More hot toast and butter thoughts

I do have a friend with a heart condition who said he was too busy to exercise.  This cartoon must have been drawn specially for him.  How can you not find time for something that might help to save, or at least prolong your life?  Or is refusing to exercise despite 'doctor's orders' no more than a personal lifestyle choice we are all entitled to make?  Of course it is.  And am I any better for occasionally drinking more wine than is sensible for me?  Knowledge of the ill-health that might result from any behaviour is clearly not in itself enough to prevent the behaviour.  Everyone in Western Europe knows that smoking is harmful to your health but millions of people still do it.  There are other far more powerful influences at work when people chose to smoke, eat to excess, refuse to exercise, drink too much, drive too fast, take illegal drugs, and so on.  I was quite taken recently by a consultant from a major teaching hospital in London who kept repeating (in a radio debate about obesity)  that people get fat because they eat too much, that exercise plays a secondary and marginal role in weight loss (although not in general health and fitness).  I like that and it's obvious when you hear it.  Exercise all you like and keep eating too much and you won't lose weight.  Stop eating and take no exercise and still the pounds will fall off you.  Well said, doctor.  Now where is that hot toast and butter?

Raafat al-Ghosain

Thanks again to Robert Fisk of The Independent newspaper for reminding us of the following.  I paraphrase slightly.  'Just after 2am on 15 April 1986 the Americans killed a young woman, Raafat al-Ghosain.  Three bombs dropped from an F-111 aircraft  "impacted in the vicinity of the French embassy" and caused – to use the usual callous euphemism – "collateral damage".  Her father described the scene. "She was lying on her back with the head turned on the right cheek, she was intact, her hair undisturbed, and a small streak of blood coming from the top side of her head, flowing down her left cheek." Ms Ghosain was aged 18, a graduate from an English school on holiday from London, a promising and beautiful artist whose individual death went unrecorded in the country that killed her a quarter of a century ago. Her mother was Lebanese and her father Palestinian, working for a Libyan oil company. She is forgotten today.' 

Cinema verite

More fun from the BBFC classifications intended to aid unwary adults who might shirk from the unexpected or be unwittingly offended on a visit to the cinema.  This time the  BBFC guidance coyly warns that the film 'contains a discrete sex scene'.  What larks!  What might 'an indiscrete sex scene' look like, I wonder?  And how exactly do you have sex 'discretely'?  With the lights off,  beneath the bedclothes, fully clothed perhaps?  Slightly tricky that last one I would have thought. But I'm trying to imagine a filmgoer being caught unawares by something that appears on the big screen. 'These people are making love, discretely, but nonetheless copulating in Widescreen Dolby Surround Sound.  Outrageous!  This would never happen in real life.  So much for cinema bloody verite.'  I would love to read the BBFC guidelines that allow the censors to differentiate between 'a sex scene' and  'a discrete sex scene'.  Or between 'sex' and 'strong sex'.  Great phrase that - strong sex.  As opposed to what?  Slightly flimsy sex?  Half-hearted but well-intentioned sex?  These people need to get out more.

Hubris

It's an unpleasant sensation to feel yourself slipping through the previously stable surface of an assumption of professional competence on which you have been happily working.  The Ancient Greeks had a word for it and this week I have experienced that unpleasant sinking feeling as a victim of hubris.  My trusty Penguin English Dictionary defines hubris  as 'arrogance, insolence' (page 360).   But I prefer the Chambers 21st Century Dictionary's definition (page 654): 'arrogance or over-confidence, especially when likely to result in disaster or ruin'.  There was no disaster, no ruin, but an act of professional clumsiness that can be explained by workload pressure but not excused by it.  I was left breathless by the stupidity of what I had done.  Was it a salutary lesson?  Most definitely, yes.  And, without wishing to make more of it than it was, it reminded me of the lines from Tobias Wolff:

'You can go on as if you hold the reins, that the course of your life, yea even its length, will reflect the force of your character and wisdom of your judgements.  And then you hit an icy patch on a turn one sunny March day and the wheel in your hands becomes a joke.'

 

Reading about, watching and listening to the news from Japan, Libya, Bahrain, Palestine, Mexico, Syria, and Yemen,  it's appropriate to recall, as Alain de Botton reminds us, of Seneca: 'What need is there to weep over parts of life?  The whole of it calls for tears.'   Quite so.  Seneca's the one in the middle, with Plato on the left and Aristotle on the right.  Nice little medieval illustration but an unfortuante reminder that my 'teach-yourself Ancient Greek chronology' has fallen on hard times.

Mrs God

Is there a Mrs God?  What a great question?  I was also tickled to learn that the use of 'He / She' in common prayer books is becoming more widespread in the Christian church.  What a wonderful example of theological 'sitting on the fence'.  And doesn't this failed and slightly barmy attempt to offend no-one really just  please / displease men / women in equal measure? But is god perhaps beyond gender, gender neutral, or a sort of divine hermaphrodite? Hard to say given the importance of sexual reproduction in the maintenance of the species.  And given that the majority of the world's monotheistic religions are patriarchal in nature, patriarchal by tradition and patriarchal in contemporary practice, does it really matter?  Answers on a postcard please to anyone but me.

History on the march

World events are moving too quickly for me to keep up with on my blog.  Libya and the brutal civil war between Gaddafi and the rebels / freedom fighters, depending on which news service you listen to - disgracefully - for surely they are all freedom fighters struggling to overthrow a vicious tyrant.  Japan following the earthquake and horrific tsunami whose devastation is Biblical in proportion.  How many killed?  Ten thousand?  Twenty thousand? And now the nuclear threat from the perhaps fatally damaged power station.  Unrest in Bahrain and the arrival of, er, friendly troops from Saudi Arabia.  The victims of the New Zealand earthquake and the Australian floods now largely forgotten.  The civilian casualties in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan equally so.  Too much is happening too quickly.  Truly it seems as if history is on the (quick) march.

All hail the goddess!

My dentist knows I dislike her.  My dentist who is a sweetly natured, gentle and proficient woman knows I approach her surgery with all of the trepidation and deep seated anxiety of a true dental coward.  I have a phobia so powerful that if my wife didn't prod and cajole and remind me that my appointment was due then I wouldn't go.  My detestation of the dental profession is so strong that when the children were younger I would take them with me so that I would have to be brave.  And that didn't always work.  But my dentist knows this and once gave me a Being Brave badge for not crying out.  When I stand up from her chair my legs wobble and I stagger slightly for the few seconds it takes me to exit her surgery.  Walking down the street, as the distance grows between her dental practice and my retreating figure, I breathe more freely.  Despite all of this, I recognise her value.  I openly acknowledge the importance of regular visits to her satanic suite of brightly-lit rooms where the sickly sweet smell of decaying molars and medicated mouthwash seems to linger and perfume the air.  Life without my highly capable and silver tongued dentist would be grim indeed.  For all of those foolish people who wish they had lived in an earlier age, I would only ask that they consider life without effective dental hygiene and dental surgery, a life without anaesthesia, a life without the wonders of penicillin.  Just look at the picture and consider the Ancient Egyptian priestess whose skull showed the horrific marks of poor dental hygiene in the shape of a fist sized hole eaten into her jaw, the result of a tooth gone bad.   So it is I grit my teeth (sorry ... ) and pay my dues (literally) to the patron saint of dentists (probably) St. Apollonia of Alexandria.  All hail the goddess!

Hille Perl

Hille Perl.  Remember that name if you want to immerse yourself in the music of the seventeenth century viola da gamba.  She plays with the touch of an angel and even her name seems to fit the style and sound of the musical world she conjures.  I suspect that Gerrit van Honthorst (1592-1656) is more interested in the fleshy tones and seductive contours of the young woman he paints than the ripe and earthy tones of the viola da gamba she purports to be playing, but it is an appealing image nonetheless.  I wonder what Hille would make of it?  I suspect that she would be pleased to see her beloved instrument promoted regardless of the context.  I wonder though how accurate the young lady's bowing and fingering technique is?  Judging by the look on her face she is clearly enjoying her own music making.  Hille Perle's rather quaint sleeve notes on her Doulce Memoire cd  includes the wish that the music 'may happify (sic) and inspire you'.  It clearly has in this case.  I rather like it too.

Skin deep

I was struck over the weekend while shopping in town and at the supermarket by the number of women who, judging by the colour of their complexion, appear to have been dipped in creosote.  Ladies, I know you're making an effort to look more attractive, but that wood preservative colouration isn't doing it for you.  For those gents who also seem to be obsessed with their skin taking on the same sheen as Ronseal's Quickdrying Mahogany Woodstain, the same proviso applies.  Be natural.  Use as much skin cream as you need to make your skin feel soft and supple.  Add whatever makeup you need to highlight your most attractive features.  Apply gently scented perfume and try not to overdose on the anti-perspirants. But forget it with the fake tans already.

The pursuit of happiness

Am I happy?  How would I know?  Define happiness, using both sides of the paper.  In a new book by John Kay, 'Obliquity: why our goals are best achieved indirectly', he suggests that profitable companies are not those who always pursue profit at all costs, in the same way that happy people are often aiming for something else. Their happiness is a fortunate by-product of doing other things, of living 'a good life' with a clear moral compass.  So much then for all those books promising readers there are only 'ten simple steps to a happier life' and holding out the impossible dream of being able to 'make yourself happy in 30 days'.  (And I just love that word obliquity.  It's the sort of word that appears to be of recent formation but I was surprised to learn that it has an ancient pedigree, stretching back to Late Middle English, according to my OED, page 1428.  It stems from the French obliquer, to turn in a sidelong direction.)  The French philosopher Pascal Bruckner clearly agrees with Kay.  In his new book, 'Perpetual Euphoria', Bruckner argues that striving to attain happiness is more likely to lead to a state of unhappiness than not: that the active pursuit of happiness is a fool's errand.  Better by far, he advises, to treat happiness as an uninvited but welcome guest when and if it shows up in your life.  Hoorah to that.  I agree too with F. D Roosevelt's old saw, also quoted by Kay, 'Try something; if it fails, admit it frankly, and try another'. This reminds me of my family motto, carved into the lintel above the doorway of the ancestral shed: if at first you don't succeed, give up.