bill bryson: the body

I love Bill Bryson’s writing! I’ve just finished his excellent book ‘The Body: A Guide for Occupants’. It’s absolutely packed with fascinating observations and detail. In the penultimate chapter (‘Medicine Good and Bad’), for example, here are just a FEW extracts about health in the US (note: by quoting this stuff, I’m not ‘having a go’ at the US – I’m merely aware that, eventually it seems to me, the UK follows America’s ‘lead’ in virtually everything!):

• “With regard to life expectancy… it is not a good idea to be an American”.
• “For every 400 middle-aged Americans who die each year, just 220 die in Australia, 230 in Britain, 290 in Germany and 300 in France”.
• “America spends more on health care than any other nation – two and a half times more per person than the average for all the other developed countries”.
• “Yet despite the generous spending, and the undoubted high quality of American hospitals and health care generally, the US comes just 31^st in global rankings, behind Cyprus, Costa Rica and Chile, and just ahead of Cuba and Albania. How to explain such a paradox? Well, to begin with, and most inescapably, Americans lead more unhealthy lifestyles than most other people... As Allan S Detsky observed in the ‘New Yorker’, ‘Even wealthy Americans are not isolated from a lifestyle filled with oversized food portions, physical inactivity, and stress.’ The average Dutch or Swedish citizen consumes about 20% fewer calories than the average American, for instance.”

Although Bryson (who was born in Iowa, but a British resident for most of his adult life) is enthusiastic about the UK’s NHS, he points out: “For Britain, cancer survival rates are grim and ought to be a matter of national concern”.  He’s also critical about the UK spending “too little” on health care: “The ‘British Medical Journal’ reported in early 2019 that cuts to health and social care budgets between 2010 and 2017 led to about 120,000 early deaths in the UK, a pretty shocking finding”.

Fascinating (and sobering) stuff.

and this will all end…

“In dreams we remember what was, we think about what is, we imagine what might be, what can be, what will be” (Eva-Jane Gaffney speaks Sarah Coffey’s words in “The Pheonix”). These words are taken from a really beautiful Irish Covid-19-inspired video about love, loss, hope and strength (if you haven’t seen it, I suggest you do so by clicking here).

The video manages to captures many of the emotions we’re all feeling at the present time… the sense of gratitude; the kindness shown by others; the awful suffering; the amazing heroes; the precious lives lost; and the enormous strength shown…

We probably all have our ‘wish lists’ of the things we will treasure when all this ends. Those MANY things that perhaps some of us have taken for granted… those simple pleasures… those things that help to make us who we are.

We will never ever forget it and we will never ever let go again.

And this will all end…

But before we get carried away by it all, it’s VITALLY important that we also never allow the people in power to forget the things that they got SO wrong and at such cost:

• The Prime Minister is very good at putting a ‘positive gloss on things’, but conveniently fails to acknowledge that the death toll in the UK is amongst the highest in the world; that NHS staff and other healthcare workers have not had the protective clothing and equipment they needed and would have expected; that the government could have increased testing, tracking and tracing capacity weeks earlier than the current timetable; and that care homes have been woefully under-protected.
• The Prime Minister skipping five crucial meetings on the virus (as reported by The Sunday Times on 19 April, in its massively-critical assessment); when he did attend in early March, it was almost certainly too late (the virus was already upon us) - failings in February probably cost thousands of lives; calls to order protective gear were ignored and scientists’ warnings fell on deaf ears (check out this week's 'Panorama' programme if you think I'm being unfair).
• The Home Secretary making disparaging remarks about low-skilled workers (when it transpires that the majority of people employed by the sector are low-paid care workers - who are responsible for providing daily help to older and disabled adults in care homes and the community).

Writer Philip Pullman doesn’t hold back in his criticisms of the existing system (in an essay in ‘Perspectives’ for Penguin Books): “It’s all got to change. If we come out of this crisis with all the rickety, fly-blown, worm-eaten old structures still intact, the same vain and indolent public schoolboys in charge, the same hedge fund managers stuffing their overloaded pockets with greasy fingers, our descendants will not forgive us. Nor should they. We must burn out the old corruption and establish a better way of living together… And let’s reform the voting system. At the very least, let’s do that without delay. It’s no wonder that people feel disconnected from politics when most of us live in safe seats, and might as well not vote at all. We must be able to see that our opinions are accurately reflected in the composition of our government, not completely disregarded as they are now. So it might lead to coalitions: excellent. Discussion, compromise, working together are exactly how to run a decent country”.

And when this will all end, you’ll ask me dance.

And I will say, yes, let’s dance.

I desperately hope that we come out of it all determined to make the world a better place.

I desperately hope that we remember the people and the jobs that make our day-to-day lives worth living.

I desperately hope that we truly decide to care for our planet.

I desperately hope that we can move away from the old world of greed and power, of the haves and the have-nots. My fear is that some will have very short memories and revert back (if ever they budged) to lives governed by wealth and influence.

I desperately hope that such individuals and corporations are overwhelmed by the voices of those who know there’s a better way.

We’ve learnt so much from this awful coronavirus experience. Let’s use what we’ve learnt to make the world a better place.

And this WILL all end…

We will cry… oh we will cry!

Photo: Banksey’s ‘Girl With Pierced Eardrum’ gets a Covid-19 facemask.

april 2020 books…

In My Mind’s Eye (Jan Morris): Published in 2018, this is a ‘Thought Diary’; a set of daily meditations on her long life of writing and the rituals of her existence in north Wales. The result is a mixture of her memories and musings, her tastes and prejudices… and her observations on life (ranging from funny, blunt, touching and kind). I love Morris’s writing and this is a rather lovely, gentle book. As perhaps one might expect from a 91 year-old, she ‘bangs on’ about somewhat repetitive themes, including her dear old Honda Civic Type R car; her dislike of zoos; her republican tendencies; her agnosticism; her daily thousand paces walk up and down the lane by her house (always whistling); her despair of today’s world; the decline of the Royal Navy; robots; marmalade; the arts; her partner Elizabeth; the great American songbook; her library (of several thousand books)… and, of course, the key to EVERYTHING in her eyes: kindness. I think my favourite sentence in the book was: “Alas, I never met Leonard Cohen… but I did once meet his mother”! She’s an institution… and I love her.
Scoop (Evelyn Waugh): First published in 1938, I first read this book ten years ago and decided to re-read it as ‘light relief’ from all the current depressing coronavirus matters. It’s an irreverent satire of Fleet Street and tells the story of a young man, William Boot, who lives in genteel poverty in the West Country and who contributes nature notes to Lord Copper's Daily Beast, a national daily newspaper. He is bullied into becoming a foreign correspondent, when the editors mistake him for John Courtney Boot, a fashionable novelist, and is sent to Ishmaelia, a fictional state in East Africa, to report on the crisis there. The novel has been described as one of Waugh’s “most exuberant comedies” but, frankly, this time around – although there are several very funny passages – my overriding reaction to the book was a sense of disgust at Waugh’s several awful ‘stereotypical’, distasteful descriptions of many of the African characters (‘darky’, ‘coon’, ‘nigger’, ‘blacks’ etc). Yes, I appreciate that it’s “of its time” and perhaps rather reflected Waugh’s reactionary character and his negative image as “intolerant, snobbish and sadistic, with pronounced fascist leanings”, but I don’t think I’ll be re-reading the book again.
Tissues For Men (Alan Coren): I re-re-read this almost 40 years since I first read it… in an attempt to gain some emotional relief from all the current coronavirus reports. Even the book’s cover acknowledges a similar sentiment: “At last, the complete cure for gloom and misery!”. Coren, former editor of Punch magazine was an incredibly funny and hugely gifted writer… with an imaginative talent for seeing humour in even apparently mundane subjects. Laugh out loud humour at its brilliant best.
Paul Takes The Form Of A Mortal Girl (Andrea Lawlor): This is my StorySmith bookgroup's latest book and this time we chose ‘LGBT’ as a basic theme. Elisa Gabbert in her review for ‘London Review for Books’ summarised the novel thus: “For a cishet reader like me, (the book) offers an education in gay experience in the 1990s – full of lore, zines and raves – but it’s not preachy or didactic; there are no sneaky lessons, or if there are, they’re so sneaky I barely noticed them” (note: I had to look up what cishet meant: “a person is cishet if he or she is cisgender, meaning identifying with his or her assigned-at-birth gender, as well as heterosexual, or attracted exclusively to people of the opposite sex). Well, it certainly provided ME with an education into gay life! The book’s protagonist, 23 year-old Paul/Polly Polydoris, is able to change sex whenever he/she wants, with no magic wands required… and, believe me, the book is FULL of graphic descriptions of Paul’s/Polly’s NUMEROUS sexual experiences (and these frequently seem to occur on a whim – as a result of a chance glimpse, a casual gesture or a calculated pursuit). He/she is constantly looking for new sexual experiences and opportunities… and sees such encounters as novelties as he/she moves from Iowa to San Francisco (and all this against the backdrop of Aids). I loved Lawlor’s detailed and lengthy descriptions of lots of the key music from the time and of the various elaborate clothes combinations. It’s a love story (admittedly quite unlike any love story I’ve previously read!); it’s very well-written and it’s frequently outrageous and often very funny. I have to admit that I didn’t find the book ‘an easy read’ (not because I was shocked by all the sex, but perhaps a little by the seemingly never-ending number of sexual encounters?) and it took me longer to read than I might have anticipated. Nevertheless, I think the book has received widespread critical acclaim and so I’ll be absolutely fascinated to discover what my lovely bookgroup makes of it.
Mrs Fox (Sarah Hall): This is one of a series of short stories celebrating Faber+Faber’s 90^th birthday (it won the BBC National Short Story Award 2013). It’s a somewhat haunting tale that focuses on the relationship between a husband and wife… about the outward appearance of perfection their relationship portrays to the outside world and yet something is perhaps not quite right… the couple’s situation changes in an instant… how do they react? The book cover puts it like this: “In language harvested from nature, Sarah Hall tells a story of metamorphosis, of wildness and fecundity, and of a man reaching for reason, who cannot let go of the creature he loves”. Beautifully-written and a bit magical.