Both woo and hoo

Well....

I have rather exciting news, and frustratingly, no real way to tell it. This is the situation.


In my spare time I write. I've been doing it from the pre-teen years, if you count the "Shangar the Black" stories*. It started out as mostly science fiction, fantasy, horror, That Sort Of Thing, but lately it's been more mainstream. It's been mostly short stories, because that's what I grew up on, but there's also been this blog, and several uncompleted novels (one autobiographical, one large-scale SF, one rather meandering attempt at erotica, and one in progress), and a great ream of poems and a few plays.


It's been mostly for my own enjoyment. Other people do weirder things.

Anyway, I applied for one of those hard-to-get-into boot camp things, those intensive "couple of weeks in the wilderness" hot-housing courses where they drop you in the desert with only a thesurus and you have to be able to construct a simile using only what you can find in the natural environment, and start a fire using only an aphorism and a lump of anapestic tetrameter... I applied and the other day they rang me and told me I was in.

This is serious good news for me, serious good news. It's happening this summer. I spent the rest of the night running up and down across the ceiling shrieking in a high-piched voice until Sarah coaxed me down with a glass of expensive (i.e.: more than five dollars a bottle) red wine, and I have not shut up about it since. Six weeks in the north Australian jungle with only other writers for company.

It is a bit terrifying. I haven't written short stories for ages. I don't know any of these people with whom I will be spending sixish weeks. I suspect, as I suspect many people do who succeed in anything, that any success I have had in this area has been due to the combined effects of luck, universal background weirdness and typographical errors in administration - my inadequacies may be found out. I may get writer's block, I may get manic or depressed, I not have anything to say. I may turn out to be allergic to semicolons.

But I am going. Pretty much the only thing that could stop me would be something medical happening to Sarah. I have commenced discussions with my boss, where I said I was going to go, and he said that other people wanted holidays around that time and it may not be easy, and I said that wouldn't be a problem, because I would resign and reapply for my own job when I came back, and given that they've been advertising for someone to do a similar job in a nicer area for two years without any real success, and that they would have a maximum of two months to find a qualified medical practitioner mad enough to want to come to the South but sane enough to work here who would out-interview and out-perform me, I reckoned I'd be right.

All calm and collected, but I've almost never disagreed with a senior doctor before, and it went relatively well.

So - I don't know how I'll blog from there, because of the whole confidentiality thing. The writers camp is called Greystoke, it's over a thousand kilometres away, on the grounds of Mangani University in Opar**. It's summer in the tropics. I have it on good authority that the air will be like treacle, that there will be honey-moths and sugar-cane and mango juice, and that there are people who will leave you alone, and there are rivers full of crocodiles.

We shall see. I had best get on with this. Thanks for listening - to be honest, this was written more out of "I want to tell people" rather than any thought that what I have to write will be interesting to others. Next post should be better.

Thanks for listening, will speak soon,

John

* "Black" in the way that black metal music is black - i.e. anaemically white but wanting to be scary.

** No, it's not. But until I come up with a better idea of getting around this whole confidentiality thing, that's what I'm going to be calling it.

Don't you thrust your crochets onto me

Hail,

And have finally managed to get back onto my own blog after locking myself out for a considerable period of time. I would explain how this happend, but it's actually too pathetic to relate.

In other news, Sarah returned wide-eyed from the recent Supreme Inter-Galactic Cat Show and told me of a hideous encounter she had had.


She had taken her cats, as is her wont, to be displayed at the cat show, and the cats were positioned aesthetically in their cages. Sarah breeds extremely fine looking animals, all long soft fur and remarkable colours, but their nature remains unrepentently cat, and they frequently fail to co-operate with her. In particular, they do not pose regally on their sumptuous cushions of purple satin, looking impressive and inscrutable. Instead they clean themselves, curl up in a ball or on occasion, produce various luridly coloured gastro-intestinal products and sit there looking perplexed.

We have, by the way, two groups of cats, the outside ones and the inside ones. The outside ones are few, they have been given to us by people who say "otherwise he'll be put down". The inside ones are a few more, they are the product of Sarah's exquisitely worked out breeding programme.

The two tribes are at war. When the screen door is opened, the outside cats and the inside cats press up against it and swear at each other. Each tribe has its great warrior, war-chief, what the old Anglo-Saxons called their battle-wolf. The inside cats tremble at the dread name of Twinkle, while the outside cats groan beneath the iron claw of Fluffy.

Anyhow - the cats are in their cages, and people come up and look at them. Sarah was chatting with a fellow fancier*, when a small, red-faced man tapped managed to attract her attention.

"Excuse me" he said, pointing at one of the cages. "What kind of cat is that?"

"That cat?"

"Yes"

"There isn't one" said Sarah.

She was right. The cage held a single tiger-striped cushion. The cat that was going to be put in there was being examined by someone else.

"Well, what's that? is it a Siamese?" said the man, pointing at the cushion.

"It's a cushion" said Sarah.

"In the cage" said the man.

"It's just a cushion" repeated Sarah.

There was a pause. The smal man nodded impatiently. "What breed?"

Sarah stared. "Breed?"

"Yes, what breed is it?"

"Tontine?" guessed Sarah.

The man nodded again, and walked off. Sarah went off to have a cup of coffee and reconsider her beliefs about the advisability of government by democratic election. She put the cat in the cage, and he imediately squirmed underneath the cushion and went to sleep. A few minutes later the man and his family appeared.

"Look" the man was saying to his wife and children. "See?"

"It's certainly unusual" said the woman. "What kind is it again?"

"A Tontine. A Tontine Kushan" said the man, pronouncing it in some exotic-sounding orientalish way. "They're quite rare."

Sarah could endure no more. She did not want the man going around saying she travelled around the state attending cat shows and exhibiting embroidered bits of manchester. She hobbled to her feet. She placed her face close to the man's and spoke clearly.

"There is no cat in there" she eunciated. "It is a cushion."

The man stared at her, then gazed downward. As far as anyone could see, the cage was empty of all animate life. only the gentle rising and falling of the pillow with each breath of the cat below gave any hint of occupacy. The man gazed for a moment, then looked up at Sarah with a belligerent expression.

"Well, if it's not a cat then, how come I can see it breathing?"

This is actually true. Not a word of a lie.

Anyhow - I will post again soonish. In the interim I leave you with a definition from an archaic on-line dictionary I was reading:

crotcheteer [crotchet (whim) + -eer] one who has a crotchet or who thrusts his crotchets on others

Anyone who is enlightened by that explaation, please forward an interpretation to me.

Thanks for reading,

John

*The correct title for a breeder of cats. Thus the Cat Fancier, the Dog Fancier, etcetera. There was actually a magazine dedicated to those who breed the particular species of bird known as the Boy, but the magazine no longer exists. There is a book.

Totally addicted to yo.

Hail,
I'm madly writing this in between cat-feeding, furniture-shifting, chook-house-building and novel-writing-avoiding, so this may not be a perfectly balanced post.

Firstly, exercise. What I'm doing is doing interval training in the morning, five or six mornings a week, and gym stuff three times a week. The interval stuff in my case is one of those stepper machines, something we bought for Sarah back when she could use things like that. Basically, interval training means short periods of maximal effort (sprinting) alternating with short periods of lower intensity exercise (jogging or something). The gym stuff is to make sure I don't starve my muscles away, it's compound, mass-building exercises--

Christ, this is boring, isn't it? One problem I have, and one reason I am talking about this here rather than with most people I know face to face, is a lot of the talk that goes on around physical fitness/weight loss/muscle building stuff irritates the living daylights out of me. I find it difficult to read a lot of the stuff about exercise. Some of it - the medicine - the physiology, the anatomy, the right way to do stuff, the less value-laden stuff - I find that very interesting.

But if there was a "fitness magazine world" or something, I wouldn't want to live there. It's an unforgiving place, all blinding white-toothed grins, an almost manic joi de vivre, commandments adn prohibitions and judgements, ideas about the world as hard and flat and unyielding as the washboard abs you see on every page. It's difficult to articulate, but I feel that it's not that far from ginseng extract in the morning and preacher curls and three thousand kilojoules a day to something much less attractive - a horrible tight-lipped puritanism, an almost palpable self-loathing (the front of the magazines say "blast your shoulders! burn your thighs! shred your chest! thrust your genitals into the meatgrinder!"). And all of this on top of a weapons-grade narcissism that you'd worry about if you saw it in a psychiatric ward.

Anyway. I remember reading something once, the writer said it was a proverb. I can't remember if it was meant to be an African proverb or an Indian one or a Chinese one, but you can bet it was one of those places we say things come from when we want people to believe what we say is true and wise and unchallengeable.

The proverb said "Tell me what you boast of and I will tell you what you lack". So maybe I'll stop boasting about how unshallow and not-at-all-narcissistic I am and get on with the fat stuff.

So. The best way for me to exercise is that early morning interval training stuff I wrote about above, because for me that's the most enjoyable way of doing it. From what I understand, interval training gets better results per minute than any other type of exercise. I am a morning person, so it makes sense for me to exercise first thing. And I like the gym, I enjoy the solitude and the feel of the cold steel and the way the weights descend through an arc, the basic, functional look to them, and the gym is close, on my way to work, so that works for me too.

With the diet part, which is basically a fairly mild degree of caloric restriction, what works for me is one of those fundamentalist diets where they set out in fairly clinical detail what you are allowed to eat and what you must not. Again, from what I understand, having something concrete like this works better for most people than those "eat when you feel hungry" ad libitum diets, so that's what I'm trying.

It's an Australian one called the CSIRO diet, you can get the books. Ten cents from the sale of every book goes to buy some decent midfielders for my football team. That or a kilo of lithium for me.

And it is working. The other thing I did was get a checkup, get a decent idea of what my starting point was so I could work out how far I would have to go in what direction to get where I wanted to be - all that stuff others have mentioned. Initially I am looking to lose one or two kilos a week, get the waist:hip ratio down below ninety and knock the early stage blood sugar stuff on the head. And it is working.

Anyway - this is something I am uncomfortable discussing. I feel ridiculously greatful to my friends who have not brought this up when I am with them in the flesh. Eating, sex, prayer - things I like doing and do when I can, but feel deeply uncomfortable discussing. I should call my next entry "let's (not) talk about sex".

As an aside, I just got a blood test back and apparently there is a blood test for"Yo antibodies". Theoretically, this is what your immune system would produce after being exposed to even miniscule amounts of "yo".

Will write again soon. Thanks for listening,
John

I have ---'d on the --- of giants

Hail,
First of all, thanks a lot for the comments, will attempt to reply later today. People have said stuff I am quite keen to respond to, and as soon as it calms down here, I will. I do find this whole issue an incredibly complex topic - each time I try write about it I get ten paragraphs of unfinished sentences. The topic itself is that horrible mixture of the private and the public.

I remember reading somewhere that the obese are unusual in that their sin is impossible to conceal and impossible to excuse. If you cripple the economies of small African countries you get lauded, if you spend every waking hour downloading hot Flemish porn you can at least lead a normal life, but if you really love pasta, you're marked out in a crowd. Obesity is hard to isolate one thing to talk about - every medical "fact" has social implications, emotional connotations, political connections.

But it's interesting. And six mornings a week I am getting up to struggle and blunder and lunge on one of those stepper machines, and each morning I am eating my low GI breakfasts and each night not having second helpings of anything non-carrotty, and all that. And it's working - incrementally, and it's early days yet, but it is working, and I do feel better.

Additionally, as part of a bargain with Sarah - she's a smart woman, but she has some really weird ideas, like "life should be enjoyable" and that "pleasure is not wrong" - I am cooking exciting stuff for us to eat, and doling it out with pathetic demands for oohs, aahs and fanfare. Anyone with any recipes that were too hard to get into "Really good exotic looking cooking for dummies" can send them hereabouts.

And it has been pointed out to me that measuring weight when you are concerned about adiposity (sounds like one of those mediaeval religio-legal terms, doesn't it? "In 1140, following the publication of his summa gastronomica, Bearneard of Cleauerviuaux was convicted of adiposity") isn't the most accurate way of doing things. So adjustments are going to have to be made, some kind of criteria which take into account body fat and physical measurements and so on. I might get one of those electrical scale things where they measure your body fat by sending an electric current through your feet. The good thing about those kind of scales is if my mood gets too bad, I can just strap a couple of them to my head and turn the voltage up.

Anyhow. We shall see. I was going to write something about boundaries - there have been a couple of patients who have sortof blurred the boundaries lately, patients where I have felt that things have slipped out of my hands, ended up in unknown territory - but I am at Central today, and the police have already been called to drag one of my patients away, and I am unlikely to be able to concentrate on something like that.

Instead, some ephemera. Here is a fragment of recent dialogue between me and one of our new patients:
Me: When you picked up the clean needle pack, there's this bit where you're meant to write down what you inject...
Him (defiant): Yeah?
Me: You wrote the letter "M"...
Him (incredulous at my stupidity): For emphetamines!

Additionally, I have in front of me a printout of blood alcohol results that show a 44 year old man presented to Florey last year with a blood alcohol of... 0.77.
That's not 0.07, that's almost ten times the old drink-driving cut-off. It's .15 g/dl higher than anyone else I've ever heard of. If this reading was not an artefact - the most likely thing I could think of is someone used an alcohol swipe to wipe his skin with and that somehow contaminated things - and if this was the Cirrhosis Olympics, this guy's Martin Phelps or whoever. Theoretically, 0.5 would kill most alcohol naïve people. I am trying to work out how much of this guy's blood you would have to drink to become drunk.

And as another aside, here is a fragment of conversation I had with two of my nurses. If anyone can explain where "first nurse" got her idea from, I will be very grateful. I cannot begin to make the connection.

Me (walking past): Jumpin' jack flash, it's a gas gas gas, do do, do do dooo do do dooo do do do...
Nurse: No, he's a porn star.
Other nurse: Bullshit. Ask John.
Me: What? Who? Why? Why me?
Nurse: Isaac Newton, he's a porn star, isn't he?
Me: Isaac Newton?
Nurse: Sir Isaac Newton. Big porn star. In porn movies.
Me: I've heard of a scientist Isaac Newton...
Nurse: What'd he do?
Me: Gravity. Optics. He was the guy who sat under an apple tree, apple fell on his head. First one to get a ray of white light, shine it on a prism, split it into colours.
Social Worker: Didn't he invent calculus?
Me: I reckon. Him and Leibniz, wasn't it?
Social worker: Horrible man.
Second nurse, triumphant: Nothing to do with pornography then?
First nurse: You're both full of crap. Sir Isaac Newton. He's a really big porn star. He's really famous.
Second nurse: What, so he got knighted for services to pornography?
First nurse: Go look it up. And then come back to me and tell me how right I was.

Anyhow. Sorry so little of substance, but there's been a lot going on.
Speak soon, and thanks for listening,
John

Fatterer

Hail,
Now, this will be a bit of an unusual post - thanks for reading. Any advice gratefully received. I could do with a bit of help, actually. The post has actually taken twice as long to write as usual, there have been multiple writings and rewritings and it sitill hasn't come out right. BUt at this rate, it never will. So: here goes.

I weigh ninetyish kilos, give or take a kilo or so.

That means on the days when I'm over ninety kilos I'm obese, days when I'm under I'm merely overweight. Some of that, obviously, is muscle and bone and the basic starter pack of internal organs, less of it than previously is hair, but a fair amount of it is fat.

Twenty years ago I was seventy kilos.

Now, I could go on at great length about how I feel about all this. I don't know about how valuable or interesting that would be, I suspect that my feelings about this are very much the same as many of the people I know, and that others have written much more eloquently than me about this. I've written and deleted, rewritten and deleted about how I feel about this, but for the moment, let us take it as read - I want to lose ten, twenty kilos.

So - what to do? Part of the problem is the psych medications - almost all the psych medications make you fat with a few exceptions that either let you go crazy or actually push you further along the way. I can't really change that. If I don't take the valproate I get too high (starting ten different martial arts at once) or too low (becoming a stromatolite), and that doesn't work. Plus I get detained, and the gym at Clearwater is crap.

So - from what I have read it is possible to get some of it back. People have done it. It is possible to lose the twenty kilos, to feel lighter, to have more energy, to be able to do more stuff more easily. That is what I want to do.

You know, by the way, thinking about obesity is an incredibly rich area. Every question, biochemical, sociological, philosophical, when examined diverges into new ones, like a fractal or a hydra's head. There are hundreds of questions here. And by the very act of asking particular questions, or answering them, you place yourself in certain positions along a curve, align yourself with blocs against other blocs - you start out thinking "these pants don't fit any more" or "my joints hurt" and three firing of synapses later you're a cocaine snorting nazi.

Anyway. From what I understand, people who lose significant amounts of fat seem to have certain core characteristics. The cornerstone is diet: they restrict caloric intake - low fat, low carbohydrate, low whatever, just low. There is tweaking - certain foods provide more of a feeling of satiety than others, meal frequency and portion size is important, dairy/calcium appears to make you feel fuller, stacking up on the pasta last thing at night seems to be a death sentence - but overall you lose weight when you eat less stuff.

The rest of the equation is exercise. People who lose sizeable amounts exercise as much as an hour a day every day. From what I understand preservation of muscle mass is nigh on essential, any exercise is good, more exercise is better, high intensity exercise is best of all. As far as I know interval training is the best method of exercise, but the type of exercise is secondary to actually getting out there and doing it.

And above all the diet and exercise, the mechanics of it, is the whole cognitive and behavioural stuff, the real interesting stuff. Obtaining and maintaining motivation and performance in a grossly obesogenic environment, tai-otoshi-ing a biological drive that is as old and smart and strong as the need for sex and the need to breathe. Starting and sticking to stuff that for every single one of your twenty trillion ancestors would have been suicidally stupid.

And it's not as simple as willpower. The more I read the less I believe in the whole "free will/free choice/we are as we make ourselves/we choose our future" thing. When I was a kid my best friend's father would quote "I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul" at every opportunity. He mustn't have ever gazed into the eyes of a pale-skinned brown eyed girl, or been jealous of a friend, or heard the blues, or drawn closer to a fire on a beach at night, or done any number of things. If your soul is your sense of everything beautiful, then we are not the masters of our soul, it is the master of us.

Anyway. We're not a blank slate when we're born, we're not a photographic negative waiting to be slid into the developing fluid, but the depressing truth is we're probably closer to the latter than the former.

So, what's the point of blogging all this?

I'm going to change what I eat and how much I exercise.

I am going to lose fifteen kilos.

I'm going to do it by midwinter next year.

I'm going to get back to seventy five kg.

I know I am going to do this because I am going to have motivation to burn, and all without spending a shred of willpower after Monday night.

Because Monday I am* writing a cheque to the Australian Liberal Party, our version of the Republicans/Conservatives/Daleks party. It will be a bank cheque, one that can't be dishonored, and it's for a sizeable amount, an amount that it will pain me greatly to pay, several hundred hours of my disposable income.

(For those who came in late, I loathe these people. At the rising of the sun and at its going down I have loathed them. I loathe what they have done and what they have failed to do, I loathe them in the morning and in the evening and I have loathed them at suppertime, I loathe what they think and say and do. I hated them in the beginning, I hate them now, and I shall hate them for ever more, amen. When John Howard, our ex-Prime Minister, dies I will dance on his grave in a red dress. A long red dress.

Something low cut. I was thinking maybe slit up the thigh, clingy, but classy. Nothing slutty).

As I said. It's a sizeable cheque. It's an amount that they would certainly notice, particularly as I have requested only some small public acknowledgement of my generosity, a mention in the Worker's Fiend or whatever fascist rag they bring out, printed on the skins of single mothers and written in refugee blood or whatever they use. It may be, for all I know, that my acknowledgement would come with a mimeographed letter of support from Tony Abbott or Philip Ruddock (he's on the left) or that ghastly little moral homunculus himself.

I am not sending the cheque to them. I am depositing the cheque witha lawyery kind of person, along with formalised instructions that should I fail to present to the offices of a particular place on a particular date and "weigh in" and weigh under seventy seven kilos, then that cheque will be sent off.

Now, obviously, the rest of it is up to me. Diet, exercise, all that kind of thing I will have to work out. But motivation? I've turned it up to eleven.

Additonally, I feel I can count on the support of my friends and colleagues, many of whom hate those bastards too, almost as much as I do.

I can count on the support of Sarah, once she has gotten over her horror.

I can count on the realisation that every excess morsel of food, every stepper-free minute of television can, and will, be used against me to bring forward the return of those grasping phobocrats from the limbo to which we so savagely dispatched them a few months ago.

Anyhow, I will keep you informed. Hopefully the next few months will be a gradual loss of surplus fat. Otherwise I'm going to be looking at that starter pack of internal organs and working out which ones are going to die for the cause.

Thanks for listening,
John

*As in "I am saying I will". At the moment this is one of those imaginary futury things. We shall see. And I don't know that full agreement on the wisdom of this plan is shared by all in the household - I may have several of the leading cats on my side, but the chickens are opposed and Sarah is still wavering.

Capsicum

Hail,

We have moved. The long, toasty period of migration is essentially over. As we speak Sarah is driving the last horse-float full of cats along the winding dirt road, under the blazing stars, towards our new home in the bush.

At night now you can see the Cross, and from what I remember the Serpent Bearer, where one of the stars is a recurrent nova, and the Pointers. I remember years and years ago, standing on a low wall on the southern shore, showing a girl* how you could use the stars in the Southern Cross and the Pointers (Alpha and Beta Centauri) to find true south. You imagined the Cross and the Pointers were each the haft of a sword, and you followed the imagined blades with your eyes, and where the blades crossed there was south, the base of the earth, the frozen land. The southern coast at night is cold, and soft, and quiet. I remember the sea hissing and curling under us.

And I remember her being impressed at how I could navigate by the stars. And I remember her being less and less impressed when we tried to get back to the car but couldn't, because I could find true south using three hundred-year-old light, but I couldn't find the car park I'd parked the car in half an hour earlier, what with it being dark and all. And I remember us blundering about in the sand-dunes, increasingly cold and tired and sober, in the small hours of the morning, tripping over tussocks of wind-grass and stumbling down the faces of dunes and crunching miles along the mud, while the tide came in and the stars disappeared and it started to drizzle. I rang her a few days later and her mother said she couldn't speak to me because she had one of those old diseases you don't hear about any more - pleurisy, or rinderpest, or maybe the ague, something you got from long hours of neglect and exposure to the elements - and that she would call me back when she felt better.

She must still be sick.

Years later, on a different beach, but same hour of the night, in summer, I first kissed Sarah. And it all worked out very well, and nowadays I have a GPS.

Anyway. We have moved to the new house. The new house is in fact old - couldn't afford a new one, had to get a second hand one - all high ceilings and cellars and polished floorboards. Because it is miles from anywhere it is cheap, when I feel the reverse should be true.

The town is miniscule, a pub and a post office and, bizarrely, a stained glass window shop. Every Friday a hunched little white-haired old man appears like a figure from a fairy story and sells vegetables from a road-side stall. People gather half an hour beforehand to buy them, squeezing the capsicums like a lover's buttocks**. I suspect the old man buys the veges in Woolies and peels the stickers off, but never mind.

And in the new house we have electricity, and light, and heat, and several of the other fundamental forces (we're still waiting on the guy who comes around to install the weak nuclear force - at the moment our bosons are all over the place), and a few short hours ago we got the internet. And tonight I go shopping, and tonight - this very night I say! - we will eat something that will not be rye toast with peanut paste.

Life is so good it almost seems unfair.

I have even found a gym in the nearest town. It's the only gym in the area, and it's a convenient thirty odd kilometres away, but it's near the railway station, so every morning at seven thirty I am there. This means I rise in the darkness, potter about the house, drive my nanocar into town, and deadlift and bench press to my heart's (and other organs') content.

The gym is a country gym. it's full of old steel weights with measurements on them in the Imperial system, and eighties music playing on the radio. I think I saw Dee Schneider on the preacher curls machine this morning. The dumbells are beer-cans filled with sand and shot-gun pellets, the punching bag is a wool-bale slung on a hook, and the "boxing-for-fitness" class is three men in blue singlets going at you with pick-axe handles.

Not really. I shower and then catch the train into work. Everyone on the train at that hour is shell-shocked and silent, and my breath curls and steams in the cold air. There are sheep grazing beside the railway station. I lounge on the seat as the trains clacks and sways and read Ulysses, realising as I do that everything I have ever written is inadequate in ways I can't begin to describe yet. I missed my stop the other day because I was reading.

Anyhow. Sarah proceeds slowly. I have informed her that we are about to enter the fourth and final stage of wound healing. Classically pathology states that wound healing consists of four stages - inflammation, proliferation, maturation and remodelling. Like many pathological processes, several alternative physiological pathways exist, and the one we have chosen goes chocolate, cats, novels and seafood. We are now entering the seafood phase, and I am going to be prescribing therapeutic squid tds prn po. Seriously, she potters about and is lovely.

We have, by the by, a new answering machine message. On it you can hear Sarah's velvet tones enunciating her message, while in the background I imitate a horde of Siamese and oriental cats. And quite well, I might add. For those who do not know, these kinds of cats look fairly similar, but Siamese have points (darker colours on their ears, tail and feet), whereas oriental cats are comparatively pointless.

That may be it for tonight. I am going to bed because Mondays are twelve hour days, and I tend to get suddenly seriously tired, and when that happens I make even less sense than usual. I will go off to be and write more in the next few days.

Thanks for listening,
John


*Belle, the fundamentalist Christian teenage mud-wrestler, without word of a lie. I was young and religious and repressed and male and the testosterone was almost crystallising out in my blood. I learnt many things that night, and the one that stands out in my mind is that a very fast left-handed hane makikomi is not an erotic technique.

**I mean "squeezing the capsicums like they would squeeze a lover's buttocks", not "squeezing the capsicums like a lover's buttocks would squeeze them, were the squeezer so inclined and were the capsicum appropriately positioned". Nor do I mean "squeezing the capsicums which were like (i.e.: in some way resembled) a lover's buttocks".

That's probably enough from me.

John

Medical Defence

Hail,

And here is an interesting article in a recent student BMJ about conscientious objection among doctors - specifically whether doctors are within their rights to refuse to carry out procedures they find unethical. The author is Charles Williams, a medical student, and he writes passionately and articulately and reasonably - but I feel utterly, utterly wrongly - about a subject he has obviously considered at some length. His whole passage gave me a feeling of deep unease, and I'll try to explain what I felt, and why, and why I am less convinced of the rightness of his position after reading his argument than I was before.

(As an aside, as I understand the current Australian legal position, no-one is compelled to carry out an abortion or to provide contraception. In that it's like any other medical procedure. However, duty of care still exists - if you don't provide contraception, you have to make sure that you patient can get access to it somewhere close and cheap and convenient. Otherwise you're not doing your job, and you're liable, which is as it should be).

Anyway. In summary, as I understand him, Mr Williams writes that an inalienable right to conscientious objection exists, and that, as part of that inalienable right, doctors can refuse to participate in terminations. Rather than being penalised or pilloried, they should be praised. He closes by arguing we need more, rather than fewer doctors with the conviction to defend what they believe is right.

This does not convince me, on a number of levels. Lately I have become suspicious when I hear the term "conscientious objection". It strikes me that it is often used as a cheap debating trick - a sneaky appeal to a dubious higher authority. The term "conscientious" evokes a conscience, and by doing so suggests that some final arbiter has been consulted, that the speaker has visited some higher moral plain and returned with something somehow superior to our petty concerns and prejudices. Once something is named as a matter of conscience, it becomes somehow impolite to question or challenge it. There is just a respectful nod and the conversation moves on.

This is a fairly bizarre argument, once you look at it. From what I can work out, it asks the listener to believe that within each of us (or within the speaker, at any rate) there resides an inerrant moral-o-meter, something that enables the speaker to accurately and precisely determine at a glance the moral rightliness or wronglitude of an action, phrase or belief, something whose pronouncements should be taken on faith. I see no evidence of such an organ.

What I do see is a human tendency to rebadge and relabel things to our own advantage, to lie to ourselves and to others in order to maintain our accustomed levels of comfort. It is more comforting - and this isn't the nicest explanation - to attribute thoughts and words and deeds to our conscience rather than to our prejudices, or our laziness, or lack of imagination, or our desire not to think too hard.

Now, that may sound harsh. It is. But if it were true, it would explain how so many of these acts of conscience people talk about somehow end up replicating the same old patterns, making things worse for the marginalized, kicking not only those who are down, but those whom we knocked down in the first place. It would explain how people who draw their inspiration from the Bible and the Judeo-Christian code of ethics, for example, can be at ease with the whole rich man and eye of the needle thing, be udderly unconcerned when a calf is seethed in the milk of its mother, but will be struck with righteous rage when it comes to homosexuals or women. All of a sudden, when it comes inconveniencing others rather than ourselves, the weak rather than the powerful, God is not mocked.

These are ugly ideas. But otherwise we have to say it's an unfortunate co-incidence that Mr William's ideas, if acted upon, would kill vast numbers of women. It's sheer bad luck that Mr Williams' actions would result in sepsis, in fistulae, in suicide and infanticide. It's a terribly unfortunate but totally unforeseeable thing that the prayer-book is followed by the coat-hanger, and the coat-hanger by the coffin*.

Maybe it's not some mythical conscience, Mr Williams. Maybe it's something else, something women have heard from doctors before, something internalised and unconscious but pretty much there all the time.

In simpler terms, maybe it's not God. Maybe it's you.

Anyway. The history of conscientious objection, of people who followed their own moral code rather than that of society or "normal" medical practice, is no cleaner or dirtier than that of any other field of endeavour. One of us is no wiser nor more stupid than all of us.

Sincere, intelligent, diligent men and women have examined their conscience and then sterilized miscegenating women, or electrocuted homosexuals to cure them, or experimented on Jews. In the end, maybe you will get lucky, maybe you won't. If you are a conscientious objector, maybe you will end up lauded as a good person, as a saver of lives, an advancer of knowledge. Maybe you will end up as a footnote, a grainy photograph, a name in an article about Buchenwald or Sakhalin or Tuskeegee.

Either way, you will have done what you believe to be right. But His eye is on the sparrow, mate.

Anyway, I have said too much and left too much of what I wanted to say unsaid. there is a sense in which I don't have a right of reply here, in which the right of reply belongs to those who have seen the cost of the conscientious objectors piety, who have to bury the bodies they created to appease their conscience. That response has been given by Dr Shashi Sigdel, whose response gives less of the air of deliberation of Mr Williams, but more one of desperation and hope, and has the added benefit of being written by the bedside rather than by someone yet to practice.

But I am preaching to the already saved.

In the end, there are only two choices. The alternative to doing what a doctor should do, to doing your job, to healing the sick, to easing suffering, is to selectively doing your job, healing only the sick whom you choose to heal, easing suffering for those who meet your specific criteria. That may be the path Mr Williams has set out upon, and I wish him well with it, but I cannot agree that medicine needs more like him at all.

Thanks for listening,
John

*If only there had been a robust collection of data about the possible consequences of denying access to abortion, a body of evidence similar to the one that Mr Williams regretfully concedes does not exist about the terrible consequences of allowing abortion. Rather than relying on people's consciences as a guide, we could base this data on, say, scientific evidence, derived from clinical trials and the like. We could call it, I don't know, evidence based medicine.

Stop me when I get too crazy.