How John Darwin lost his mojo

Or his memory, or whatever it was. I forget. But the explanation is really quite simple.

A window on the male mind

Recently I had a friend stay for a couple of days. He's perhaps not your average PhD in statistics, and while that might come in handy for me occasionally, that's by the by. A few years ago he married the love of his life, then promptly watched her die a slow and painful death, which actually wouldn't have been so bad if her parents' contribution to the grieving process had been a little more sensitive than the immediate presentation of a fabricated Will. But that's by the by too. Well, it is now, anyway. He hopes to recover his health by the end of the year.

Slowly he's getting himself to the point where he'd like to find a date, so while he was here I took him to an online candy shop dating site. I did a search for what he was looking for and was quite amazed by what came back (but I guess I've always known that not wanting children isn't a great marketing strategy with women). He was even more amazed and I hardly heard a word out of him for the next hour. But I did hear the following:

"She looks like she has some depth!"

"Oh no, her eyes are too close together."

I wish him luck.

They should know

I've now been assured by two women that a man a woman fall in love just by spending lots of time together over a long period of time. These two women had something in common, too. They had been married a very long time, and weren't in love.

21st Century Dating Etiquette

I believe it's perfectly OK, if you're already going out with someone, to ask them to help you calculate the child support payments you will be seeking from your ex. Especially if they're more mathematically inclined than you are.

But if you've met someone online and haven't even seen each other in person, to request a telephone coaching session in negotiating your divorce settlement? Hmmm, not so sure. I'll have to ask my grandmother how they did it in her day.

How to tell a Woman from a Girl

Mother (henceforth called Farm Girl, for reasons which will become obvious later in the song) runs her own farm. She raises cattle. She is very good at this, but not so good at the commerical side of things. She has an accountant set her stock targets to reach her financial objectives.

Farm Girl sends me an email. "I'm thinking of buying some weaners..."

It's OK, I didn't know what weaners were either. They are calves that have just been weaned, three months old. Not to be confused with wieners - these come later.

Farm Girl doesn't normally buy weaners. She buys day-old calves, because her operation is oriented around feeding and raising them from this age. Day-old calves are much cheaper, and her expertise turns them into healthy fat cattle in quick time.

I ask her why she would want to buy weaners. "I'm behind my projections". Her accountant has set her a target of x weaned stock by the end of the year, and she figures that her best option is to buy older calves to meet the projection. I'm not so sure.

Firstly, she doesn't save any money by buying weaners. She still has to run her milking operation for other calves, and she has spare capacity for her proposed acquisitions, so there is no additional cost involved if she buys day-old calves instead. Well, there are minor costs, but they come nowhere near the higher price payable for the weaners.

Secondly, her advanced rearing methods mean that calves she rears from infancy mature faster than calves from other farms. In short, if she bought a weaner and a day-old calf today, they would both mature at the same time. This is what matters, because it's not until a calf matures, and is sold, that she gets any return on it, and the purpose of the projections is realised. She rifles through her accountant's projections and realises that if she acts now she can still meet her planned sale dates without difficulty. She relaxes.

Once she's given me this information I explain to her that she gains little benefit from buying weaners, since she won't get her return on them any faster, but that they'll cost her twice as much initially. I don't calculate the figure at the time, but the difference is somewhere in the order of $10,000. Done.

Next day Farm Girl sends me an email. "I'm thinking of buying some weaners..."

I'm sorry girl, I can't help you.

Surreality #9.3

Mother is indeed slightly unhinged, but I'm pretty sure I know why. At least, that's the conclusion she's been gently leading me towards. I'm still trying to place her on the reality-fantasy continuum and not having much luck - not a good sign. But the most important thing to establish is whether she's planning on doing some healing, or is just looking for someone to hold down the reality end of things so she can go off the scale. Then I'll know whether I have any place here.

Surreality #9.2

Day 10: Daughter reams out Boy for being negative (i.e. not having proposed to Mother, who he has yet to meet in person).

It seems they really do do things differently in the country. Apparently people have children so they will have someone to arrange their marriage.

Purple

The red you wear when you're feeling blue.

Occupational hazards

One of the joys of doing a line of work that lacks a standard job title is what you get to sift through while scanning the job market. Or, I should say, while keeping abreast of the job market. I can only presume that whatever service they provide, it's not grammatically demanding. I couldn't see them making $3,000 an hour for putting prose like this together.

Proof of Intelligent Design?

Blood is alkaline. Thus it will not corrode one's nice new guitar strings.

Surreality #9.1

Mother is either slightly unhinged or just a country girl (sometimes it's hard to tell the difference). Or both. Small wonder that she kicks arse.

Surreality #9

Girl meets Boy. Girl chats up Boy. Boy realises that he is too old for Girl. Girl talks to Boy like she has always known him. Girl realises that Boy is too old for her. So Girl does the logical thing - she sets up Boy with her mother. Mother kicks arse.

Boy must now decide whether to place his within range.

A new religion

Having just invested a few minutes of my life watching atheists and Christians engage in debate perhaps best described as less-than-robust - although, being conducted on the internet, it was, as you'd expect, intensely polite - I thought it might be useful to stake out some middle ground. Somewhere the warring tribes might come to sit, have a cup of tea, and work through their differences while feeling equally ill-at-ease.

Yes, it's time for one of my new religions.

Every religion needs some kind of founding, guiding principle, preferably quoted from an ancient text translated through half a dozen ancient languages, each of which attaches its own unique symbolism to a range of commonly-used words. I will simplify my task by selecting a text which has already been Quality Assured by three of the world's top 10 religions. I refer to what is collectively known as The Old Testament.

Now I must select my guiding principle. In order to appeal to the masses with their attendant spans of attention, I need a soundbite, something catchy, something the TV news editors can run with. An obvious candidate is Sirach 25:23, or, expressed more colourfully, Sirach 26:12, but today I feel like doing something original. So instead I'll choose Genesis 1:27, specifically God created Man in His image. Yes, I think I can work with that.

Let us now think through the implications of Man being created in God's image. Back before the beginning of time, we have God sitting around in His grand omnipotence (underpants not yet having been invented) with nothing to smite. We know that Man in such a circumstance would quickly become bored, and find himself compelled to build something in order to smite it. So God, not really having much else to do for the remainder of eternity, sets about building himself a Universe.

Of course, designing and building a Universe is no simple task. It requires the development of unifying principles of matter and energy, gravitation, electromagnetism, hydrogen bonding, fermentation, smallpox, Cleopatra, misuse of the apostrophe, breakfast cereal, borderline personality disorder, fish paste, cowbells, daytime television - the works. Hand such a task to a Man and he'd likely feel a tad daunted. Unless, of course, he thought he was God. Then he'd wade in and design the whole thing in one go, and in his unbridled self-confidence fail to recognise his mistakes. In his perceived infallibility and invincibility he would also likely just switch the thing on without thorough testing, which would just as likely result in some almighty explosion. Imagine how much worse it would be if he knew he was God.

I think you can see where we're headed here. God designs and builds His Universe in a mere six days (presumably tracked by burning a knotted rope, hence His installation of the Sun and Earth as an elegant timepiece). Naturally this isn't enough time to really think through some of its fundamental principles, like the unification of gravitation with the other basic forces, but He figures that this is just version 1.0, and no one seriously expects anything to be stable, intuitive and fully-featured until at least version 7.3. At midnight on the sixth day He is knelt over His Universe shooting footage for the unreleased documentary Behind The Scenes: The Making Of The Universe*, when He realises a flaw in His Laws of Physics. He puts down the camera and reaches for a screwdriver, but it's too late.

Universe 1.0 explodes. Our hapless God, with no opportunity to escape, is instantly vapourised, His constituent atoms flung to the far reaches of His flawed Universe, a victim of His own Creation.

So there we have our new religion, one which provides a satisfactory explanation for the Universe as we know it. All we need now is a name, which is fairly obvious, really - Kneeling Over Big Bang, or Knobbism. Disciples are to be known as Knobbs. Currently there are no plans to build congregations as it's difficult enough being a Knobb without having to stand in a room full of them.

* Behind The Scenes: The Making Of The Universe was axed as network executives considered the content "too demanding" for any conceivable audience.

A moment of weakness

We interrupt this mindless drivel to bring you a special event. An unknown but benevolent individual has placed upon YouTube one of Australia's classic television commercials, which for your correspondent was far too fortuitous a turn to leave unstoned. We ask that you forgive these gentlemen in their moment of weakness.

For the benefit of those among you who refused to see the humour in the above, yes, I have been labelled a misogynist. But after lunch I was dubbed a lesbian (you know what they say about curries). Balance in all things. I therefore present to you some girls getting even. I scarcely require to bring to your notice the attendant increase in sophistication.


Primer: the product (men's underwear) had been advertised for over a decade with the by then well-known jingle "one day you're gonna get caught (with your pants down)".

Dub is the Natural Rhythm of the Universe

I don't need to explain or justify that assertion. It just is. I don't know why that Stephen Hawking guy even bothers.

Oh, but of course - he can't dance.

Spin your inner compass

I was reading yesterday a little piece written by a woman with bipolar disorder. I think her point was something about her condition being invisible to the average citizen, but I found myself thinking I didn't regard her as disabled, but over-abled. Wider emotional repertoire. Greater mental range. More flexible brain. Psychologically double-jointed. 0-100 and back again in less than one second. Can - and does - go anywhere. The chief problem is that it threatens all those other people who are stuck with being normal. And granted, it can be difficult to harness. But I still reckon bipolar people are easy to sell.

Reminds me that it's now some years since I dated anyone who could genuinely be classed as mentally ill. No wonder I feel like I'm getting stale.

It was bound to happen sooner or later

And now it's been done.

Unsurprisingly, it works, although I'm guessing the contemporary Qawwali masters have already amended their Wills.

Just when you think you can get through a week without learning anything...

...along comes cornstarch.

What this has to do with North African remixes is something only a search engine would know.

A spot of freefall wouldn't go astray

Nothing wrong with me right now that being dropped from a considerable height couldn't fix.

Note to Self

Must find place in Universe.

For Make Benefit Glorious Race of Tour de France

When you stay up too late watching television you start to see very strange things. Such as this fellow, who has apparently just won his triathlon.

Ms Shared Skitless: the debriefing

It now seems safe to conclude that Ms Shared Skitless has indeed imploded. Knowing her sense of timing, if she ever contacts me again she'll wait until I've forgotten her name (not the one I gave her, the one her parents did). This could be as soon as the week after next. In times gone by I might have got myself in a knot about feeling like I understood a day too late, but these days I'm just happy to feel like I understood at all. For every ounce of promise there was a pound of confusion, and while clearly a giving person, she was too paralysed by fear to actually give. There's nothing to miss.

Down the hole

"I GUARANTEE You’ll Lengthen your Drive and Cut your Handicap by 7-12 Strokes in Just Two weeks."

I got so excited. I read the endorsements ("What a difference it has made in my swing"); I marvelled at the exactness of the science. I pulled out my credit card. And then I realised they were just selling better ways to ruin a perfectly good walk. Talk about an anti-climax.

Fudge

I received a phone message from The World's Biggest Mining Town today, where a group of friends and former colleagues is locked in a room trying to solve The World's Second-Biggest Mining Problem (The World's First-Biggest Mining Problem being that too many people think they would only be happier if they had more stuff). Nothing unusual about this - every few months someone calls to ask me if I am ready to resume having no life in return for the satisfaction of being recognised as one of the select few who failed to solve The World's Second-Biggest Mining Problem (as if it wasn't already on my CV). This is usually a very short conversation.

This time I knew it wasn't one of those calls. The tone of voice was grave, the message curt. This could only mean one thing. Sure enough, I rang back, and was immediately asked for one of my old fudge recipes. I'm sure you know those little treats that mathematicians bring to work folded in aluminium foil, which they furtively unwrap and feed into the computer when they think no one's looking. I have something of a reputation for making fudge serve as a substitute for a proper meal. I don't know what is the mathematical equivalent of diabetes, but I do know that I am at high risk.

This was one of my old bosses talking. He's always a bit cagey when he talks to me, because he thinks I'm twice as good at his job as he is and could render him unemployed. This seems strange to me, because I can't even comprehend half of what he does. Plus there at least 57 other things I can think of in life that I'd rather do than his job. And anyway, my conscience would never let me to put him on the street where he'd have nowhere to plug in his plasma-screen TV. But the cageyness is infectious, so when I do anything for him I find it harder to think. So instead of helping him with his problem I'm just sitting here blogging about it. My head hurts.

Getting serious about road safety

It's about time we did something about the road toll. I've looked at the numbers and it's perfectly clear where the problem lies. While the death-rate for most road users has long been in decline, one group continues to crash the funeral party in unprecedented numbers - pedestrians.

Some apologists try to portray pedestrians as real human beings, as everyday members of society just going about their everyday business; in truth they are anything but. The people entrusted with optimising the quality of human interaction in our cities - traffic engineers - know that pedestrians are modern-day anarchists whose only objectives are to interrupt the free flow of testosterone on our streets, and to cripple the economy by making journeys without consuming resources or creating employment.

Unfortunately, while the social benefits of killing pedestrians are enjoyed by the entire motoring community, the costs are disproportionately borne by those individual drivers who take on the responsibility of making our roads safer. Drivers who kill pedestrians often have to swerve, and sometimes even brake and then accelerate back to speed, increasing brake and tyre wear, and consuming additional fuel. They suffer damage to their vehicles, necessitating time-consuming trips to the panel beater. Some of them even stop after the impact to telephone pedestrian disposal services, and while the telephone call is toll-free they may end up late for their hairdresser's appointment.

For their part, pedestrians remain defiant and insolent. Honestly, the way they carry on you'd think walking is something humans had been doing for millions of years. Or that driving a car wasn't a basic human right. They refuse to acknowledge the statistical proof that putting one foot in front of the other is an inherently dangerous activity that poses a grave threat to the productivity of the average hairdresser.

Fortunately, a socially-efficient solution is at hand. If pedestrians refuse to protect themselves then it is up to society to protect them from themselves. Henceforth all pedestrians will be required to travel within an armoured metal box designed to protect them from collisions with other road users. It is anticipated that for such a box to have sufficient strength it will weigh somewhere in the vicinity of 1,000kg (2,200lb). As such it will need to be supported upon wheels, and require a motor for propulsion. Pedestrians will be required to register their metal box with the authorities at nominal cost, and fuel for the box's motor will be taxed; these revenues will be used to offset the social costs of pedestrian activity. And then, you can be assured, our streets will be safer, and we will all be much better off.

Miss Nomer

Ms Scared Witless. I got her name wrong. It's actually Ms Shared Skitless. Not that it matters, because I don't expect I'll be hearing from her again, which means you won't have to hear about her either. Apart from the inevitable coroner's report.

10 reasons to pluck a G-string (among others)

10 reasons why one should play the guitar

1. It sounds better than scraping one's fingers with sandpaper

2. You don't have to pay someone else $100 to tune it

3. It's the only instrument that makes you think you're better than you really are

4. You can scare people just by not covering your fingertips

5. It's not too heavy to carry on your own

6. You can play and sing at the same time

7. You always have a spare G-string on you

8. If you annoy people in playing it, it's too big to be shoved down your throat

9. If you carry one in public people come up to you and ask you to play for them

10. It can remind women of something else


10 reasons why one shouldn't play the guitar

1. It's about as useful as scraping one's fingers with sandpaper

2. You can never get the bloody thing in tune

3. It makes you think you're better than you really are

4. You scare people just by not covering your fingertips

5. No one will ever help you carry it

6. You can play and sing at the same time

7. Women are always disappointed when you show them your G-string

8. It has a convenient handle that vastly improves leverage when the body of the instrument is to be applied to the player's head

9. If you carry one in public only drunk people come up and talk to you

10. Women are only interested in what it reminds them of if you're giving them the impression that you'd be any good at it

Single men face problems of biblical proportions

The chief difficulty of being a single man is still having all your ribs. It's nearly impossible to buy, off-the-shelf, a corset that fits properly.

Love and unconsciousness

My favourite discoveries are unquestionably the ones about how we unconsciously influence - and sometimes make inevitable - outcomes that we really don't want. I'm excited right now (flawed logic alert), but by the time you read this, you won't be.

At a very early stage Ms Scared Witless commented that she didn't think men were aware of what women were thinking/feeling/doing. At the time I took that to be a generalisation with exceptions, as one does, such as when I say "women hate generalisations". But after a month of going around in circles I'm starting to think that she has never seen an exception.

Now, to have not seen an exception, she must never have encountered one, or not recognised one when she encountered it. Personally, I find it hard to believe that she has never encountered one, especially as she would be a person of interest to any such man. For she is considerate of what men are thinking/feeling/doing. I have labelled her A Good Woman.

At this juncture I could pursue some tangent about a sensitive considerate person being most compatible with an insensitive inconsiderate one, but I won't.

So it seems that she has never recognised a man for having any awareness of women. I'd have thought this was difficult to sustain through a couple of decades of adult life, but after a month of going around in circles I think I can see how she's achieved it.

Somewhere along the way she's concluded that men can't read signs. Whether this was her conditioning, early experiences, or the fact that 90+% of us can't read signs, I don't know. But once she's reached that conclusion, she's taken hers down and sacked the signwriter.

We now have a woman who offers men few indications as to what she wants. Her body language is occasionally warm but always sends conflicting messages, she disappears from contact for up to a week at a time without notice or explanation, and she rarely says anything that gives a man the slightest chance of knowing what she'd like him to do. And, because her name is Ms Scared Witless, if he does the wrong thing she goes into a tailspin.

So what's a man to do? Well, if he's the kind of chap who's used to reading the signs and doesn't do anything without an invitation, he soon realises that he's in an impossible situation, and bounces off. If he doesn't need an invitation, well, he's got himself A Good Woman, and there's no sense letting one of those get away without a fight.

I can't wait to discuss this with her. Except that she's disappeared from contact without notice or explanation.

The Fado Paradoxes

By now some of you are probably thinking that I have some kind of unhealthy obsession with death, and I suppose I should reassure you. Firstly, my obsession with death is anything but unhealthy, and secondly, I do have other interests. For example, I'm also quite keen on booty music. This, in turn, is why I'm not terribly interested in theology. Allow me to explain.

There was a time when I ran with the Salvationists, but was no longer welcome after I failed to stifle a laugh when I saw how puny the Y-chromosome was. The Annihilists had a space in wide midfield so I signed with them. After a few years' careless research I stumbled upon a world without paradoxes, in which even the Salvationists made sense in their own paradoxical kind of way. Consider, for example, the Fado Paradoxes.

In the remote mountain caves of Portugal, far from the prying friars of the Vatican, there are two small factories. One makes 12-string guitars; the other produces women with voices that will lift an unsuspecting individual from the floor of a crowded room and smite them against the wall. When these two products come together they produce a sound known as, for want of a better word, Fado. So far, so good. But here's where the problems creep in.

Paradox #1: Fado is so beautiful that it was clearly created in God's image. Therefore we have an image of a God that is half woman, half guitar. While this is undoubtably a pleasing asthetic well suited to the creative aspects of the work, it's simply not masculine enough for projecting omnipotence and descending pestilences upon Egyptians and stuff, for which it's much better to present as a fit old white man who could use a shave. And who wears a bathrobe. Neither of these are made in remote mountain caves in Portugal, although I'm sure a few of them work there.

Paradox #2: if Fado can smite people, and comes from remote mountain caves in Portugal, it must be God. This means that the existence of God is proven, and its character is known. If this got out there'd be an awful lot of theologians out of work. (The preachers would be OK - they could get gigs as DJs and spruikers.)

Paradox #3: Fado is a joke if you can understand the lyrics. If you cannot comprehend Portuguese you would think these women had watched as their entire families perished in civil war; if you can you just hear them crap on about going next door to borrow a cup of sugar, but no one was home. Therefore no one who speaks Portuguese can be Saved, in spite of the fact that most Portuguese-speakers worship both the guy in the bathrobe and any woman built remotely like a guitar. One should never learn Portuguese for this reason.

So you begin to understand why in millennia of theological writings, none has mentioned Fado. It's all too much of a threat. So I must take up where they didn't, and explain how Fado also offers us insight into what heaven must be like.

Clearly, if heaven exists, it contains 12-string guitars and women singing unintelligibly in Portuguese. Therefore, we can conclude that in heaven, no one speaks Portuguese (except of course the Fado singers, but we've already established that they're God anyway, and I suppose they need their own private language so they can keep the saints in dark about all the stuff those sinners got up to).

Now, you can take it from me that heaven also contains drum kits, electric basses, stage pianos, some wicked woodwinds, and women singing unintelligibly in Middle Eastern scales. And that all of these are not necessarily heard at once. Therefore heaven either has several rooms featuring adequate soundproofing, is extensive enough that all of these genres can be played simultaneously without interfering with one another, or is subject to different laws of physics to the rest of the universe. (Contentions that heaven is simply beautifully scheduled or that all new arrivals are issued with an iPod included in their registration fee are not upheld - in heaven the music is on-demand and live.)

Continuing with this argument, we see that the last of these is the case. We have all seen those pictures of angels playing harps on clouds. Now, I don't have to tell you that harps are heavy, and the ones they have in heaven, fitted as they are with electric coil pickups and multiple effects pedals, are even heavier. No earthly cloud is going to support one of these babies. Therefore water vapour has a far higher density in heaven than it does on earth. Which leads us to our final conclusion: if you're in heaven, and it's raining, don't go outside.

Love and nothing approaching clarification

Ms Scared Witless waited until the moment I assumed that she had shot through, then sent me a text message. She may not have revealed all of her commendable attributes, but it has to be said that her timing is one of them. The message itself was too indirect to have much impact, so - since she'd sat on a text and an email of mine - I decided to wait and see if anything followed. Today there's an email saying my last email confused her. That can't be right. Since when have I confused anyone?*

Meanwhile I have learned something (and since when has that happened?). Whenever I have initiated anything with this woman the best outcome I have achieved is confusion. When she's done the initiating we've got along fine. Hardly surprising for someone called Ms Scared Witless, I suppose. Last time she met she made the observation that most men weren't comfortable with women taking initiative (on which I, having spent most of my life in two of the most homophobic cultures on earth, have my opinions); from that it can be comfortably assumed that she is comfortable taking the initiative. So I've emailed her back and told her to do that. I'm sure that will only cause more confusion.

* yesterday, actually

Places I'd rather be

It's too long since I sat by the sea watching the pelicans land, and it didn't happen today either. So I'll listen to this instead. One day I'm going to put down this silly guitar and learn how to play the duduk. Then I might get invited to more parties.

Dates - the perfect laxative

If you're going to have every facet of your life transformed by Big Machines you may as well date one.

I can't remember what inspired me to join an internet dating site. I think I might have been shopping for a graphics card - no, wait, that was eBay. Ah, now I recall. There was that woman at work about 18 months ago. Sparks everywhere. We were developing into a serious fire hazard until we had lunch together. I've been scratching my head ever since. Anyway, I thought I saw her on this site and somehow figured it would make life less confusing if I got on there as well. It wasn't her.

But once on there it seemed like an opportunity, so I stuck with it. A key attraction was the ability, as a friend so eloquently put it, to "cut through the crap". But she was married, so what would she know? Another was the idea of "looking" without putting day-to-day energy into looking - if I directed that energy almost anywhere else I'd be fairly certain of having something to show for it, and absolutely certain that the world would be a better place for it.

There were, of course, potential problems. So many people might be lying that if you tell the truth no one will believe you anyway. Some people might be there because they are scared of contact with the opposite sex. They're there. Some might be there because they lack the social skills to conduct a relationship. They're there. Some might be there because they don't have a clue what they're doing. That was me.

I had forgotten something. I don't date. I just go along, and sometimes a woman comes along who I connect with. Sometimes something happens, sometimes it doesn't. But it has always happened naturally, and with as much honesty and openness as either was capable of at the time. This notion of searching for a person to fit a relationship, of meeting a stranger repeatedly in a spirit of blind optimism, trying to realise your intentions and protect yourself from their intentions at the same time, trying to impress them and protect yourself from them trying to impress you at the same time - who invented this? Why do so many people put so much energy into it? How can anyone believe that anything good could come of it?

Medical advice

Or in this case, advice to those general practitioners and specialists who either "treated" me or messed up my relatives and friends:

1. You are in the business of preventing deaths, not saving lives. There is a difference.
2. You spent a lot of time at university working on dead bodies. Then you've been expected to go out and work on living ones. There are some pretty surprising differences that I only found out about because you didn't.
3. Science is a rigorous process of learning from data, not a pulpit or a book of facts. Failing or refusing to collect data before reaching a conclusion is not science either, although it can still kill people.
4. When there is nothing intrinsically wrong with some part of the body, but it is not functioning correctly, there are two things you must do and two things you must not do. You must:
i. recognise that there is a problem, but that it is coming from somewhere else.
ii. investigate the problem or refer the patient to someone else, or both.
You must not:
i. shrug and do 5.
ii. interfere with healthy parts of the body having trouble enough compensating for whatever that problem is.
5. Telling a patient that there is nothing wrong with them, that they are "stressed", should see a psychiatrist, need some TLC, or just need to sit quietly and read a book are not effective treatments for genuine medical problems.
6. Most of your interventions, particularly surgery, are invasive and violent, and place patients at risk of complications that you were not trained to recognise. Conduct these interventions as a last resort (meaning that you first consult people who are trained to recognise these complications), and as sympathetically as possible.
7. If a patient is convinced that something isn't right, maybe something isn't right.
8. Yes, I know some of you are now dead yourselves, but your evidence has no bearing on my opinion.

Another penny drops

Whenever life has allowed, I have kept moving. Other side of town, other side of the country, other side of the world; it's all good. Much of the push has been the search for a place where I could feel more at home, feel less of a misfit. Of course I was always a misfit wherever I went, but in each place the misfit experience was different, which had novelty value if nothing else. Lesson 1 was that if you're going to be a misfit anyway, it's much better to be in a place where you look and sound like one, because at least there you're not expected to fit in.

Lesson 2 has been staring me in the face since I was 8 years old but, in characteristic fashion, I've only just discovered it. Everywhere I've gone, no matter how "good" the culture was, the people I got along with best were those who also came from somewhere else.

Now I understand the value of moving away. It's less about where I'm going to, and more about not being where I'm from. The actual destination may be less important than I thought...

The call of the whiled

I wandered through a cemetery today. Just a wee one - never knew it was there even though I'd been to that particular place many times. Cemeteries are interesting and not. They're kind of like call centres in that everyone's allocated their little cubicle, everyone's checked their humanity in at the gate, and hardly anyone seems to be there by choice, but kind of not because just about everyone who's stuck there seems to feel so strongly about it.

Since this was such a tiny call centre I fancied my chances of tapping the wires without everyone drowning each other out, so as I passed the last cubicle with its rotting wrought iron footrail I popped the obvious question. Was this a fulfilled, restful soul?

Apparently not. All I got was a feeble but toxic tingling in my back that wore off completely at ten paces and left only an aftertaste of pity. No "oh, the osteoporosis has flared up again but it's great not having to bale that bloody hay every summer, and really, I've never felt better - how are you?"; or "hey, doesn't my cubicle look great? see, I decked it out with this wrought iron footrail. it looks so much more permanent than Alice's silly flowerpot"; or perhaps a "gosh it was great seeing the looks on the kids' faces when they learned we'd spent their inheritance"; not even a "thanks for asking". Dead people have no manners these days.

It could have been worse, I suppose. I could have been selected to receive a free mobile phone.

Love and cultural differences

Such as only happen with women from my own country. It seems a certain female noticed a certain male put out subtle "physical" signals, and wanted them, but was sufficiently preoccupied observing them that she neglected to offer any response whatsoever. The male thus became reasonably certain that this was not a desired course of action, or he was until he was set upon and kissed.

A certain female now feels a right royal goose. And so she ought.

So if you live in a country where half the women complain that they go to bars and no men come and talk to them, and the other half complain that they can't sit in a bar and have a drink without men coming up and talking to them, don't complain to me. And really, why complain at all when you can date foreigners instead? They make so much more sense.

But in an unusual twist, this locally-grown one still talks to me. Or at least, she did today.

A funny thing happened on the way to the crematorium

Not that I'm planning on leaving behind anything worth burning. As life has gone along I've always gravitated towards the people I connected with rather than whoever my family or peers would have chosen for me. As a child this more often than not meant the other misfits my own age, or the elderly. Unfortunately I didn't get as much time with the elderly as I would have liked as my mother was convinced they were so fragile that letting a child go near them would cause them a heart attack (unquote).

Once in my twenties I pretty much understood what the pattern was. They were people who thought about life and weren't afraid to admit it. Needless to say I've had a few good chats with people challenging various blockages and crises in themselves. Half my romantic attachments could be placed in the same category.

More than half my romantic attachments also belong in the "older woman" category. Despite my penchant for thinking about things, this was never something I needed to think about. It has been rare for me to connect with a woman anywhere near or below my own age, and moreso if they were single. Of course I became aware of the younger-man-older-woman thing (hereafter YMOWT) but I never personally saw it as a choice because younger women just didn't happen.

But I did think about the YMOWT. The strongest theory kicking about seems to be an alignment of sexual appetite, which to me explained why a relationship might be stable, but never accounted for how people get together in the first place. In hindsight, I believe I underestimated the extent to which we project our sexuality and sensuality.

It's always been bleeding obvious to me that sexual "approval" is one of, if not the, biggest drivers of human societies (not to mention economies). I've always marvelled at the silent games of attraction played in the street, in workplaces, in supermarkets, and in time I learned to play them.

As I played these games as a younger man I soon learned that, amongst those women who played them too, the older did so with far more assurance and poise than the younger. Hardly surprising - experience is a wonderful teacher - but the primary sense I got from the younger woman was fear. In turn I learned to play by different rules according to a woman's age and the level of confidence she projected. If she was under 30 I would play gently, over 40 and I could throw at her whatever she looked able to handle. Under 20 and I would not even go as far as to look at her directly.

Now, according to the YMOWT, when a man reaches middle-age he flips from older women to younger ones. I always saw middle-age as the time I could start picking on women my own age. When I qualified a couple of years ago I was curious to see if anything would happen. And something is happening. The younger women aren't too scared anymore.

If there was one rule I always took for granted in this country it was that I do not catch a younger woman's eye (you're right, this isn't Spain). Actually I never really expect to catch a woman's eye, but if she's young I know it won't happen. Er, make that "wouldn't happen".

Now if a younger (say, <23) woman sees that I will play the game with her, she expects me to catch her eye, and will virtually stop and wait for it before departing satisfied with the attention. It took a few months of wondering why younger women seemed to be taking longer to go past before I cottoned on. Oh, and maybe the one who fetched and held my eye and remained transfixed in fear until I smiled at her.

As a corollary to this, there's also been a change in how males of the same age respond to me. In a manner perfectly consistent with them perceiving me as a competitor for "their" women, from any distance they start shaping up to me and asserting themselves by, for example, standing in my path or placing me in theirs. When they get closer and see the grey hair, they shrink, and slink away.

At the same time I've been trying to gauge any change in how older women respond. If anything they've become bolder too. And silly games aside, so have children and animals. So it's not them. It's me. Life is a curious thing.

If you must compare yourself to others

Compare yourself to who you can be. Not to what everyone else seems to be.

Love and revision

After clearing her inbox she decides that maybe she wouldn't mind seeing me again. This time something's different. She's calmer, and showing signs of a more balanced (read positive) outlook, something she needs more than a man anyway. I'll tell her that if I have to.

Keeping it simple

You have two eyes. Keep one on the things that might harm you. With the other, look for the beauty you can have, share, give, or create.

Love and coincidence

For the next 48 hours I vacillate. Do I tell her the things I had hoped to show her, or do I walk away quietly? At the rate I'm going it'll be the latter.

I'm on my way to the osteopath. In my regular stupor I get on the right tram thinking it's the wrong tram, and get off at the wrong stop, condemning myself to a 15-minute uphill walk my body doesn't particularly need right now. I'm still cursing myself ten minutes later as I pass a supermarket. The footpath is narrow; the doors open as I pass and I step aside to avoid a collision. It's her.

Instinctively I keep walking. When a woman has just told a man to go away, it is not taken for granted that she'll be happy to see him 48 hours later. But her face lights up and I cannot help but stop. She starts putting her bags down and asks if I have time to stop, but I don't. As we part I tell her that it would be nice to see her, and her face twists in pain. I think mine may have followed.

But it resolves the question. When I get home, I write what I wanted to say, and I send it. Immediately I know I've done the right thing. And I am free again.

How to improve your sense of humour

Some years ago I heard some statistic on how many people live with chronic pain and immediately thought how awful that would be. I didn't realise at the time that I was one of them, and had been almost all my life. (OK, I'm a frog. Boil me.) And I can tell you that the worst thing about chronic pain isn't the actual pain.

No, the worst thing about chronic pain is the wall it erects between you and the rest of human experience.

It starts with not wanting to participate in what everyone else seems to think is great fun, because you know that it isn't. You move on to living vicariously, maintaining contact with feeling by inducing it in others. As the wall builds itself higher even this disappears from view. Forced back upon yourself, you start to fantasise about release, of destroying the source of torment.

You wonder how anyone can have a job and a family at the same time. Or start a business. Or play sport. Or dance. Time passes, and you wonder how anyone can have a job or a family. Sport, well that's clearly played by robots.

You pick up a newspaper and read that so many people have died, and your first thought is, "so what's the problem?" A friend loses his young wife to cancer before their first anniversary and your first thought is, "why couldn't I take her place?" Your best friend from school, now raising a couple of young kids, emails 20 years later to say he's in chemo, and you send back a chirpy message welcoming him to the one-day-at-a-time club. It doesn't fully register that his reply is neither timely nor chirpy.

Your favourite people are the precious few who can alternately shine through the fog, and grant peace. Much of the darkness in the human psyche feels like damp, trodden pasture smelling rather freshly of livestock, that you have to camp by overnight because it's got dark and you're still an hour's ride from the next town; OK, maybe not quite like that, and perhaps a little more scary, but you get the idea. It's still cold and squishes between your toes, though. Anyway... You realise that you could walk outside and make - or ruin - someone's day, save - or take - someone's life, after which you could shrug and not feel a thing. At least, you could on the days you go outside. All your favourite films are about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

You know you are sane, perhaps more than most, but you are not sure whether this is of any comfort. It certainly doesn't help you interact with 90% of the population. You no longer see good and evil, just response to circumstance. You assess people not by how high they've climbed, but what they've had to climb through. You check between their toes for mudstains.

Then, 30 years down the road, you find the first practitioner who recognises that there's a problem. Naturally the dominant medical establishment assures you that in spite of five years of university training, and rather more robust diagnostic methods than spouting a dismissive opinion from the far side of a desk, such practitioners haven't a clue what they're doing. You resolve never again to visit a member of the dominant medical establishment, at least not for any kind of health problem. After all, if it killed you it would hardly be a backward step.

Eventually you get a diagnosis. And a probable prognosis. And it's not bad. They just can't tell you when it might happen. So you go along with it, figuring the worst thing that can happen is that you'll die of something else in the meantime. Actually, that's the second worst thing. The worst thing is not dying of something else in the meantime.

But over time, something changes. You spend less and less time fantasising about smashing in your skull. You start to become curious again. What does it feel like to not be in pain? What would it feel like to be able to relax? And if I felt like that, who would I be? How fast could I run? What could I lead? Would I want my life? And what would I want to do with it?

Now, if that isn't funny, I don't know what is.

Love and other blows to the head

We meet. We like that enough to do it again. And again. And again. And by now it's clear she's one of those special ones, equal parts passion and sensibility. Certainly not shallow. Certainly not normal. Troubled, scarred, but determinedly positive. Unabashedly afraid, yet unafraid to act.

We are different. We like different things. We will likely never grow together, we likely do not belong together. But for now, we have much to give one another, for however long whatever lasts.

She visits my place for the first time, just for a couple of hours on her way to work. Not far out of her way; she can almost see her house from my living room window. She is smarting from a freshly served parking ticket, but that is soon forgotten over a cup of tea and some old-time songs that her father used to play. But after an hour or so she starts to become edgy. Soon after she says she must go. She goes quiet, appears troubled. She retrieves the parking ticket from her pocket. I put my hand on her shoulder; it doesn't seem to help. I suggest meeting again; she doesn't want to discuss it. Suddenly she advances towards me and kisses me fully and firmly on the lips. Twice. Then she runs to the door, and leaves.

48 hours later she calls and says she doesn't want us to see each other any more.