37.My New Face

After 15 years, I have shaved off my beard - compare this photo to 'my image'.
So instead of sending dozens of emails to all and sundry, this post will inform anybody who is interested - maybe all 6 of them!

In 1993 we spent a holiday on a couple of gulegs off the western Turkish coast. The pre-trip instructions did not mention the different voltage on the boat - incompatible with my electric razor. So instead of buying a Gillette razor locally, I decided to 'let it grow'. The 18 fellow travelers were all strangers, and Judith did not mind [see below].

There were some other problems. Peter Reynlds, the tour director, was a little odd. Although he flew with the group from London, and we all wore the yellow discs of ACE, he did not reveal himself until after arrival, when we had got out of the airport. And when he photographed any site, he made sure that no human beings appeared in the view. He died some years later.

Peter believed that we should have 'a relaxing time'. So he never told us the next item on the programme, or its timing, until we were ready to move off the boat. I found this very irritating. Also, he had no guiding license for Turkey and was liable to be denounced by jealous Turkish guides and arrested. So his explanations were given surreptitiosly, with one of us serving as lookout.

Our meals were prepared on the boat by the cook who was the captain's assistant. But one of our group could not eat onions - which is vital in salads. On the second day luckily I had the simple idea of asking for a small dish of chopped onions, that we could add individually to our food.

I did not enjoy the tour. While we were sailing between sites, I could not sunbathe - I would have burned. Nor could I read - motion sickness prevented it. And when we were moored in the evening, the electric light in our cabin was not sufficient for evening. And we were asked to be economical with the boat's battery power.

Our cabin had an annoying smell of sewage. Clearly there was a leak from the sewage container on the boat back to the toilet. And they emptied the sewage during the trip illegally, within territorial waters. When the [British] owner visited us on the last day, his reaction to deny it was as offensive as the smell. But I am sure that I was right.

One of our group was a retired GP - he and his wife were very pleasant people. He mentioned that he had an aching neck, and I suggested the use of a collar to restrict movement. He was well and active, but several months later I read his obituary in the BMJ. I wrote to his wife and she told me that he was found to have cancer of the pancreas. So it was a secondary in the cervical spine as the first symptom - unusual.

At the end of the tour, I looked like Yasser Arafat with my stubble. When we got home, I was going to shave it off, but most people said that it 'looked nice'. So we bought a beard trimmer instead. With my bushy beard, and sparse hair on top, Heather remarked that I looked 'upside down'. But soon I removed the moustache. Trimming it accurately was tricky, food tended to catch in it, and I claimed that it interfered with my 'social contacts'.

So a few days ago I shaved it off. Judith came back from shopping, and we put away the merchandise. Then we had lunch. We chatted - I do not listen to the radio during meals. In the afternoon I emailed our daughters that my beard had gone - with a copy to Judith. That's when she first realized it...

None of our friends noticed it without being told. But they said that I looked younger. There were two adverse effects: shaving now took longer, and I actually bought a new razor. And people no longer offered me a seat on the tube. Ah well.

36.Fibromyalgia

This morning on BBC 4 Woman's hour they broadcast an item on 'fibromyalgia'. I was puzzled and irritated, so before commenting I read the item carefully on Wikipedia.

In Britain apparently 2 percent of the population 'suffer' from it, and they are entitled to social security benefits. There are moves to make it legitimate in the European Parliament. But I suspect that if the Nazis had selected fibromyalgia sufferers to the gas chambers, every one of them would have done full work as a slave labourer instead: a perverse twist to their slogan: 'Arbeit macht frei ... von Fibromyalgia'. 'Work frees you from fibromyalgia'.

So there are more than a million sufferers in Britain, yet there are no clues as to the cause, or criteria for a diagnosis. Every medical test known to doctors will give normal results. Like other psychiatric conditions, proof of the illness relies on the verdict of the doctor - and this must be an enormous source of employment and income to many of my former colleagues. Cleverly, rheumatologists have not off-loaded fibromyalgia onto their psychiatric colleagues. Knowing that there is no physical abnormality whatever, makes it safe to 'treat'; and knowing that there is no cure, will justify prolonged 'treatment' despite its failure.

There is no effective treatment - except for psychiatric drugs and cannabis - but not apparently tested in double blind trials. Just boost your out-patient statistics, and collect your salaries or private fees...

The only reliable statistics claim that 9 women are afflicted for every man. There are no data on mortality - I bet that it does not shorten life. It would be interesting to learn what the incidence of this 'disease' is in primitive societies, and among refugees. Is there any fibromyalgia in Iraq? My biased view is that it is a psychiatric condition - invented less than 30 years ago - and it has become a true gold mine for doctors and patients. It's totally safe!

35.A Cautionery Tale

We get several lists of cut price books - by post or email. When the price suddenly drops, there is probably a new edition on the way. One can compare their prices on various Amazon web sites: -.co, which is uk, -.com, which is US, and even -.de, which is Germany. I compare currencies and exchange rates and often I finally abandon my interest.
Virtually all these mailings include inserted leaflets with offers from other companies. But at our age, these offers are of no attraction.
There is Oxbow for archaeology, Post Script for art books and others, the British Museum bulletin, the Biblical Archaeology Review, and at the lower end of the market 'The Book People'. These latter have changed over time and now their offers are almost entirely of children's books and we have not ordered from them for some time. We watch out for their cheap offer of the London A to Z atlas, to update our own edition.

The latest posting from the Book People included an [unaddressed] circular letter from the Loyalty Awards Club, with a London address. 'As you may know', they wrote, 'from time to time we allocate a number of thank you prizes and awards to a limited number of selected recipients'. I should ring a premium rate number [at £1.50 per minutes, maximum 6 minutes] to listen to my Despatch Code and obtain my claim number. But the return postal address was not in London EC1 but in Weston-super-Mare.
My code was ...00075, and I had 'definitely been selected to be awarded a prize'. Electrical items required a payment of £6.50 for despatch and insurance. Judith and I both suspected fraud. If we did not receive the present, we would only lose £16.0 at most - provided we ensured that our premium rate phone call did not last longer than 6 minutes. But the Loyalty awards club would have a tidy income, possibly thousands of pounds from this one exercise.
We could not see how the hundreds of customers on the book people's mailing list could all receive an unsolicited present of up to £5,000.
To investigate the credentials of the loyalty awards club was the sort of job the BBC would undertake. As for us, we just needed to interrogate 'the book people', who had mailed the letter with their book list, on 0845 602 3030. Our local phone calls in Britain are free, but not o854. So I searched 'say no to 0845' and obtained the local number for the book people - 01248 679395. After a long musical wait they answered and said that they dealt only with orders for their books. They seemed to know of the loyalty promotion but suggested that I phone the Loyalty Awards Club. I suspect that they had been instructed to give this answer. I was sure that the Loyalty Awards Club would not admit to any irregularity, and so I demanded to speak to a manager of the book people.
They gave me the number, 0194 2721777 and a very nice lady from the management confirmed that I should not touch that 'loyalty' offer. The book people management team had been against this scheme and very many people had contacted them to complain, but her superiors had insisted on proceeding - they were of course paid a fee by the Loyalty Awards Club for including their 'award' letter in the mailing. She would pass my misgivings to her superiors.

Recently we heard from our friends, that they had received notification that they had won a huge prize on the Spanish lottery - el Gordo. They had never played that lottery, but they have a son in Spain, who immediately warned them that this was an attempted fraud.
From time to time I receive emails from UK banks, on what appears to be their genuine headed stationery. They need to update my particulars, and ask me to click on a web address to complete my details. However, with most of these banks we have no dealings; and sometimes the letter has grammatical errors. It is an attempted fraud.
More rarely, an email arrives from a lady in Nigeria. Her wealthy husband has just died, and she needs me to help her to transfer his enormous wealth out of Nigeria - into my bank account in Britain, of course.
Now if she was young, and had requested my help to provide her with an heir...