Prostate exam – a pass but no distinction

Andy Williams assumes the position... (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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Standing in the shower yesterday, making my nether reasons scrupulously fresh for a man I’ve never met before, I decided that the polar opposite of Christmas Day must surely be Manual Prostate Examination Day.

Or as Andy Williams might have put it, It’s the Least Wonderful Time of the Year.

And the perfect riposte for the ladies, it occurs to me, next time some boor insists that “if it was blokes who had babies we’d have come up with an easier way of doing it by now…”

Centralisation’s curse means craic appearing in Irish society

“Cork licensee Con Dennehy believes publicans and hackney drivers should work together to provide discount fares for elderly customers so they don’t live in rural isolation.”

Ha! I bet he does, was my immediate reaction to this report in the Irish Examiner. Nothing self-serving in that, I’m sure.

Reading the rest of the report, however, swiftly removed the smile from my face. Much as it may often look to enjoy a certain detachment from the destructive frenzy of modern living, Ireland, it seems, is feeling the social pinch in those very areas that grace so many tourist brochures.

‘Gardaí have noticed in the past few years that the age profiles of those committing suicide in some rural areas has increased…

…Mr Dennehy said that normal places of interaction for people, especially those living on their own, were disappearing rapidly in rural Ireland.

“It’s not just pubs which are closing, but post offices, creameries, garda stations etc. Even the postman is not now calling to some houses in rural areas and is instead putting letters in boxes down lanes,” [he ] said.

However neat it may look on the spreadsheets of those who decide such things, this is the flipside of the streamline and centralisation fetish that has long dominated the management of public and private sector concerns alike, certainly on my side of the Irish Sea. It sucks life out of areas that ultimately cannot live on nice views and birdsong alone. More and more, it also begs the question – if centralisation is so right, so imperative, how come we managed without it for so long?

Our ancestors weren’t all commercial dunderheads, I’m sure. How come there was a time when villages had their post offices and hospitals and small towns their railway stations and the British Isles not only survived on such arrangements but thrived on them?

Getting to the heart of it, is centralisation something commerce does to survive, or merely something it does to make big profits bigger?

I’m neither an historian nor an economist, so I would genuinely like to know. As might those among Ireland’s elderly for whom a place to die for seems in danger of becoming precisely that.

Movember – hairy lips and home truths

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Two colleagues are discussing their involvement in the Movember appeal, while admiring their hirsute upper lips in the mirror above the sink.

“Very nice,” one of them observes, with perhaps a hint of irony.

“Yes, and so much less hassle than all that stuff women have to do for breast cancer,” says the other. “They run marathons; we grow moustaches…”

He leaves the rest unspoken but has said enough to leave me thinking the unthinkable.

That old boast, beloved of male blowhards everywhere – “If it was men who had kids, we’d have come up with a better way of doing it years ago.”

What if it’s true?

There are two types of cosmetic surgery

Image via Wikipedia

Those of us whose medical expertise extends no farther than applying a plaster can only gaze in awe at the remarkable reconstruction of Davinia Douglass.

The 29-year-old’s face was trashed in the 7/7 bombings that hit London five years ago. The photograph of her being led away from Edgware Road Station in a ghoulish protective face mask became one of the atrocity’s iconic images.

Yet today, not even such scarring as remains can diminish the fact that a handsome young woman is once again ‘back in the room’.

Everyone responsible for this amazing come-back should take a bow, yet even as I marvel at their work, I am struck by this thought: what wonders cosmetic surgery can do when asked to restore Nature, yet what botch-ups it so often produces when asked to improve upon it.

Do you suppose the Botox brigade and those who pander to them will hear that penny drop as they contemplate the pictures of Davinia Douglass, or will it be drowned out by the clamour of ego and rustle of notes?

If you see me walking down the street and I start to cry…

Image via Flickr

I always thought it was the pay-off for being athletically inept in my youth.

Not for me, I consoled myself, the gnawing anguish of the once-gifted sportsman who feels his grip loosen or his feet grow weary and realises that age has conquered in a way his opponents never could.

What you never had, you never miss. Only we all have something, to some extent.

To my dismay, I have noticed in recent weeks that the long-legged walker whose confident stride once left so many trailing in his wake, has now himself become the trailer.

Past me they all go now, zealous young turks with calves and appointment diaries that bulge in equal measure, while I, like some doddery trout, shuffle into the haven of a quieter backwater at the inside edge of the pavement.

On the bright side, I am at least spared an audience of 50,000 people telling each other I’ve lost it.

Juvenile dementia

He takes a fair old beating, our office dreamer.

‘Dream-a-day Bill’, ‘head in the clouds’, ‘making one of his rare visits to our planet’: those are some of the nicer things uttered behind his back.

So it was good to hear this essentially nice bloke come back with a self-deprecating belter of a response today.

“I’ve a unique genetic makeup,” he explained sheepishly. “I get less senile as I get older…”

Goodbye, sir

“RIP Mr *******. We all loved you. x”

We’d forgotten all about our son’s teacher on long-term sick leave, until my wife stumbled across this testimony to him on the lad’s Facebook page this morning.

Say this for social media: in the midst of all its evils, it affords young people the chance to voice sentiments that, 30 years ago, might have remained locked away behind glum faces. Sentiments that override teenage ‘cool’ and the detachment that goes with it and offer a welcome reminder that there are still teachers out there who manage to touch hearts as well as hit targets.

I’m sat here mourning a man I hardly knew, purely because of the impact he had on my son.

And waking up to the sobering realisation that our ultimate worth may not be intrinsic but measured instead by the effect we have on those around us.

John Donne was right. We are none of us islands.

Like it or not, big screen now the norm

He looks up from his monitor and casts an eye around an office full of people doing just what he was doing until a second ago. Staring at a screen no more than two feet away from their faces.

“All those years,” he says out loud to no-one in particular, “our parents said ‘don’t sit so close to the telly; it’s bad for your eyes’.

“Now look at us…”

Hope springs eternal

Image via Wikipedia

Dad is genuinely perturbed by the medication prescribed for him for his recurrent bladder infection.

“I asked the doctor,” he tells me in a sombre tone, “you mean I could be on this stuff for the rest of my life?”

He’s 89 in August.

I’m cheered by the fact that he’s more optimistic than he realises.