unfortunately though it might turn out all to be correct.

So what did I do? I discussed it in broad terms with the members of the MRC Environmental Research Committee, but unfortunately it was August and most of them were on holiday.

Then it was time for desperate lateral thinking. I pointed out in my critique that it was far from certain that the statospheric aircraft exhaust gases would deplete the ozone layer, but if they did, perhaps the Americans could say what quantity of exhaust gases their stratospheric military aircraft had been producing for 24 hours every day for many years, ever since the Cold War. And I also pointed out that increasing the UVR at sea-level might also have beneficial effects (e.g. fewer hip fractures) which their Report had neglected to mention.

And did it make a difference? Did it hell.

What a relief !

2010-08-03T14:51:00.000-07:00

Dr. Samuel Johnson said 'No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money'.

I usually agree with Sam, the Great Cham, but then I remember that the fly-leaf of my first physiology textbook (Bell, Davidson and Scarborough) quoted an Arabic proverb 'More than the calf yearns to suck, doth the cow yearn to suckle' and being a silly old moo, I have to admit that blogs are kinda fun if there's not too much grouting or ironing to be done. If nobody reads it, who cares, so long as it relieves my over-burdened chuckle centre. There, that's off my chest, though its a funny place to keep a chuckle centre....but a perfectly reasonable site for a suckle centre.

I expect you'll be wondering how I filled the aching, langorous hours of ennui since my last blog. Well, a lot of time was spent on monotonously chipping away at my latest stone bas-relief (see picture below) and it was with relief that I finished it.

You might also be wondering 'Does that depict what I think it does?' Well yes actually, that sort of thing happens quite a lot, here and there (though more there than here, ......personally I can never find a supportive broken stone pillar when I want one). It's perhaps surprising, given the public interest in 'that sort of thing' that there aren't more statues of Queen Victoria in a similar pose. Just think what Rodin might have done with Victoria, Albert and the Crown Jewels.

My effort arose because my neighbour looked at my previous stone-carvings which were entitled 'The Kiss', 'The Pregnancy', 'Mother and Child' and 'Teenage Daughter', and pointed out that I'd omitted a crucial step between 'The Kiss' and 'The Pregnancy'. I felt I had to rise to the challenge and fill the hole, so to speak.

My friend Richard saw the finished work and said he could recognize my wife but who was the lucky man? The cheeky devil wondered if I was likely to need any models in future. I've offered to repeat the work with him and his wife as the models but only if he can hold the pose for 3 weeks. I doubt he'll accept the challenge, because his wife told me that a few weeks ago she said "Richard darling, lets race upstairs and make mad passionate love" to which he apparently replied "You can choose one or the other, but I couldn't manage both".

I was quite pleased with the sculpture, but since it is sandstone and not Portland stone I was unable to enter it for the recent sculpture competition organized by the British Limestone Corporation. I hear that the statue of Casanova won by a long chalk.

Not a blog

2010-07-24T12:51:00.000-07:00

This is not a blog, it's just a reply to Alison's kind Comment of 23.7.10.

Its true that one of my ambitions when I wrote the first blog was to cover every computer in the country in masticated cornflakes, as Alison implies. The sad fact is that it didn't happen. Hers is probably the only speckled Mac.

My first blog, dealing as it did with Rude Bits and No God, was very well received, and people continued to tune in for several days, presumably to see whether God would either reply or smite me. When neither event happened, they seemed to lose interest, even though I tempted them with Dead (or at least moribund) Sheep, Flatus and even Dead Sheep and Flatus in the House of Commons. Tells yer sumfink about the blogging public, don't it!

However the real reason I began my short blogging career was to bring my new book entitled 'Why Man Made Gods and Dogs' (ISBN no. 978-0-9565588-0-0) to the attention of a world-wide audience. This was because it has a two important ideas which I think people should know about.

The first is that modern science strongly suggests that there is very unlikely to be a God. Many people know that, but my book explains why, in simple terms, looking at the whole of science from cosmology to neurobiology and evolutionary psychology. The idea is not to denigrate religion, but since religion seems to be a major cause of conflict in the world, young people in particular need to be aware of the history of the innumerable religions and realize that they can't all be right, and probably none of them are.

The second idea (the new bit, which needs publicity) is that religion probably has a survival value for the genome, in the Darwinian evolutionary sense. When early Man became intelligent enough to ask difficult and unanswerable questions about life, death and the Universe, he had to postulate the existence of supernatural forces, a Spirit and an after-life. This naturally led to the concept of gods, worship, sacrifice, prayers and rituals. The formation of tribes and altruistic behaviour has survival value for a species, hence the need for religion becomes hard-wired into the human brain. There has to be something out there, doesn't there? Once spirituality becomes part of the genome, it doesn't easily give up.

OK, you've got the two main ideas now, so you don't need to read the book, though it does have quite a few jokey bits, it only costs £9 (in U.K., including postage) and you can order it from
perrottpress at hotmail.com. Oh, and the profits if any, will go to the National Eczema Society.

Alison, I quite enjoy trying to make you laugh, but my wife says there's grouting to be done, and you were the one who told me off for letting her tire herself with laying the paving slabs.

Bye for now.

Career Choices

2010-07-22T21:43:00.000-07:00

We scientists are generally thoughtful folk, not known for taking our pleasures in the form of wild drug-fuelled bacchanalian orgies, of the type indulged in by city bankers and pop-stars. We do regularly have Professor Brian Cox on the telly, but Sid Vicious he isn't. He is every Northern granny's pin-up boy, and I doubt whether he was ever the Mick Jagger type, even in his pop-star heyday.

This tendency for scientists to take their quiet pleasures where they may is epitomized by the 'Feedback' column in the weekly magazine 'New Scientist'. It generally confines itself to a type of slightly pedantic humour occasioned by the incapacity of many lesser journalists to distinguish their high-voltage arcs from their El Ninos. What they call 'Fruit-loopery', the crazy pseudo-scientific claims of so many modern advertizers, is another of 'Feedback's regular hobby-horses, and quite right too.

Recently they've been having great fun with acronyms, those words formed from the initial letters of other words, e.g. radar, derived from RAdio Detection And Ranging. They've been delving into the intricacies of 'nested acronyms', where the first letter of an acronym is itself used in another acronym, and you can then form acronyms in acronyms in acronyms, like those little gaily-painted wooden Russian matrushka dolls.

A SNARE, for example is a SNAp REceptor. Maybe you didn't realize that a SNAP, which contributes the SNA part of Snare, is the acronym for Soluble NSF-Attached Proteins. And as we all know, NSF is our old friend N-ethylmaleimide-Sensitive-Fusion protein.

The record so far appears to be a nest of 4 acronyms within acronyms in Appendix 7 of the Report of the 37th Meeting of the Coordination Group for International Satellites held in October 2009. You'd need to read New Scientist, July 10th, page 64 for further details of RARS and how it might affect us all. You may laugh, but the trouble with science is that it might easily affect us all.

Personally I like SECS. It stands for SEMI Equipment Communication Standard. 'And what is SEMI?' I hear you ask breathlessly. It's all to do with semiconductors. Those which have to communicate are labelled SECS I, SECS II etc. but those which do not need to communicate are simply called British, as in the long-running comedy No Sex Please, We're British.

My own research was never complicated enough to have an acronym, so I had to get my kicks in more devious ways. I worked at various times with Dr. Pye, Dr. Black, Dr. White, Dr. Peachey and Dr. Bottoms, all of whom had different areas of scientific expertise. I eventually managed to devise projects in which I was listed as an author with Peachey and Pye, but I never managed to get into juxtaposition with Peachey, Black, Bottoms et al.

Now I write blogs and books about Gods and Dogs.

I think I'd rather have been a pop-star.

Just once!

2010-07-21T09:00:00.000-07:00

Judith Woods wrote a short piece for the Telegraph yesterday (21.7.10) entitled 'A night with the nanny, priceless' in which she described how a friend of hers had been baby-sitting in a 5-star hotel and when she emerged from the hotel at 2 am, looking somewhat tired and dishevelled, she was propositioned by two Russian men who thought she was looking for business. They assured her that money was no object. Judith says the woman's boyfriend was livid but, she writes,"The rest of us, truth be told, felt oddly jealous".

We fellows, musing on the mysteries of life, sometimes wonder how common these little female fantasies are?

I asked my friend Richard (Rich for short, but not for long, which explains his fatal attraction) for his opinion, as he is very knowledgeable in these matters, and he told me that once, long, long ago when they had steam trains with individual carriages, he had been lucky enough to be isolated in such a carriage with a most attractive young woman (MAYW), and the following conversation ensued.

Rich, folding up his newspaper, leaning forward and gazing earnestly into her eyes. 'You know, you have the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen' .
MAYW, smiling demurely 'Oh, thank you'.

Rich, 'In fact you're the most attractive woman I have ever seen in my life'
MAYW, blushing slightly 'Oh really? You flatter me'.

Rich, ' Would you sleep with me for £10?'.
MAYW, deeply offended 'Certainly not, I was never so insulted in all my life'

Rich goes back to reading his newspaper for 10 minutes, then leans forward again.
Rich, 'I'm sorry I didn't mean to offend you, but I am in fact a very,very wealthy man and you are absolutely irresistible, and so I wonder whether you'd make me deliriously happy by sleeping with me for just one night for £1 million'.
(I think the later Pretty Woman film pinched his idea actually).
MAYW, sees his Rolex watch and his Gucci shoes. 'Well if it was just the once and we were very discreet, I suppose I, er... Well, yes, I suppose I would'.

Rich says nothing, but goes back to reading his newspaper for 10 minutes, then leans forward again.
Rich, 'I'm still very keen on you, would you sleep with me just once for £20?
MAYW, 'Certainly not, what kind of a girl do you think I am?'

Rich, 'I think we've already established what kind of girl you are, now we're haggling about the price'.

Of course I don't believe a word of it, but I do believe what happened to him last week in his Retirement Home. An elderly lady burst into the recreation room, held her clenched fist in the air and shouted, “Anyone who can guess what’s in my hand can have sex with me to-night!"
Richard, long past it, looks up wearily from his newspaper and says “An elephant?”
The lady thinks a minute...... “Close enough.”

Corn oil

2010-07-21T00:55:00.000-07:00

My wife and I spent last weekend at an educational establishment.

It was my daughter's house actually, and for the communal lunch on the Sunday when my son brought his brood too, we had a team of 7 grandchildren, aged from 2 to 10, to entertain.

I think the children learnt a lot.

1. If you want a slightly more expensive bauble from the toy-shop than your spending-money allows, granny's your best bet.

2. When Mummy is mad at Daddy, don't let her brush your hair.

3. If your sister hits you , don't hit her back, they always catch the second one.

4. No matter how hard you run, you'll never catch a pigeon.

5. You can hide unwanted broccoli in a glass of milk.

6. Never break your little brother's favourite toy when he's holding a cricket bat.

What did I learn?

1. Don't give chocolate to a 3 year old when you're wearing smart cream trousers (I think I knew that but my memory is not what it was).

2. Weetabix sticks to the wall if you let it dry (see above re memory).

3. Always consider your wife's hand-writing.

This last one may need some explanation. You see, when there's a lot happening on the lunch-preparing and child-minding front, its sometimes helps if the most expendable and useless member of the family pops down to the supermarket to purchase those provisions which Sainsburys failed to deliver. That elderly man will obviously require a list of what is required and since he is not familiar with the lay-out of the supermarket he will naturally find the prettiest shelf-stacker and, trying to look hunky and helpless at the same time (that's quite difficult), ask if she will help him to find things. Well that was no problem, although I'm afraid the 'hunky' turned into 'pathetic' but we were doing well until we came to the last item, Corn Oil. The girl gave me a peculiar look and asked how much I thought I'd need.
"Oh, a fairly big one I should think", indicating eleven or twelve inches with my two hands. "Could I just borrow the list back, to check what she said?".

And then I noticed that my wife's capital C with its big curly loop, looks just like a capital P.

Adam had it hard.

2010-07-19T15:10:00.000-07:00

Alison very reasonably asked (Comment 16.7.2010) how they can do extreme ironing without electricity. It's a very fair question, and I must now confess that I have never actually witnessed an Extreme Ironing competitition; at home we just have the normal 'Who will do the ironing competition'. I do believe however that ironing was done before electricity came out of sockets, because I've seen films like 'Antony and Cleopatra' and Elizabeth Taylor never had a creased toga even after a thorough ravishing. I expect Egyptian cotton was better than linen.

With regard to modern ironing and the household chores and things, we New Men sometimes think we are hard done by, but I suspect 'twas ever thus. It can't have been easy being a New Man when you were literally a New Man, i. e. Adam in the Garden of Eden.

There was so much to learn, and so little to guide you, particularly in the Battle of the Sexes Dept.

It seems likely that God was a male, if we're to believe the Christian theologians, although I believe the feminist fundamentalists have cast doubt on this and I don't think a proper endocrine/genotype work-up has ever been done.

Anyway being famous for His Goodness and Mercy He would doubtless have helped Adam as much as He could in those little problems which are likely to afflict any young man.

You could imagine the little conversations they would have had in the very early days.

God "Adam, I want you to do something for me"
Adam "Gladly Lord, what wouldst thou have me do?" (I'm sure Adam would have used this Northern Anglo-Saxon version of the 2nd person singular, as in "Tha's done nowt but grizzle ever since tha' coom", since Yorkshire is widely recognized to be the nearest thing to Paradise on Earth).

God "Go down into the valley"
Adam "What's a valley?" God would explain that a valley is the gap between two hills.

God "Then cross the river"
Adam "What's a river?" God explains that a river is long and wet, like a weekend in Rochdale.

God "In the hillside beyond the river you will find a cave"
Adam "What's a cave?" God explains it's a hole in a hill.

God "In the cave you'll find a woman"
Adam "What's a woman?" God explains, trying not to use his hands.

God "I want you to have sex with her".
Adam " What's sex?" God explains the clinical details, though with some hesitancy because He's obviously gone straight from the drawing board to the launch with this one, and He's not entirely confident of the plumbing details Himself (see my first blog dated June 27th) since there is, so far as we know, no Mrs. God, hence there has been no road test of the somewhat complex systems involved.

Anyway Adam gets the gist of what he is supposed to do, and off he trundles, down the valley, across the river, up the hill and into the cave.
An hour late, he's back, hot, flustered and clearly fed up.
Adam "What's a headache?"

Baby Track-record?

2010-07-19T09:22:00.000-07:00

People are beginning to wonder what lasting benefit the Olympics will bring to London in 2012, looking to South Africa after the World Cup as a possible predictive model.

On this basis, our lasting legacy will be a lot of babies with odd first names, since it is a South African tradition to name babies after some significant event at the time of their birth. Ladies with a somewhat turbulent love-life might have baby Quarrel or baby Heartache for example. South African newspapers have recently drawn attention to a wave of new 'football' names such as baby Vuvuzela, baby Striker, baby Offside and even baby Substitute, which is every new mother's fear as they dish out the babies from the trolley in the Maternity Hospital.

I can vouch for this naming tradition, having spent some time in South Africa. The most colourful name I came across belonged to an otherwise undistinguished man called Vermin. Not a bad choice when you think about it. Vernon is an acceptable name in UK, but the suffix 'non' is very negative, as in anonymous nondescript nonentities, whereas Vermin is closer to men and manly.

The English are not above making similar bloomers. Candida is a perfectly acceptable rather upper-class name, with connotations of a Goddess and virginal purity, even though Candida is a yeast-like organism which causes an offensive white vaginal discharge. In the same vein I think Syphilis (a character in a Latin poem) and Hepatitis are quite pretty names. Melanie was a popular name at one time and I did consider Melaena for our first-born, but my wife demurred as she knew that melaena is a sticky black diarrhoea due to intestinal bleeding. My own mother chose John, an American toilet, and loads of attractive women (my age,you see) are called Pat, as in Cow-pat.

Such difficulties can arise in any society, as in the case of the Essex girl who had to have an interview for her Social Security benefit-

Social worker: Are you married?
Essex girl: Aw my Gawd no!

Social worker: Any children?
Essex girl: (counting on her fingers) ...Er, ten, ....so far

Social worker: Can you give me their names?
Essex girl: Well, the eldest is Wayne, the next is Wayne, and so on, and when the new baby comes next month he'll also be Wayne.

Social worker: So they are all called Wayne, are they?
Essex girl: 'At's right

Socail Worker: So how do you address them?
Essex Girl: Well I just go to the door and I either shart 'Wayne stop that!' or 'Wayne come in fer yer tea'.

Social worker (S.W.): But supposing you want to address them individually?
Essex girl (E.G.): Well I just shart their surnames, doan'I.

Extreme Ironing

2010-07-15T09:38:00.000-07:00

Two days ago on the main BBC 1 News channel we were blessed with the appearance of St. David Beckham, who had attended the football World Cup in S.A. to advise our players on strategy, based on his unrivalled experience and his analytical skills. He explained with a perfectly straight (admittedly handsome ) face that England lost because the players did not play well enough.

And there was me thinking it had all been due to the snow or the wrong sort of leaves on the pitch.

I can't live in that sort of intellectual cauldron.

My favourite sport at present is Extreme Ironing. This is a sort of cross between Extreme Frisbee and Figure Skating, except you use an ironing-board instead of ice-skates. Marks are awarded for style, athleticism, difficulty of the executed programe etc. I believe it was invented in the Peak District when a young man on a glorious sunny afternoon was hoping to go rock-climbing on the Sheffield grit-stone edges with his mates. His girl-friend, however, thought he should spend the afternoon doing the ironing. Being a New Man, he decided to take the washing and the ironing-board with him, and did the odd climb between ironing the smalls. His mates then decided that they could all do a bit of ironing halfway up a rock-climb and thus a sport was born. It's now also been done while parachuting, skiing, deep-water diving, skating, hang-gliding or whatever.

International competitions are being held and though the English team did very well at first, other nations have now learnt how to iron 'in extremis' and we've slipped down the table. Some pundits believe our ironing-season is too long, and others put it all down to these foreigners coming to England to wash their dirty linen in public so our English ironers don't get the experience of top-level competition. Alan Hansen thinks its because the managers don't release their ironers to attend board-bonding sessions, Adrian Chiles thinks its these new Jabulani irons, and Beckham thinks our guys just aren't ironing well enough.

Although I am now an extreme-ironing enthusiast, and I am happy to watch other people ironing, my own ironing skills are relatively limited because I resisted being a New Man when I was a young man, and I only became a slightly New Man out of the goodness of my heart when I was already a fairly Old Man. Seeing my wife was exhausted by laying concrete slabs in the patio one day I offered to iron a couple of handkerchieves for her and that was my fatal mistake. She praised my ironing skills to the skies, told all her friends what a wonderful ironer I was, and now I'm stuck with my reputation. Crafty things, women.

I haven't tried any overly ambitious or intricate ironing manoeuvres yet, as you have such a long wait in Casualty departments these days, though I did once manage a pair of knickers while answering the telephone, but then I caught my foot in the flex. I was however greatly heartened to read in the newspaper yesterday about a 75 year old man who attempted a swallow-dive from a 40 foot cliff into the sea in Dorset. It turned into a belly-flop and he had to be pulled from the sea by his sons. "My face, chest, arms and legs took a battering" he said "and my bits hurt a bit." If only he'd jumped with his ironing board he'd have been in with an excellent chance in the veterans class.

I'm off to London today to count the grandchildren, so my next blog will be on Monday.

Stepping in it.

2010-07-14T02:30:00.000-07:00

I stepped right in it a few days ago.

You'll recall that I had heroically rescued a sheep in our paddock from certain death by tipping it back on its feet.

While I was in the paddock I'd noticed that some of the lambs had scabby bits on their foreheads. When I rang my friend the shepherd to tell him of my good deed I asked him about the scabby bits and he said it was orf. Now he is Somerset born and bred, so he doesn't say orf as they do in Mayfair, e.g. "Ay'm fratefully afraid the prawns hev gorn orf". When he said it was orf, he meant it was a viral disease of sheep which can affect humans.

Now as a doctor I had occasionally seen patients with orf. In lambs it causes small blisters and ulcers around the mouth, which interferes with their suckling, and when farmers or their wives bottle-feed these ailing lambs, they sometimes get blistered lesions on their fingers from contact with the lamb's muzzle. I'd never seen it cause scabby lesions on the forehead though, in either sheep or humans.

So I thought I might learn something from the shepherd, and when I next saw him in the paddock I went to join him. There were two men with him whom I'd never seen before, knowledgable-looking countrymen in tweeds and flat caps, obviously vets. I was even more likely to learn something.

I approached them with a cheery smile, and said "Hello Jim, I hope you don't mind but I'd like to listen in with the consultation, because I've been a bit worried about that sheep that nearly died yesterday and then there's one with a very bad limp and there's all this scabby stuff which you said was orf, but I'm not sure, so I'd be interested to hear what the vets say."

There was a long pause, accompanied by a long hard stare. "Well actually John, they're not vets, these gentlemen are judges from the Melplash Agricultural Show and they've come to judge the quality of my herd".

Oops!

Well, they would have noticed, wouldn't they? They are judges after all. Nothing that a large bunch of home-grown sweet peas and a bag of plums won't put right.

I hope.

Never under-estimate old ladies

2010-07-12T10:00:00.000-07:00

Speaking of eternal life (July 12th) reminds me that little old grey-haired ladies don't actually live for ever, they just seem to. That may seem sexist, or ageist or sizeist and even hair-colourist, but the fact is that most women are smaller than most men, they tend to live longer, and as women reach old age they often become stooped and stop dyeing and dying. Hence the term 'little old grey-haired ladies' (LOGHL). There's a lot of 'em about.

These LOGHL must never be under-estimated. I realized this many years ago when I attended a night-school class to try to learn German. There was a LOGHL attending who seemed a bit on the slow side, although it gradually became apparent that she spoke quite good German, which wasn't surprising as she'd lived in Germany as a child, and had come to England when Hitler started being beastly to the Jews. She was a shy person, and I thought perhaps slightly retarded mentally, so I tried to chat to her, to give her confidence.
It seemed she had in fact worked as a laboratory techician at Bristol University, where she had met her husband who became a Professor of Physics.
She had in fact worked in his Department and helped in his experiments.
Actually they had between them discovered the pi-meson, for which her husband was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Not all LOGHL are shy, either.

I heard recently about a legal case in a small town in Mississippi where the first witness was a LOGHL. The prosecuting lawyer, wanting to ingratiate himself, asked her "Mrs. Jones, I think you know me, don't you?"
"Oh yes" she said, "I was a friend of your mother's and I've known you since you were a boy and frankly you've been a big disappointment to me. You lie, you manipulate people and talk about them behind their backs, and you cheat on your wife. Yes, I know you".
The lawyer was stunned, but being quick on his feet (as they are), he pointed across the court-room and said "Mrs. Jones , do you know the defence attorney?"
"Oh yes" she said, "I've know him since he was a youngster too. He's lazy, bigoted and he has a drink problem and he also sleeps around, including with your wife. Yes I know him".
At this the judge felt he had to intervene. He beckoned both attorneys to his bench and in a very low voice, said to them "If either of you asks her if she knows me, I'll send you both to the electric chair".

Living to be 1000.

2010-07-11T06:52:00.000-07:00

I had a little rant the other day (July 2nd.) about journalists who hype scientific results to raise unrealistic hopes, and I cited the Indepenent's reporting of some gene research which allegedly allows us to predict who will live to be centenarians.
I was astonished to learn from Wikipedia recently that there is at least one expert in the biology of ageing, Aubrey de Grey, who believes that many children already born will live to be 1000 years old.

Put very simply, his reasoning is as follows.
The average life expectancy has increased dramatically in the civilized world in the last 2000 years or so. In the Middle Ages it was probably around 35 to 40 years, in Victorian times it was 55 to 60 years, and by the mid-20th century it was around 70 years. Moreover the rate of increase has accelerated as scientific knowledge has increased, so the curve is becoming asymptotic. Also we now seem to be on the verge of discovering biological strategies which will counteract the normal ageing processes. It is therefore quite likely that some of these advances which will slow down or even reverse the ageing processes will become practical possibilities within the next 20 years, so that a baby born today with a life expectancy of say 85 years, will in 20 years time be expected to live to 110 years. And 50 years after that, when the same person is 70, the life expectancy will have advanced to 200 years. By the time that same person is 200, we shall know how to live to be 1000.

I should point out that not all scientists agree with Dr. de Grey, though he did graduate from Cambridge with a BA in Computer Science in 1985, and in 2000 he was awarded a Cambridge Ph. D. for his work on 'The mitochondrial free radical theory of ageing'. In 2007 he wrote a book,with Michael Rae, entitled "Ending Aging" which provides a detailed account of the social problems which will arise when many people live forever.

What a scary thought!

Personally I can't think much past the anticipated problems of a 90 year old. I like the story of the two old men sitting on a bench in the sunshine in a park, watching all the girls go by. One turned to the other and said
'George, d'ye remember those tablets they used to give us when we were soldiers in 1941, so we shouldn't want to go with women?'
'Aye, what about 'em?'
'Well I think they're starting to take effect'.

The problem of the changing requirements of men at different ages is also neatly illustrated by their choice of restaurants.
A group of middle-aged men decided to meet for a School-Reunion Lunch. After some discussion they decided on the Ocean View restaurant because the waitresses were all chosen for their friendliness and their curvaceousness and they wore low-cut dresses.
Ten years later, now aged 50 they again chose the Ocean View, because the food was great and the views of the ocean were good.
Ten years on, now 60, they chose the Ocean View, because there were no stairs and it was quiet, so you could hear what people were saying.
Ten years later, they chose the Ocean View, because it had wheel chair access and the hospital was only half a mile away.
Ten year on, now 80, they chose the Ocean View, because they'd never been before.

The Old Testament worries me.

2010-07-10T22:49:00.001-07:00

It seems that I am not the only person who has been troubled by Leviticus. A certain Dr. Laura Schlesinger said in her radio show in USA that homosexuality is an abomination according to Leviticus 18:22 and cannot be condoned under any circumstances. This apparently prompted somebody to post an open letter to her on the Internet. According to Yurica it was originally attributed to a J.M Kauffman, apparently in error, so they apologized and the true author remains unknown.
It reads as follows:

Dear Dr. Laura,

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show and try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual life-style, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination....End of debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some other elements of God's Laws and how to follow them.

1. Leviticus 25:44 states that I may possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighbouring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans but not to Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?
2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman during her period of menstrual uncleanliness, Leviticus 15:19-24. The problem is how do I tell? I have tried asking but most women take offence.
4. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it causes a pleasing odour for the Lord (Leviticus 1:9). The problem is my neighbours. They claim the odour is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
5. I have a neighbour who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states that he should be put to death. Am I morally obliged to kill him myself, or should I ask the police to do it?
6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination (Leviticus 11:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this? Are there degrees of abomination?
7. Leviticus 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20 or is there some wiggle-room here?
8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Leviticus 19:27. How should they die?
9. I know from Leviticus 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play footaball if I wear gloves?
10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Leviticus 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary to go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them (Leviticus 24:10-16)? Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair, like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws (Leviticus 20:14).

I know you have studied these things extensively and thus enjoy considerable expertise in such matters, so I'm confident you can help.

Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.

Your adoring fan,

Anon.

P.S. It would be a damn shame if we couldn't own a Canadian

Fundamentalists-are they fun or mental?

2010-07-10T09:14:00.000-07:00

I took my latest book 'Why Man Made Gods and Dogs' into the local bookshop last week to ask the proprietor if he'd be willing to stock it. He was a pleasant -looking middle-aged man with a ready smile.
'What's it about?' he asked, very reasonably.
'It's an overview of modern science as it relates to religion' I explained. 'It ranges from astrophysics and cosmology, Parallel Universes, Black Holes and so on, through Creation of Life in a test-tube and the future of humanity, paranormal phenomena, altered consciousness, the evolution of altruism in animals, scientific evidence for the power of prayer, questions for atheists to answer etc. Its a serious book but written for the general reader in a light-hearted, even irreverent, style'.
'I see' he said thoughtfully 'but what's your conclusion?'
'Well I've provided the facts in a simple format and I hope people will think for themselves, and then draw their own conclusions when they're better informed about modern science. My personal view is that as humans evolved from apes they probably began to ask intelligent questions about the Universe which they could not answer and so they postulated a supernatural agency to account for the natural world they saw about them'.
His brow wrinkled. 'You're not trying to say there's no God are you?'
'In my judgement, looking at all the evidence, there's probably not' I said.
He held my book at arm-length, and handed it back to me disdainfully. 'I couldn't possibly handle a book like that. Everything that science knows was already written and predicted in the Old Testament' he said.
Deepest Somerset is not without its fundamentalists.

I'd also sent a copy to the Archbishop of York, because in the book I'd questioned whether his habit of praying for victory for his local football team in York was really something of which God would approve. It seemed a bit unfair to the other team I thought. His put-down was much more sophisticated. He replied politely that he looked forward to reading my book "when time permits". I'm afraid this may be some time ahead, judging by the current fracas in the Church of England over homosexual and female bishops.

I recounted these two stories to one of my devout Jewish friends who lectures to school-children on Judaism. I asked him whether he really accepts that adulterers should be put to death, as recommended in Leviticus, and how many British Jewish adulterers have been executed in the last 100 years or so. He gave me a knowing smile. 'Ah, its all a matter of interpretation, John, you see according to our version, the Talmud, the act must be witnessed by two neutral observers before it would incur the death penalty'.

So its OK if you draw the curtains then. Not so good if you've sold tickets.

Dermatology and Lowry

2010-07-09T10:24:00.000-07:00

I was in Manchester this week to attend the annual conference of the British Association of Dermatologists.
Whenever women of a certain age realize I'm a retired dermatologist they usually take me to one side to ask me whether Anne French's Deep Cleansing Milk is really worth the extra money compared to Oil of Tiddlypush. How would I know? Dermatology in Britain is not cosmetology, and dermatologists are not beauticians.

The titles of the papers at the conference would tell you that this is not about beauty products. Two consecutive papers on the Tuesday for example were entitled 'Multicentric epithelioid haemangioendothelioma of the penis' (don't worry lads, you'd know if you'd got it, even if your G.P. couldn't put a name to it) and 'Painful mutilating ulceration of the dorsolateral foot in diplegics with acroangiodermatitis of Mali' (no need for you girls to snigger, this could happen to you). Then on Wednesday we had 'Efficacy of mycophenolate mofetil in severe mucocutaneous lichen planus' (very painful, mouth and vulva too) and 'The Imre and perialar crescentic advancemant flaps for the reconstruction of upper cheek defects' for the would-be surgeons with a penchant for taking faces to pieces.
And if you knew all that, there were hundreds more titles to choose from.

Personally I didn't know any of that, but since I now only go for the craic with my doddery old mates (except I'm never quite sure how to spell it), I decided that at my age I'd benefit more from seeing the Lowry Centre in Salford.

What a transmogrification! You get there quickly, pleasantly and cheaply in a modern tram and the Harbour Quay area which I remember as being a dingy, smelly offshoot of the river Irwell is now a series of open water-basins with beautiful tower-blocks and avant-garde glass mini-sky-scrapers. Its much more reminiscent of Amsterdam than the Hades it used to be.

And it has the Lowry Museum! I know Lowry is not considered to be a great artist by some of the elitist London critics, but boy, did he evoke the atmosphere and life-style of Pendlebury and district. Maybe you had to live it to understand his genius, but his simple, even naive style of painting conveys more messages and sheer nostalgia for a Lancashire now departed than a thousand sharks or unmade beds.

Part of the afore-mentioned craic included a few football jokes, topical even though depressing.
It seems that the 3 Lions, emblem of English football pride, are to be replaced with the 3 Tampons... worst period we've ever had.

That joke probably reflects the fact that over 50% of dermatologists now are female. One of them told me that when she has a bad hair day she feels she must curl up and dye.

Manchester - still wet

2010-07-08T22:52:00.000-07:00

My recent trip to Manchester was great. I lived there for 6 years as a medical student about 50 years ago, and although being a medical student is great fun wherever you are, Manchester itself, as a city, in the 1950s and 60s was less than wonderful.

It had been wonderful in its Victorian heyday of course. The memory lingered on in some of the magnificent monolithic buildings such as the Town Hall, the Refuge Assurance building, the LNER Railway station and the John Rylands Library, and there was still considerable civic pride. After all everybody knew, did they not, that "what Manchester does today, London will do tomorrow". This was where John Dalton, the father of modern chemistry had discovered the atom, and Manchester University had at one time been the world-centre for atomic physics research. The industrialists with their steam engines and Spinning Jennies and coal and cotton and drive and energy had led the world into the 20th century, and some of them were among the richest men in the world. And everybody knew that the 'Manchester Guardian' was the world's best newspaper which shaped London's, and therefore the civilized world's, opinions.

But by the 1950s the memory was fading. Britain had been hammered in the Second World War, the cotton trade had declined, and austerity was the rule for individuals and cities. It had been true for Manchester and the whole of the North that 'Where there's muck there's brass' but when I first went there in 1958 the muck had lasted but the brass had dwindled. There was no Clean Air Act, and the huge factories of the Stockport to Salford conurbation and thousands of rows a small terrraced houses belched out clouds of black smoke by day and night.

My memory of Manchester was of a dark grey city, cold in the Winter and chilly in the Summer, with incessant drizzle interspersed with regular choking fogs. One woke to the sound of sparrows coughing. Sometimes it was even foggy in the lecture theatres. Coming out of a lecture at 4pm in November there would be impenetrable black fog (called 'smog') and the only way to get home would be to memorize and follow the edges of the pavement. Visibility was down to about 2 yards, and the few buses that were still running had a conductor walking just in front of them waving his lamp backwards to guide the driver who was following him. On one famous occasion the bus to Didsbury followed the conductor up the drive of a large house and ended up in the rhododendron bushes, where the passengers had to disembark and grope their way back to the road as best they could. The hospital wards in the Winter were full of people with chronic bronchitis and pneumonia, who died in their hundreds.

It was said in those days that the quickest way out of Manchester was a bottle of gin. Les Dawson, our very politically incorrect Manchester comedian knew little of Moslem religious factions at that time, but if he had he would have said, in short, that there were only two types of weather in Manchester, it was rarely Sunni, but it was often Shi'ite.

I once asked a student friend of mine, who was Chinese, with an imperfect grasp of English, how he liked Manchester. To my surprise he said it was velly, velly good. Why is that? "Because wherever I go next (pause and smile) it will be better".

Well I am pleased to report that Manchester is now very, very much better. And did it rain? Of course it bloody did!

Cold callers

2010-07-04T09:57:00.000-07:00

I empathized with Alison's lovely blog of July 2nd, concerning the sense of humour failure of the secretary checking her into a course at Summer School. She made a quip over the telephone, and there was, she said , "Silence. The tumbleweed rolled past me into the humour desert. Sigh - it could be a LONG 5 days". Hestia's Larder blog of July 2.

The odd thing is that everybody thinks they have a Good Sense of Humour. Almost every punter in the Dating columns of newspapers claims to have GSOH, but how often do they admit to NSOH, though its pretty important when you're looking for emotional harmony. People who never stop trying to be funny can be extremely irritating, can't I.

The thing is though, Alison, that you can have a lot of fun in the humour-free desert with unknown people, provided its on the telephone where they can't see you and they can't hit you.

I get most satisfaction from the 'Cold Callers', those who ring up just as you're about to serve dinner and who try not to let you know at first that they want to sell you something. There are several techniques, depending on how much time I have:-

1. If I'm in a hurry I let them off gently.
Cold caller- "Good evening John, and how are you today".
Me - "Absolutely dreadful, I've just been told I have cancer of the pancreas and I have only 2 weeks to live, do you give credit ?".
C.C.- " No problem".
Me - "Self-fornicate elsewhere". (Phone down).

2. With a little more time to spare we do my 'How dangerous is he?' routine.
We go through the preliminaries ... we're in your area... we've chosen your postal code for a free security check of your property.........we'll fit everything at your convenience with a 75% reduction...etc.
With this technique I try to be affable and cooperative, but a little bit, shall we say offbeat, slightly zany, he's an odd sort of fellow, isn't he? Not willing to give his exact address, wonder why not. Then when they've almost clinched the deal I say "Obviously I'll have to confirm this with my wife". "Certainly Sir I'll just hold on while you speak to her". "Oh, I wouldn't wait that long if I were you, she's in the attic and I only take her food in once a week".

Silence... nervous laughter, "Ha ha, well perhaps you could call her down and I'll speak to her myself".

"Oh, she can't come out, because of all the locks and chains... the security you know...you know all about that, don' t you?" Prolonged silence, perhaps with muttering in the background.

"Listen John, how long has she been in the attic?". "Oh, it must be about 3 years, since the last one had her little accident" (Phone down).

3. If I have plenty of time and I'm just waiting until the potatoes are boiled, I use my third technique,where the permutations are endless.
I try to have a gin and tonic to hand and I get settled into an easy chair. We go through the usual preliminaries and this time I'm really enthusiastic and keen to buy whatever it is. It might be 'Magic-Weather-Guard' silicone-paint treatment of all my outer walls, just as an example. I spin it out and whet their appetite as much as possible...."it's a huge house,.....Oh, I guess there's about 19 bedrooms,....... about 90 metres long and 3 stories high........but we have 3 guest cottages too..... we had it in our last house and it was wonderful,..... well worth the money, .....I persuaded all our neighbours to have it and they were thrilled..." and so on.

When I can hear the saliva dripping onto their order-book I gradually begin to introduce the hurdles they must overcome......"what colours do you have nowadays? ..... you don't still do that candy-stripe effect, do you?.....couldn't you get some made up specially? ...... what's your best deal on credit arrangements,..... I'd need a 20 year warranty, .....of course you can come and inspect the property, how about 6 am next Sunday?....what do you mean you can't make it that early, I have to work too, you know......now, do you want the business or not?....well go and ask your manager then......next week did you say? I can't manage anything until after Christmas....what do you mean you can't book that far ahead, you're not one of these fly-by-night businesses that folds up after 6 weeks are you? .....well obviously its in next year's diary I'm not stupid......well fetch it then.... can I speak to your manager again please... "

And so it goes on until the potatoes are cooked and its time to administer the coup de grace. "Can I just check that this Magic-Weather-Guard paint of yours is compatible with my walls, the last stuff didn't seem to go on at all smoothly....... what are the walls made of? ....feathers, of course!" (Phone down).

Mmmm, that is sooo satisfying.

This will be my last Post for a few days as I'm popping up to Manchester for a Dermatology Conference. If you miss me, why not buy my book ('Why Man Made Gods and Dogs' by John Burton, any profits go to the National Eczema Society) which will tell you all about Big Bangs, Parallel Universes, String Theory, Sex, Gods, Spirituality, where its all leading to, and when...... and there's even a serious bit about dogs.

A Parliamentary Bestiary

2010-07-04T06:44:00.000-07:00

Speaking of journalists and political insults involving dead sheep, as we were on July 1st and 2nd, prompts me to mention an article by Max Davidson, in yesterday's Telegraph, in which he discussed the standard of personal insults expressed by various Members of Parliament.

The rudest and crudest, as you might expect was an Aussie, Paul Keating, a former Prime Minister of Australia from 1991 to 1996, who tended to describe his opponents as 'mangy maggots', 'intellectual rust buckets', 'gutless spivs', 'foul-mouthed grubs' or 'little desiccated coconuts'.

They had more style in the old days, especially in the Mother of Parliaments. Benjamin Disraeli for example said the Earl of Aberdeen had 'the crabbed malice of a maundering witch'. Maundering? I didn't know either, but apparently it means dreamy or rambling, as in opium addict (as it was in those days, though I believe there are now more modern substances).

Our recent chaps have kept their end up though. Michael Foot compared Norman Tebbitt to 'a semi-house-trained polecat' and Tony Banks said that Terry Dicks was 'living proof that a pig's bladder on a stick can be elected to Parliament'. Banks also boggled my mind by claiming that Mrs. Thatcher had 'all the sensitivity of a sex-starved boa constrictor'. I was left wondering how exactly he knew about the boa constrictor's sensitivity and which bits he tested, but nothing M.P.s do in their spare time would surprise me.
The winner for my money though was Vince Cable, when he hastened Gordon Brown's departure by pointing out that he had been transmogrified by recent events from Stalin into Mr. Bean.
Max Davidson's article was of course prompted by Simon Burns' recent description of the revered Speaker of the House of Commons as a 'stupid, sanctimonious, dwarf '. How rude! In my opinion that robbed Mr Speaker of his dignity just as if he'd picked his pocket. How could he stoop so low?
I like dwarf jokes though, especially when they're made by dwarves. Ronnie Corbett highlighted his frustration that he is not tall enough to play James Bond, but he's too big to be adopted by Madonna.
One can only speculate as to why Bernie Ecclestone married such a tall girl. Did one of his friend put him up to it I wonder?

How to be 100.

2010-07-02T12:50:00.000-07:00

I generally ignore the front page of newspapers, on the grounds that no matter what they're getting excited about, its unlikely to affect me personally. At one end of the spectrum they're getting into a lather about whether Jordan has decided to have them enhanced, diminished or moved to a different venue altogether, and at the other, more serious, end we are likely to have more detail than I really require on the need for fiscal restraint, which is an impossibly hard notion to get over to my wife, even in the simplest terms ("I said NO!, the bank has got a headache, take them back to the shop"). And after years of the Brown Bear's glare, do we in this neck of rural Lib.Dem/Con.-land really give a stuff about who might lead the Labour Party into their glorious future.
Yesterday was different. As I passed the newsagent I looked on the rack and there, occupying the entire front page of the Independent, displayed for all to see, was a picture of me, naked. I looked again and saw that it was actually 7 pictures of me at different ages, striding in single file across the page, with a baby boy at one end, several assorted handsome hunks in the middle, and on the far right was a bent, wrinkled, grey-haired old geezer. Poor old thing...not taken from my best angle.

The banner headline was "Have you got longevity genes? Scientists discover what makes us live longer", then the usual guff about "new tests", "life expectancy of 100", "ethical implications" etc. This was clearly going to change my life. After a whole page 2 of exciting stuff from a philosopher and a Science Editor, tucked away on page 3 was a more sober assessment of this much-trumpeted research. Professor Tom Kirkwood, an acknowledged expert on ageing, said that he is unconvinced by the claims, as the sample size was too small to justify any confidence, and the statement that the new test could predict longevity, let alone increase it, was open to serious misunderstanding.
Why can't journalists agree to be boring and truthful about science, instead of hypeing it up every time?
The Telegraph's approach suits me better, when they're not droning on about MPs expenses for duck-houses, because they don't seem to be as worried about political correctness as the more liberal papers. Admittedly they do tend to worry excessively about whether Andy Murray should bow to the Queen, but they had quite a good summary of the Englishman's attitude to Murray recently, pointing out that
when he's brutish and brattish he's Scottish but when he wins and he's skittish he's British.
Now we've had the Nadal match its fairly clear that I shan't live to be 100, but with another 5 years of reading about another unsuccessful dour Scot it will probably feel like it.

Dead Sheep and Green Energy

2010-07-02T07:15:00.000-07:00

I was rather surprised to find that my encounter with the dying sheep (June 29th) seemed more popular with my regular readers (both of them) than my much livelier Sex-organs (June 27th). Obviously that needs rephrasing, but you know what I mean. Could this perhaps have been due to an occult residual fondness for the English football team, who recently played like dead sheep in the World Cup, or is it that in Guardian-reading bloggers, there is a collective folk-memory, a lingering longing in the deep subconscious for the politician Geoffrey Howe who was said by Denis Healey to behave at the Despatch Box of the House with all the savagery of a dead sheep, but nevertheless with his last gasp he managed to dispatch Margaret Thatcher in fine style.
An example of this fascination with dying sheep and their effluent came from my friend Richard, who suggested that instead of Brussels paying farmers a subsidy for set-aside land, they should pay them to keep Texel sheep, then turn them on their backs occasionally and use the resulting effluent gases as a source of renewable energy. He cited the little known fact that near the Savoy Hotel in London is a street called Carting Lane, known to the locals as Farting Lane. In that street there was once a Webber gas lamp, which was powered by the methane gas from the sewers which carried the ordure from the guests of the Savoy Hotel. One day a motorist reversed his car into the illuminating lamppost and the pedestrian population, overcome by the offensive whiffs of the toffs, demanded that the lamp be powered thenceforth by natural gas, which it was, to the detriment of our planet.
I thought that would be a very interesting idea for the Green Party to consider, when next they debate what to do with their ordure. And ordure (shit) is itself an interesting word (Latin ord - foul). Have you noticed that when the Speaker of the House of Commons intervenes in a spirited debate he shouts “Ordure, Ordure”. And he’s generally right, it is.
My friend Richard is keen to publish a book of such stories about London and I told him that if he produced 100 such stories, I’d publish it for him.
He then sent me a charming little poem about a Flatulent Nun from Hawaii, with an execrable rhyme in the second line (she allegedly supped on papaya), but in the 3rd line 'Passover' certainly rhymes well with the 4th line ('ass over'), and I have no quarrel whatever with 'papaya' and the resulting 'Handel’s Messiah' which was probably a delightful musical experience.
“Ooh, Richard, you are awful, …but I do like you!” (Kenny Everett).
Richard tells me I bring out the worst in people, which may be true. Boring old farts that we are.
Anyway I explained to him that I only publish books in the best possible taste, suitable perhaps for people with an Oxbridge education. I was thinking of people such as Dr. Spooner, whose half-formed wishes often turned into half-warmed fishes. It was even more embarrassing for the good Dr. when he once described the unwise amatory adventures of one of his fellow dons as ‘one of Cupid’s stunts’. I wonder how he would have responded to Richard’s shafts of wit?

Still on Babies

2010-06-30T22:01:00.000-07:00

Alison’s Comment (on my Blog of 27th June) that she’d prefer her eggs to be fertilized while she was out to lunch (well, it has been known to happen; two bottles of bubbly and those comfortable couches at the Savoy Grill could easily promote friendship) reminded me of the difficulty I had as a first-year medical student in envisaging child-birth, a process whereby, as I understood it from the Anatomy textbooks, a thing the size and consistency of a coconut had to be gradually squeezed along a thing the size of a hosepipe, using little more than will-power and a mild laxative. As my training progressed, with the help of friends (ahem!) I gradually learnt more about the hosepipe side of things, but it was still difficult to put myself in the lady’s shoes, so to speak.
On witnessing my first delivery, things appeared to be much worse than I’d thought, judging by the imprecations of the Italian momma who was at the extruding end of things. My role as a student had been mainly to endure the screams, to regularly mop her fevered brow for 12 hours or so, and then allow my hand to be shredded by her fingernails during each contraction once things started to happen.
I was absolutely amazed when 10 minutes after the delivery, and a certain amount of mopping-up, her husband was allowed in and she greeted him with every sign of affection and happiness. If any man had put me through that I’d have killed the bastard.
Years later, when it became fashionable, even essential, to empathize with patients, instead of just looking after them, I decided that I ought to find out what it really felt like to have a baby. Its surprisingly difficult for men who’ve never been constipated for more than 5 days to really understand exactly what it must feel like down there, so I asked my wife if she could give me any inkling of the agony.
“Its fairly easy” she said “Just put each of your little fingers into the two corners of your mouth and pull gently” O.K.
“Now pull harder and harder” Ooh that hurts.
“Now pull as hard as you possibly can for an hour and when you can’t stand it any longer, use your two forefingers to peel back your upper lip from your face, and then push your entire head out through your mouth”

"When I were a lad...."

2010-06-30T02:36:00.000-07:00

All this recent hoo-ha about the English soccer team and their impressively inflated wages and their even more impressively inflated WAGS reminds me that although I usually try, like the footballers, to impress people with talents I don't really possess (savoir faire, cool urbanity etc), my natural style nowadays tends more and more to the Northern Grumpy Old Man school of oratory, which consists of a stubby forefinger pushed into the chest of the cornered listener, accompanied by the phrase "When I were a lad, yer were right lucky to 'ave......" In my case it was football boots.
I should begin by explaining that my uncle played professional football for Nottingham Forest long before Brian Clough was born, and in those days they apparently were a very good First Division team. When I tell my grandchildren this story they cannot understand why we’re not now all millionaires, but football in the 1930s was not a licence to print money. Like most of my male relatives my uncle worked as a coal-miner and played football as a hobby at weekends. He usually worked the night shift on a Friday and came home in the early morning exhausted and coated in coal dust. He would then bathe in a tin bath in front of the coal fire, and catch a few hours sleep before getting his football kit together, having a quick sandwich and catching the public bus to Nottingham for the Saturday afternoon game.
His remuneration for his efforts was that they paid his bus-fare and provided his football kit. When he returned home he would give his dirty boots, shirt and shorts to his little sister (who eventually became my mother), and it was her job to wash the football strip and clean his boots, for which he paid her several pence. The Beckham life-style it was not.
With that family history however I felt I should at least get into my Grammar school team. As I now know, genetic inheritance is not always that reliable. I was 6 ft. 4 in. tall and bore a distinct resemblance to a bespectacled giraffe both with regard to shape, size and agility (think Peter Crouch after 6 lagers). Small persons ran rings round me and although there were odd occasions when my head got in the way of the ball, it was never a happy experience. Footballs in the 1950s were made of heavy leather and they had stiff, hard, leather laces that tended to stick out. As a defender I dreaded those long goal kicks which were heading my way, as I knew that if I shirked it I should get a verbal lambasting from the John Terry equivalent, whereas if I steeled myself to withstand the pain and leapt forehead-first into the heavy ball I knew I would probably get a headache or concussion, and most likely would lose my glasses, which would get trodden on if my header didn’t quite work and the ball didn’t bounce far enough away from me.
Nevertheless I tried hard, as I had little else to offer on my University application form. I did make it into the First team once, when we played the local Agricultural College second team in a snowstorm (hulking, great 20 year-old farmlads) and lost 15-2.
So what could I put on my University application form in the space for Other Achievements? I eventually heard that a team called Pinxton Rovers were so short of players that anybody with a pair of football boots and a bicycle to get them to Pinxton could turn out for them any week. We played on a bone-hard recreation ground,with occasional patches of grass, usually with either 9 or 10 men. Good exercise but I can’t remember us ever winning a game.
The real, and only, benefit came many years later when I was able to casually tell my grandchildren, who now live in London and support Arsenal at the new Emirates Stadium, "When I was a lad, I played for Pinxton Rovers you know". They sometimes ask if they can see my No.7 shirt. If only!
John B.

Sheep- are they intelligently designed?

2010-06-29T06:08:00.000-07:00

Yesterday started well. I saved a life before breakfast.
I looked out of my bedroom window at 7 am. and in the paddock beyond our garden I saw what looked like a sheep. Nothing unusual there, but this sheep appeared to be lying flat on its back with all four of its legs sticking up vertically in the air. Further observation through binoculars showed it was not one sheep but two, one of which seemed like an adolescent lamb sleeping near its unconscious upside down mother.
I knew from our local shepherd that the ambition of every sheep is to try to die before it can be sold in good condition at a market, and this sheep looked to me to be about to achieve its ambition.
I dressed hurriedly and approached the inverted sheep which was comatose,wheezing softly and intermittently discharging copious quantities of what commonly steams out of Cowes backwards other than the Isle of Wight Ferry.
The lamb skipped off, happy as Larry, and I knelt carefully in a dry bit beside the mother.
I knew that this sheep was a Texel, a breed known for its large size and its broad back, and when it turns turtle, just like a turtle it cannot turn over again. The weight of its own body then compresses its lungs and gradually suffocates it, and this was clearly what was happening here .
Heaving manfully on its woolly flank I just managed to roll it over, whereupon it behaved like a newborn zebra, i.e. it lay still for a few seconds, opened its eyes, coughed a bit, tried to stand, wobbled and promptly fell over again. It repeated the standing, wobbling and falling sequence several times, then gradually got it strength together and wandered off to graze as though nothing had happened.
The lamb, which was an adolescent ram, then returned to mother, and although it was almost the same size as its mother, it tried to suckle, and when she would have none of it, it tried to mount her.
What does this ovine adventure teach us? One might venture to suggest that sheep are not intelligently designed, as the Creationists would suggest, but I suppose one might equally argue that Texel sheep are designed by Man by selective breeding to have broad meaty backs, so we can't blame God if they die whenever they roll over.
And what about the behaviour of the teenage ram? It just confirms my view that propogation of the species is a very strong instinct, and humans shouldn't be surprised when cuddly toys behave like animals.
Anyway I went off to breakfast quite pleased with myself and ewe and son are both doing well.