In the Beginning…

 

I have a theory. It goes like this. Everything we do is about death. Everything. From reading a book to eating to sexing (that’s a real thing) to sitting at the back of the class in school learning maths. From the day we are born to the day we die, death is at the centre of all we do, either consciously or unconsciously. It is the basis of all fears, from spiders to heights to water. It drives us, gives us purpose and yet is equally as capable of rendering us inert, unwilling, demotivated and demanding of its presence in an effort to control it1 . Sex is the transmission of life, the physical and psychological epitome of that selfish gene so espoused by Dawkins: ‘We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes2 .’ We like to think that it’s a triumph of drunken fumbling on a Thursday night round town, but it’s not. We boast about it, smile pensively next to the photocopier, dream of it. Yet, it’s something far deeper, far more sinister than that. It is the monster that lurks within and, like an alarm clock, it wakes you up to the possibilities that come with gender difference. It is in our genes and there is nothing we can do about it. We are given an innate urge to procreate, to ensure the survival, not of the species, but of the individual. It is a craving that, if not met, can at the very least lead to a skewed vision of the world around us; at worst, it can lead us into temptations that rely upon the oppression of others to meet our needs. This gene-deep urge is so strong that, at least 1 Quite possibly Terror Management Theory. Developed in 1986 by social psychologists Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, and Sheldon Solomon based upon Ernest Becker’s ideas. Curse them for stealing my extraordinary thunder. 2 The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. Oxford University Press (1976) 10 at one point in our lives, it becomes an uncontrolled, misunderstood, whip-wielding monkey on our back. Our bodies, with those minute, physical, functional units that control us like a Master of Puppets, are merely vessels designed to perpetuate, to replicate those gene-engines. Love, romance, soppy music, Les Mis, perfumes, lipsticks, hair gels, gyms, are all just ways to get us to do this. We are being manipulated by nature to, in the words of Marvin Gaye, get it on. ‘Researchers have found that the male brain is hardwired to seek out sex, even at the expense of a good meal, with specific neurons firing up to over-ride the desire to eat. Intriguingly, women do not have the same neurons, suggesting that sex for females comes secondary to sustenance.’3 Sex isn’t, as we like to think, about fulfilling our own desires. It has nothing to do with us. It’s about avoiding death – in the long term. The stigma that is still attached to those couples who don’t have children is something that still sends conversations into a death-spiral and, in the back of many peoples’ minds lays the question of their ‘completeness’. Food is the avoidance of death. From the moment we are born, we crave the nipple or the bottle. We are not trained to eat. We just know that we have to do it. If we don’t get it, we cry like cats until someone shuts us the hell up. We are, strangely, in our early years, dependent upon others to feed us because we are limited by our physical abilities but, once physically mature enough, put us on a desert island and we will fish and hunt and fight, even kill each other, for food. Of course, society has turned this all into an elaborate dance through consumerism and the power of advertising, but it works; it works because, like sex, there is in us that innate need to gain the best food that we possibly can in the quickest possible 3 www.telegraph.co.uk. 14 Oct 2015. This study was actually carried out on nematodes. I’m not sure how to interpret that. 11 time. Lucozade Aids Recovery; A Mars A Day Helps You Work Rest And Play; I’m Lovin’ It; Finger-Lickin’ Good (with a hyphen, it’s so good); Eat Fresh – these slogans aren’t accidental. Advertising is a deeply studied, psychologically intense field. Most adverts are prone to massive hyperbole, prey upon our weaknesses and fears and usually end up offering us something that we never actually thought we needed. I can remember, when I was a nurse, people brought Lucozade in to their relatives after bowel surgery. It was full of gas which, believe me, is not the thing that you want inside of you after losing fifteen feet of small bowel. A Mars a day didn’t help you work rest and play – a balanced breakfast, lunch and dinner did that. A Mars a day just contributed to the world’s obesity statistics. Eat Fresh, the slogan of Subway, is a clever little sausage of a slogan. Be honest, you are not going to go out looking for food that isn’t fresh and yet the slogan offers us the one thing that our robotic inner selves all want. You are not going to join the crows and peck at sticky carrion at the roadside between passing cars. We know, instinctively, that food which is not fresh, will harm us. Look at how much food we throw away because it is past its sell-by date. We smell our food, not because it smells great, although it invariably does, but because there is something in us that tells us to smell it to check that it is safe to eat. Anybody sniffed the milk or the bread this morning? Anybody change the water in the bottle before they went on a bike ride? Who won’t eat a bruised pear from the fruit bowl, apart from me? The expression, we eat with our eyes, is 100% true. Why do you think we fall for the patter that the chefs on TV sell us? Because they tart up the grub – if it pleases our eyes, we know that it will probably please our belly. We are suckers all. We are manipulated by those tiny motherboards within us that tell us, without us even realising it, that we must eat, when we must eat and what we must eat. It has all been twisted and turned by the politics of society, but the end result is the same – we avoid death. And how does reading a book fit into all this? The sex and the food thing make sense, but how on earth can reading a book be related to death? There are a couple of points in this theory’s favour. One 12 is that books present knowledge. Knowledge enables us. It enables us to improve our minds and by doing so enables us to get better jobs, to know what to do when the bomb drops, to know how survive with Ray Mears in the snowy, death-trap forests of Canada. The more we know, the longer we are likely to live. Life is a process of learning. Let’s look at fishing. Put a stick in water, you probably won’t catch a fish. Put something that wiggles and trails and leaves ripples on the water, the fish will see this as potential food and are more likely to be driven by their curiosity towards the object. Stick a worm or a fly on it and you’re in Trout City. How about building a house? The story of the Three Little Pigs is a perfect example of the ability to survive through acquired knowledge. As a pastime, reading calms, diverts, reduces stress, takes us out of mundanity, fulfils our subconscious need to make ourselves better mates. It doesn’t matter that we read less and less from books (although it does to me), because we are able to get our information from so many sources nowadays. Knowledge is, quite literally, at our fingertips. Instead of taking months to research this book, I can reduce that time to weeks. If I can reduce that time to weeks I can, hopefully, make money from it more quickly, which means that there will be a guaranteed source of income for food and a reason for my mate to stay with me and propagate. She is less likely to die if she stays with me. What about phobias? Well, that’s obvious. Some people are afraid of water because they might drown. I’m afraid of spiders because I know, I just know, that a spider will bite me, I will die, it will cocoon me and then slowly suck the juices from my body until I am a dusty, desiccated shadow of myself. It doesn’t matter what you are afraid of, you are afraid because something tells you that the object that you fear, will do you harm – possibly fatally. We can, with methods such as aversion therapy, learn that those things we fear might not do the harm that we think they will, but the association between the object and the compromise to our safety has to be broken. The difficulty comes when we don’t understand the source of the phobia; many of them are attached to deeply repressed events 13 from childhood that we have somehow managed to shut away and yet still come to the fore when those fears are by some means brought to life. The problem is that death is still a very taboo subject and is either greeted by silence or overt flippancy. We desensitise ourselves to it by, over the decades, increasing the violence in movies and in books. This gives us distance, tells us that it is something that happens to other people and makes us feel, albeit temporarily, better about our own mortality. The less we feel, the less affected we are by it. When it comes home though, we are, more often than not, drowned in the awkward silence that accompanies it. We don’t like to talk to colleagues about the recent death that they have endured because we don’t want to upset them, we don’t want to talk about something that we find difficult, that reminds us of our own mortality. Tears at funerals are very often not simply for the bereaved, but for those left behind, for what has been lost and for that which is yet to come. Funerals are terrifying because they hammer home reality. In hospitals, we separate the living from the dying, not out of an act of kindness for the dying, but because we don’t want to upset those who MRSA or medical incompetence have not yet killed. We shuffle the dying off into siderooms or we move them closer to the exit so that the mortuary trolley doesn’t have to wobble its way through the ward like a faulty Tesco trolley when it comes to collect the body. We don’t speak ill of the dead because tomorrow it might be us and we don’t want to think that someone might speak ill of us. We use euphemisms for death – asleep, deceased, late, lifeless, cold, departed, stiff, bereft of life (parrot, anyone?), bloodless, bought the farm, breathless, checked out, cut off (usually in his/her prime), defunct, demised, done for, expired, gone to meet his/her maker, gone to his/her reward, no more, offed, out of one's misery, passed away, pushing up daisies, resting in peace, sleeping. I wrote a play called Uncomfortably Numb in which, I’m sure you’ll be surprised to hear, death played an important part, and yet 14 the main characters would not say ‘dead’, they would say ‘demised’, as if the use of the word would cause the fellow with the scythe to tap upon their shoulder, take them by the crook of the elbow and lead them away to whatever destiny awaited them. So, why this book? Partly for the reasons mentioned above. All that we do is dictated by death - birth, education, work, eating, sexing (it’s still a thing), putting on the slap before we go out. It’s like that game, Six Degrees of Separation, where everything finds a common thread back to the one thing that they all have in common. Death is our common thread. I’m also writing about it because it’s a fascinating subject. I dealt with it in its various forms when I was a nurse and was always intrigued by peoples’ reactions; the false respect, the real reverence, the civilised routine of it, the cultural differences, the relatives who had been waiting poised for this moment to get hold of the deceased one’s house and the relative who would have given their own life to have their loved one back. I was also intrigued by my own reaction to the subject. In the end, I think it did for me. I don’t think I was able to cope with the hypocrisy and the ritual and the constant reminder of my own mortality. There was very little more juddering than seeing a person’s worldly possessions packed into an ASDA bag. It made me wonder if I would have much more to give away after I had ‘fallen off my perch’. I wrote about the first body I encountered, a young man of nineteen who had died in a road traffic accident, in Condition of Life: ‘I stared at him. I couldn't help it. My eyes were drawn to him in the same way that people rubberneck a motorway accident... The thing about the dead is that their eyes are rarely shut. Their lids come to a rest about half to three quarters of the way to closed. Their lips are thin, their nose pinched, their skin waxy, but at any moment, they could wake up and, despite those 15 half-closed eyes, your instinct is that they are no more than asleep. As I stared at him, I realised that there was something missing. This person in front of me was no longer meeting my expectations. His chest did not rise. I could not hear breaths. There was no movement in his eyes, no ruddiness to his young cheeks, no shine to his dark hair. Nothing living is ever completely still and yet the only thing he had was stillness. He was empty. Something had moved out. It is too easy to say that it was life that had gone, but it was also too difficult to grasp that concept. At that moment, I could not define life. I simply could not relate the lad in front of me to any concept that I could understand.’ It is something that never leaves you. A lot of the nurses I worked with remembered their first body. It was like the first blood of hunting – you were marked, changed for ever. It is also an important subject and worthy of some sort of analysis or gathering of info in one place, not only in the philosophical parpage that has been the whim of the last few pages, but also because, statistically, it’s just amazing. I will make you glad that you were born where you were born because the statistics for those living elsewhere are, thankfully, shocking. It’s good to feel the warm comfort of someone else being statistically more likely to die before they are fifty than you are. I will look at the media’s worrying attraction to death and how we lap it up like dehydrated dogs on a hot summer patio. I will look at diseases, murder, suicide, the gods, the decay of the body and ghosts and mediums. I will cover death from every angle except, with any luck, one. Well, there you go. That’s my theory. Life/death, yin/yang and all that. I’m sure someone else has come up with some similar theory1 ; there are many, far more intelligent people out there than me, but I haven’t seen it and, believe me, I have 16 looked for it. Enjoy. It might give you something to look forward to somewhere down the, hopefully, very distant, line. 17 PART 1 PART 1 World Death Rates and Causes WORLD DEATH RATES AND CAUSES 18 19 The population of the world is, give or take a couple, 7.5 billion. In 1900, it was 1.6 billion. In 1750, it was 700 million. In 1300 it was about 400 million. Once upon a time, it was 2. In 2050, it is anticipated to be 9.3 billion4 . To give this a proportion we can relate to, in London, in the year 1, there were a few farmers, perhaps 50-100. By 1300, it had a population of 80,000-100,000, by 1500, 550,000-600,000. In 1901 it had grown to 6,506,954 and by 2015 it had risen to 8,615,2465678910 . It is expected to be 13 million by 205011 . These explosions happened all over Britain12 - Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield - as the Industrial Revolution ground into top gear. What were once villages became smoke-belching, polluted, yellow, sulphur-fogged, overpopulated paeans to commerce. 4 www.ecology.com/ 5 www.londononline.co.uk. The Agrarian History of England and Wales: Volume 4, Agricultural Markets and Trade, 1500-1750. Cambridge University Press. 6 www.demographia.com 7 Major Cities in the Middle Ages Tellier, L.N. (2009) 8 Urban World History: An Economic and Geographical Perspective. Presses de l'Universite du Quebec. Thirsk, J.; Chartres, J. (1990) 9 Greater London, Inner London Population & Density History. demographia.com. 10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_London#Population 11 www.standard.co.uk 12 Table: Populations in major towns pre- and post-industrial revolution. The Census, 1801-1901: Statistical Reports. The National Archives TOWN POP 1750 P0P 1861 LONDON 675,000 2,804,000 BRISTOL 45,000 130,334 BIRMINGHAM 24,000 296,000 LIVERPOOL 22,000 443,900 MANCHESTER 18,000 338,300 LEEDS 16,000 207,200 SHEFFIELD 12,500 185,200 20 Up to 20.30 today, 3 December 2018, there have been over 330,000 births according to Worldometers. According to the same website, there have been about 138,000 deaths. That is over twice as many people born as dying. The world’s population is already 7.6 billion and growing, although the live US census site has the population at 7.5 billion. Either way, it’s a big day for the supermarkets. There is one birth every eight seconds and one death every eleven seconds. That is a net gain of one person every 14 seconds, according to the US government census on 3 December 2018. Up to this date, this year, the world population has grown by 75.5 million. That is made up of 130 million births and 54.5 million deaths. That is ridiculous. It’s no wonder that we are running out of homes, fuel, power and God knows what else. It makes me wonder if the world is slowly sinking in space. Maybe one day, like some errant snooker ball, we will gently bounce against the soft cushion of the universe and come to a stop, perfectly lined up with the yellow two-point sun, as if Stephen Hendry himself had gently tapped us across the black baize and left us in perfect alignment for our next shot at evolution. As a species we are vulnerable. There are over two hundred different types of cancer. There are over fifty eye diseases. The heart is vulnerable to coronary artery disease, arrhythmias, congestive heart failure, heart valve disease, heart muscle disease and congenital heart disease. Within each of these categories are other categories; arrhythmias include sinus or nodal bradycardia, atrial flutter, supraventricular tachycardia, ventricular extrasystole, ventricular tachycardia and ventricular fibrillation13, to name but a few. The bowel is a positive battleground of conditions that can cause the individual to waste away – Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, irritable bowel syndrome, coeliac disease, diverticulitis, cancer, Hirschsprung Disease. These have always been here. Imagine life before toilets. In The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, Ian Mortimer vividly describes early Exeter, where the 13 Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine 2nd edn 21 local brook, ‘shitbrook’ he calls it, is a dumping ground second only to the outflow from Sizewell B nuclear power station. As a breeding ground for further disease in an antibiotic free land, Shitbrook will do nicely, thank you. We have 206 bones in our body, each of which can break in a hypnotically grisly way - a greenstick fracture is an incomplete fracture in which the bone is bent, a transverse fracture where the broken piece of bone is at a right angle to where it might once have been, an oblique fracture where the break has a curved or sloped pattern, a comminuted fracture is where the bone breaks into several pieces, a buckled fracture, where the bone ends are driven piledriver-like into each other, a pathologic fracture secondary to a disease process, causing the bones to weaken, open fracture dislocation and a stress fracture. This is only a selection of the types of fracture. The list is not endless, but it would certainly keep you occupied if you wanted to try out each one. The chart above, from www.who.int, shows the worldwide causes of death for 2012. This relates to nations of all financial and social background. Ischaemic heart disease, stroke, diabetes, road injury and hypertension have all increased since 2000. THE TEN LEADING CAUSES OF DEATH IN THE WORLD IN 2012 ISCHAEMIC HEART DISEASE 7.4 MILLION STROKE 6.7 MILLION CHRONIC OBSTRUCTIVE PULMONARY DISEASE 3.1 MILLION LOWER RESPIRATORY TRACT INFECTION 3.1 MILLION TRACHEAL, BRONCHUS, LUNG CANCERS 1.6 MILLION HIV/AIDS 1.5 MILLION DIARRHOEAL DISEASES 1.5 MILLION DIABTETES 1.5 MILLION 22 ROAD INJURY 1.3 MILLION HYPERTENSIVE HEART DISEASE 1.1 MILLION In low-income countries, lower respiratory infections are the highest cause of death, followed by HIV/AIDS and diarrhoeal diseases. In middle income countries, ischaemic heart disease is top, followed by stroke and then lower respiratory tract infections. It is similar in high income countries. TOP TEN CAUSES OF DEATH IN LOW INCOME COUNTRIES PER 100,000 OF POPULATION 201214 LOWER RESPIRATORY INFECTIONS 91 HIV/AIDS 65 DIAORRHOEAL DISEASES 53 STROKE 52 ISCHAEMIC HEART DISEASE 39 MALARIA 35 PRE-TERM BIRTH COMPLICATIONS 33 TUBERCULOSIS 31 BIRTH ASPHYXIA AND TRAUMA 29 MALNUTRITION 27 . TOP TEN CAUSES OF DEATH IN HIGH INCOME COUNTRIES PER 100,000 OF POPULATION 2012 ISCHAEMIC HEART DISEASE 158 STROKE 95 TRACHEA/BRONCHUS/LUNG CANCERS 49 14 www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs310/en/index1.html 23 DEMENTIA 42 CHRONIC OBSTRUCTIVE PULMONARY DISEASE 31 LOWER RESPIRATORY INFECTIONS 31 COLON AND RECTAL CANCERS 27 DIABETES 20 HEART DISEASE 20 BREAST CANCER 16 It is interesting to note these differences. Does a better way of life lead to increased heart disease and stroke due to obesity and a less active lifestyle? The media and the statistics would suggest so. So would EASO (European Association for the Study of Obesity): ‘•Worldwide obesity has nearly doubled since 1980. •In 2008, more than 1.4 billion adults, 20 and older, were overweight. Of these over 200 million men and nearly 300 million women were obese. •35% of adults aged 20 and over were overweight in 2008, and 11% were obese. •65% of the world’s population live in countries where overweight and obesity kills more people than underweight. •Overweight and obesity are the fifth leading risk for global deaths. At least 2.8 million adults die each year as a result of being overweight or obese. •44% of the diabetes burden, 23% of the ischaemic heart disease burden and between 7% and 41% of certain cancer burdens are attributable to overweight and obesity. •More than 40 million children under the age of five were overweight in 201115 .’ 15www.easo.org/education-portal/obesity-facts-figures/ from World Health Organisation Fact sheet N°311 24 Their definition of obese is according to the BMI (Body Mass Index). This measures weight in relation to height. A BMI equal to or over 30 leads to a diagnosis of obesity. When I was a nurse and required to check the BMI of patients at regular intervals, I have to admit that I found it to be a slightly dubious method. I was considered obese, according to our BMI chart in use at the time, when I weighed sixteen stone at 1.8 metres tall. There is a problem with proportionality which came up time and again. There was also a lack of accounting for the individual. However, I would say that, on a global scale, it is probably about as accurate as we will get with current methods and remains a good indicator of body mass in relation to health. If you have seen the scenes on the spaceship in WALL·E, where humans are so fat that they can no longer walk, you will see where we are heading. I thought it was a documentary. The high ranking of HIV/AIDS, diarrhoeal diseases and lower respiratory tract infections are indicators of lower education, lower income resulting in lowered ability to afford medicines (and perhaps more corrupt/inefficient government) and the lack of basic sanitation. We in the richer countries have educated ourselves to health. We have invested time and research and can afford to have a safety-net system where health care is available to all (although not for much longer, I don’t think). It is interesting to note, and you can’t have failed to have noticed it in the media, the rise in diabetes. We are eating ourselves to death. Diabetes does not even show up on the 2012 statistics for low-income countries. Preterm birth complications does show up (but not on the high-income chart), as does malnutrition.16 ‘In June 2001, the United Nations General Assembly declared HIV/AIDS to be “a global emergency”. Member States agreed to…a comprehensive package of strategies for prevention and care, including: 16 Charts from: www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs310/en/index1.html 25 • access to affordable condoms • prompt treatment of other sexually transmitted infections (which increase the risk of infection with HIV) • access to voluntary HIV testing and counselling • prevention of mother-to-child transmission • 17 www.insidermonkey.com Country By Wealth Life Expectation (years) 1. China 75.2 2. United States 79.3 3. India 68.3 4. Japan 83.7 5. Germany 81 6. Russia 70.4 7. Brazil 73.6 8. Indonesia 70.6 9. United Kingdom 81.2 10. France17 82.4 Country by Lack of Wealth Life Expectation (years) 1. DR of Congo 64.7 2. Liberia 62 3. Zimbabwe 58 4. Burundi 59.6 5. Eritrea 62.2 6. Cent African Rep 52.5 7. Niger 61.8 8. Sierra Leone 46 9. Malawi 58.3 26 • • promotion of advice and support to reduce HIV infection among intravenous drug users • sexual health education in schools and the community • improved access to care, support and treatment, including sustainable access to affordable supplies of medicines and diagnostics19 . The implication that comes with the above statements is that these were not in place prior to the agreement. The statements are all about ‘access’ and ‘promotion’ and ‘education’, things not available to the so-called ‘third-world’. Life expectancy is also related to wealth and lifestyle (see table previous page), which includes education, availability to healthcare and living conditions. In the wealth table, India and Indonesia are perhaps anomalies because of the vast, well-documented gap between rich and poor. China has a very different, healthier lifestyle to those in the west. Generally speaking though, the life expectancies shown do reflect a country’s wealth. It doesn’t take too much to draw conclusions from the list of poorest countries, does it now? The Japanese are the longest-lived with an average of 83.7 years. At the bottom of the scale is Sierra Leone, with an average of 46 years. That is a vast difference and is accountable to the above factors already mentioned. The UK is at number twenty, with 81.2 years. The US is at 31, with 79.3 years20 . 18 www.therichest.com/rich-list/world/poorest-countries-in-the-world/ 19 www.who.int/immunization/topics/hiv/en/index1.html 20 www.worldlifeexpectancy.com. Primary sources: WHO, World Bank, UNESCO, CIA and individual country databases for global health and causes of death. Published 2014. 10. Togo18 58.4 27 In 2012, in England and Wales, the top deaths (presumably not as in favourite) for women was given as dementia and Alzheimer’s, followed by heart disease and cerebrovascular disease. These were followed by chest infection, emphysema/bronchitis, lung cancer, breast cancer and bowel cancer. In men it was heart disease, lung cancer, dementia and Alzheimer’s, emphysema/bronchitis, cerebrovascular disease, chest infections, prostate cancer, bowel cancer, lymphoid cancer and liver disease. It’s interesting to notice the differences and similarities. Men, it would seem are far more prone to cancers, perhaps because they smoke and drink more, but bowel cancer features highly for both men and women, perhaps due to the amount of red meat in the diet and the lack of roughage, perhaps because we are living longer (9 out of 10 cases are in the over 60s), because of increased alcohol intake, because the symptoms are more obvious than other types of cancer, because we delay treatment, putting those symptoms down to other causes, because obesity is high, because of familial histories and inactivity. All of these stats are open to interpretation and will change with trends, with fashion. One would hope in the future to see less bowel and lung cancer as we are now more aware of the causes. Research into dementia is aggressive, with ongoing studies being carried out (my father has been in one for years) and more and more articles cropping up in the media on a daily basis. The problem is that we are now being bombarded by facts and figures. In the space of a week, I was told by the BBC that drinking wine was both good and bad for me. I am inclined to think that our knowledge is very much a double-edged sword. The more we find out about the ways in which we can go wrong, the more paranoid and confused we are liable to become. In Condition of life, I wrote: ‘What have I said before? 100% of the people who exercise will die. 100% of the people who don’t exercise will die. 28 We are warned endlessly by the news about how fat we are becoming, how diabetes is increasing, how cancer is doing this and dementia is doing that. Here’s an idea: STOP DOING RESEARCH. STOP IT! Ignorance really, truly, most definitely is bliss. If you start digging in the cemetery, believe me, brothers and sisters, you’ll find bones. Have the number of people with diabetes or heart disease or cancer or God knows what other diseases there are, increased because we have found out so much more about them? Of course. Every new piece of research, every discovery, opens the door to both hope and disaster. If you want that hope, fine, but be prepared to take the disaster along with it… Have we got fat because we are eating too much shit? Yes. Did fat people exist many centuries ago? Yes. Is cancer a twentieth century disease? No. We used to call it by another name in the same way that we called tuberculosis consumption or tetanus lockjaw. I love this from the Daily Mail: ‘Cancer is a man-made disease fuelled by the excesses of modern life, a study of ancient remains has found. Tumours were rare until recent times when pollution and poor diet became issues, the review of mummies, fossils and classical literature found...Scientists found no signs of cancer in their extensive study of mummies apart from one isolated case. Michael Zimmerman…said: 'In an ancient society lacking surgical intervention, evidence of cancer should remain in all cases. The virtual absence of malignancies in mummies must be interpreted as indicating their rarity in antiquity, indicating that cancer-causing factors are limited to 29 societies affected by modern industrialisation.' www.dailymail.co.uk There you go. It’s your own bloody fault, the Daily Mail says so. But then I found this (and please donate to the Help Americans Spell Foundation should you be in any way traumatised by this article): The world's oldest documented case of cancer hails from ancient Egypt, in 1500 B.C. The details were recorded on a papyrus, documenting 8 cases of tumors [sic] occurring on the breast…In ancient Egypt, it was believed cancer was caused by the Gods.’. www.cancer.about.com What I am saying with all these facts and figures, is that we are made to be broken. We are born to die. We can do all we can to prevent that, we can research until the pasteurised, fat-free cows come home, but we will not succeed. The body is a finite thing. If we are lucky enough to have kids, our genes, those manipulative, head-strong bullets that pierce the veil of death, will live on, and that is the only way that we can even touch immortality. There is an innate desire to live forever. We express it daily through our fears, our phobias, our road signs and the maternity wards. We watch TV serials because the assumption is that we will see the end. Coronation Street has been on air since Henry VIII died; if that’s not hopeful, I don’t know what is. We live almost to the point of denial of death. It happens to others, on the news, in the movies, even to our nearest and dearest, but once we have buried them, once the news has passed, we retreat into our cocoon of unreality and, despite the repressed kernel of truth that hides shyly behind our heart or rumbles in the 30 diverticular pouches of our extensive guts, we keep telling ourselves that we will never die. Never. I have some bad news for you…

​

HOME