Sex, Sleep or Scrabble

by Hammond, Phil

  Most people find it hard to resist rude words in word games. In Countdown’s Dictionary Corner next to the delightful Susie Dent, I once had a ‘woody’ and a ‘boner’ in the same game. On reflection, I think the boner was Susie’s, but I stole it from her. We had to stop recording for several minutes for the giggling to die down. Des Lynam held it all together like a consummate professional, but left the show shortly afterwards. I still worry that Susie’s boner did for him.

  For some, expanding ‘end’ into ‘innuendo’ for a triple-word score is hell on earth. Being forced to play board games with crustaceous relatives at Christmas can leave you scarred for life, but all couples should at least try a game of pre-marital Scrabble before tying the knot. If your partner doesn’t take it terribly seriously, allows you to graze the dictionary for inspiration and is happy to abandon the game when you’ve fallen asleep, then he (or she) is likely to be equally laid-back to live with. If he only plays competition rules, criticizes your spelling and limited vocabulary, insists on seeing it out until the bitter end and takes a copy of the score sheet up to the bedroom to taunt you with, then at least you’ve been warned.

  Scrabble, like Monopoly, Risk and other wholesome family games, can easily turn into an instrument of torture in the wrong hands. It’s a deceptively small leap from the game-board to the water-board. Anyone who boasts repeatedly about his winning ‘manihoc’ or highlights your absurdly naive tactics in front of his mates is probably not going to be very helpful during childbirth or when your mother gets dementia. If you want to know what your future holds together, have plenty of Scrabble before marriage.

  After marriage, sleep tends to be the most popular ten o’clock option, at least for mothers. It’s an unfortunate evolutionary quirk that men often want sex when women most want to sleep, and there’s no easy solution. If you opt for sleep, the man rolls around complaining that he can’t kip on a stiffy or tries to have a sly tug that registers on the Richter scale. Wake up, lend him a hand and get it over quickly. If you opt for tired sex, you also want it done and dusted in under a hundred strokes, so you need to stop thinking about tomorrow’s shopping or what’s happening in The Wire, and make a few of those ridiculous noises that always get him going.

  On no account try to solve the sex-sleep dilemma with the compromise of knackered Scrabble. You won’t spot his cheeky ‘flange’ and you’ll be too tired to come up with anything more taxing than ‘bed’, leaving you wide open to ridicule. And if you’re a light sleeper, there’s nothing worse than being woken by that 4am rollover onto the missing ‘P’.

  Just like the game, the Scrabble debate at my shows goes on and on, at least for those who manage to stay awake. But when it comes to audience questions, nearly all of them are about sex, or the things that happen to your body that stop you enjoying it. There’s far more pleasure to be had in life than ninety seconds of hide the sausage, but it still dominates our hang ups (and hang downs). So it is with this book. As a half-Australian comedy doctor, I’m immune to rudery, though some of you may prefer Scrabble to Forbidden Fruits. But if you stick with it you’ll discover words you only dreamt of.

  Dr Phil

  September 2009

  1

  Not so simple pleasures

  Most of us spend our lives trying to balance pleasure and harm, so it’s odd that the only medical lecture I’ve attended that even mentioned the ‘P’ word was about sticking an electrode into a rat’s brain. In doing this, a Canadian researcher called James Olds stumbled on a part of the brain entirely devoted to pleasure. When the electrode was attached to a pedal, the rat would press it thousands of times an hour for maximum pleasure. A bit like a teenage boy and his penis.

  That was back in 1954, and teenage rats and boys have been pedaling furiously ever since. But pleasure has never really taken off as a serious subject for doctors. Type it into the search engine of the mighty National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (www.nice.org.uk) and it returns not a single hit. Pleasure gets just two mentions in the Oxford Textbook of Medicine (in relation to condom usage and physiotherapy), whereas stress weighs in with one hundred and twenty-seven. As with our news media, it seems medicine is obsessed with frightening us into compliance and accentuating the negative rather than helping people to be happy.

  Doctors very rarely tell patients to pleasure themselves (for fear of getting struck off), but anything above a rodent is hardwired to seek it out. The Japanese call enjoyment ‘Tanoshimi’. What little research that has been done suggests a regular dose of pleasure strengthens your immune system and keeps both mind and body healthy by relieving stress. And it’s cheap. If you close your eyes and think of the things you really enjoy, most don’t cost much.

  Enjoyment is a personal thing, but the concept is not new. Alcohol has been invented and used in every known culture, especially those in which it is banned. Stories, sex, siestas, chocolate, pets, dancing, laughter, cakes and coffee are just as ubiquitous – although not necessarily in that order. It seems there is a basic human need for us to enjoy ourselves and, if you believe Charles Darwin, there must be some evolutionary advantage in hedonism, provided you keep it under control. The trick is to enjoy life without harming yourself or those around and inside you.

  But pleasure doesn’t last long if you ruin it with regret. One study found that some women feel more guilty about eating ice cream than committing adultery. And committing adultery with ice cream is what keeps therapists in business.

  Humans are social animals and pleasure generally requires some form of connection – to friends, family, fantasy, food, art or the environment. But to connect takes time and although we seem to have more of everything else than we had sixty years ago (money, possessions, sexually transmitted infections) we have less time to enjoy them (or at least put a condom on properly).

  Very few pleasures aren’t improved by slowing down (except perhaps running from bulls). Going slow allows you to connect more, consume less and remember enough to make a story out of it. Stories allow us to recycle pleasure constantly. They last forever, reinvent themselves and give us surprises, meanings and metaphors for life. And if you can enjoy your own story, as well as the stories of others, you’re more resilient when shit happens, and more able to pass your story on.

  I’m a big fan of skinny-dipping in the summer. Let the budgie breathe. After fifty lengths, it looks as if it’s taken off. I don’t do it in the winter for fear he’ll never return to the perch. I used to do it in the sea but nudist beaches are on the wane owing to coastal erosion, so the joy of feeling the salty wind whistle through the lower regions may have to be put on hold. Still, it makes it a lot safer to squat in a rock pool (a sure way to get you shouting ‘Tanoshimi’, unless you enjoy the old-fashioned way of catching limpets).

  If you slow down too much, don’t you get pressure sores?

  If you’re having a day in bed, it’s wise to roll over occasionally or shift from one buttock to the other to keep the circulation flowing. But slowing down doesn’t (or needn’t) equate with doing nothing. The slower I go, the more I think. I’ve perfected the art of slow exercise – moving just fast enough to be slightly breathless but never so fast as to be thoughtless or speechless. Most comedians find that idle thoughts are often their funniest.

  The slow movement is nothing new. Life may not always have been sweet for a medieval peasant, but they had more public holidays and far fewer key performance indicators than us. During the Industrial Revolution, the work ethic was rammed home from the pulpit and you were made to feel guilty if you didn’t enslave yourself to the production-line machine.

  Time and energy are both limited, and if we burn too much up chasing dull, repetitive, unrewarding targets, the only escape is to try to squeeze in some instant gratification after work. So a bottle of wine or a six-pack of Stella disappears in half an hour and you have to do tomorrow’s dull repetitive tasks with a jackhammer in your brain.

  Some people manage to get pleasure from work, par
ticularly if they don’t do too much of it. As Tom Hodgkinson, founder and editor of the (twice-yearly) Idler magazine puts it:

  A characteristic of the idler’s work is that it looks suspiciously like play. This makes the non-idler feel uncomfortable. Victims of the Protestant work ethic would like all work to be unpleasant. They feel that work is a curse, that we must suffer on this earth to earn our place in the next. The idler, on the other hand, sees no reason not to use his brain to organise a life for himself where his play is his work, and so attempt to create his own little paradise in the here and now.

  Are we really less happy than we were in the fifties?

  Hard to say. Comparing happiness in different eras is a bit like comparing sportsmen. Rod Laver or Roger Federer, Ronaldo or Eusebio, Geoff Capes or Hercules? How can you make a comparison when the hair was so different?

  At least with sporting achievement, you can define what you want to measure but happiness is both harder to get a handle on and easier to interfere with. Telling Roger he wasn’t as great as Rod probably won’t affect him much, but the steady drip of psychologists telling us we’re not happy anymore could talk us into a global depression. Or at least it might if they didn’t have a twelve-step plan to dig us out again.

  Just about everyone I see (and work with) has a rumbling, low-grade anxiety going on in the background of their lives. Sometimes it breaks through and the jitters take over for a while, but for most of us it just sits there, gnawing away at bits of the brain we didn’t know existed (like the hippocampus), wearing us down and paving the way for depression.

  The causes of this anxiety can be knocked up quickly by any Professor of Common Sense at the University of the Blindingly Obvious. Debt, time-pressure, bullying, entrapment, loss of control, worrying about the kids, media-induced fear, politically-induced fear, advertising-induced envy, a lack of meaning and purpose, uncertainty, isolation and insecurity. Doctors get very anxious having to deal with all this in less than ten minutes, along with hitting the cholesterol and diabetes targets (and dealing with our own doubts).

  My wise GP trainer used to say: ‘Life is a pool of shit and our job is to direct people to the shallow end.’ I see it more as bodies floating down a river. As a doctor, you get so knackered pulling them out and putting them back together again, that no one has time to wander upstream and stop them jumping in.

  The idler’s approach is to camp out on the bank and watch the bodies floating past. You downsize, you live as cheaply (and consume as little) as you can and you make your own entertainment where you live. As Samuel Johnson put it: ‘the wise idler will allow events and goods to come to him rather than expend energy and money travelling to disenchanting locations.’

  Slowing down also gives you more time to listen to music, and the most concise advice on happiness comes from songs. I once waded through 600 pages of a book on how to keep yourself sane to discover it all came down to ‘Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive, E-Lim-In-Ate the Negative’, written by Johnny Mercer for Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters in 1944. And one of the best self-help country classics to come out of the fifties was ‘A Satisfied Mind’ by Red Hayes and Jack Rhodes. It includes such wisdom as:

  How many times have you heard someone say

  ’If I had his money, I could do things my way?’

  Little they know that it’s so hard to find

  One rich man in ten with a satisfied mind.

  and

  Money can’t buy back your youth when you’re old

  Or a friend when you’re lonely, or a love that’s grown cold

  The wealthiest person is a pauper of a kind

  Compared to the man with a satisfied mind.

  The song was a No.1 for Porter Wagoner in 1955, and has been covered by Johnny Cash (on the Kill Bill Vol 2 soundtrack) and Jeff Buckley (if you like posthumous poignancy). Bob Dylan murders it on Saved but my favourite version is by Jonathan Richman on the album Jonathan Goes Country. Richman is something of a personal hero, not least for his infectious enthusiasm. He once performed with ‘I love life’ on his t-shirt. My favourite obscure country band, the Ozark Mountain Daredevils, also covered it. Their album It’ll shine when it shines is an idlers’ classic.

  So there you have it. The secret of happiness is a satisfied mind. That’s why we were happier in the fifties. A mind needs time and space to put its feet up on the bank and appreciate the wisdom of country music. So cut out the crap and clutter, and learn to say ‘no’ – particularly to happiness questionnaires.

  NOTE: Idling is fine up to a point, but someone still has to clean the toilet; preferably the person who just idly pissed all over the seat. If you’re going to slow down, there’s no excuse for not improving your aim. As someone with English, Irish and Australian heritage, I’ve dribbled all over the world and concluded that the secret of life is to feel comfortable in your skin wherever you happen to be. Just peel it back first.

  Comfortable in your own skin also means comfortable in your own company. If you can enjoy yourself on your own, it really doesn’t matter if someone chucks you on Christmas Eve because your hair’s too ginger and then runs off with your brother.

  Is sex the greatest pleasure there is?

  You decide. A lot more work has been done rating pain. Doctors often ask you to come up with a number between one and ten for hurt, and there’s even a league table of painful events, with kidney stones jostling for top spot with childbirth, cruciate ligament tears and cluster headaches. But much less research has been done into pleasure, partly because we’re obsessed with the negative but also because it’s very hard to compare, say, the sweaty intensity of sex with the relaxed wonder of butterflies on the buddleia.

  Pleasure needs plenty of variety. Think of it as food. If you draw a pie chart of your daily pleasure intake, it should have more than pies in it. Recreational sex is like a cream bun. Fine as a treat but you can’t live off it. You need the protein of love and friendship and the slow-burning starch of broader passions. You can’t compare masturbation with meditation. You need a bit of both.

  Sex (solo or otherwise) at least has the capacity to provide very intense pleasure without causing any harm, which puts it streets ahead of any drug. And all for the price of a condom. But as with a drug, the drive for sex can stop you enjoying other pursuits. If you’ve got the itch, sex is everywhere you look, no matter how hard you try to divert it. Even butterflies. There are few more romantic sights than a pair of dancing Fritillaries. And why’s that Purple Emperor lurking near the Painted Lady? Sex needs a sense of perspective. If it isn’t available, sort yourself out and go and admire the Red Admirals. Man cannot live on instant gratification alone. And women find it even less gratifying.

  Is happiness as contagious as swine flu?

  No. But a study published in the British Medical Journal (in 2009) found that in any community, there are ‘non-random clusters’ of happy and miserable people i.e. happy people are more likely to be found living near each other than would occur by chance alone. And the same goes for miserable people. This could be because happy people cut all the miserable people out of their lives and surround themselves with other optimists. Or – as this study seems to suggest – happiness spreads across boundary walls. It also suggests that to be happy, you have to interact with others rather than keep it all to yourself. And to prove it, you have to fill in another bloody happiness questionnaire.

  Everything we do is driven by our mood but – rather like sex – the British aren’t too keen on talking about feelings. No one is happy all the time but those who manage a good percentage of happy days seem to be very adept at mood-flipping; getting yourself out of a miserable hole before it gets too deep. In a relationship, humour can be the best way of flipping your partner’s mood (though it can backfire badly if you get the timing wrong). On your own, music is probably the quickest mood-flipper but you can’t spend your entire life attached to an iPod because: a) you’ll go deaf; and b) you’ll have no friends. You need lots of vari
ety on your pleasure plate.

  Can you enjoy being miserable?

  Not all the time. A persistent inability to find pleasure in anything, particularly in things that you used to enjoy, is a good indicator of depression. It’s also a side effect of recreational drugs that burn up all the brain’s pleasure chemicals in one instantly gratifying explosion, and then leave you absolutely floored and fucked and looking older than a scrotum.

  Some people are born with a ‘half-empty’ rather than a ‘half-full’ default mood, and it takes more effort to flip between them into optimism. And a lot of people are just too stressed, busy or tired to have fun. But shit happens to all of us eventually, and it is possible to get and give pleasure in coming to terms with it. That’s how comedians earn a living.

  Relationships probably give people most pleasure and pain. As Kary Mullis put it, in his Biology Laureate Nobel Prize lecture in 1993: ‘There is a general place in the brain, I think, reserved for the melancholy of relationships past. It grows as life progresses, forcing you finally, against your grain, to listen to country music.’ If you’re struggling with unrequited love and need a dose of melancholy, I’d prescribe ‘He stopped loving her today’ by George Jones.

  A dog, a job and a knob. Do I need anything else?

  A little food and water perhaps, and somewhere warm to shelter. But we actually need relatively little to be happy. We’re social animals and we like company, but a dog is much easier to live with than a human. It gives you unconditional love, finds you amusing when you’re drunk, doesn’t mind mess, doesn’t mind if you get its name wrong and even gets excited if you come home smelling of another dog. It won’t wake you up at midnight and ask, ‘If I died, would you get another dog?’ Its parents never visit. It reduces your blood pressure and your cholesterol (by eating your food) and keeps you active and supple (as you bend over to pick up the poo). And, if you’re too depressed to put your pants on in the morning, it’ll lick your testicles. You don’t get that with Prozac. Or marriage.