Sex, Sleep or Scrabble

by Hammond, Phil

  They do, sadly, get sick and die so expect to do some serious grieving. A friend had two dogs, one of which needed to be put down. She arranged a home death with a friendly vet, and she wrapped the dog in a blanket on the lawn, with a piece of chicken in its mouth to distract it from the injection. The family gathered, music was played, poems were read and tears were shed as the other dog appeared frantically at the window. They let her out to say goodbye and she dived under the blanket, paying her last respects, before emerging with the chicken. Dogs will be dogs, and not everyone should have one. Some people just don’t get it. Others hate the smell, the shit and the saliva. And there’s a strong correlation between cruelty to animals and cruelty to children.

  A job, or at least a sense of purpose, is important for health but it helps if you enjoy it. Money is less important than having control over what you do and how you do it. Our best comedies are about entrapment. Basil Fawlty stuck between Cybil and Manuel, Blackadder between Queenie and Baldrick … they’re going nowhere. David Brent in The Office, Alan Partridge and Keith in Marion and Geoff are all trapped, either denying or bemoaning the futility of it all as they get dumped on from all angles. If you’re an employer, hire people who can do the job and give them the freedom to do it without 147 targets and 326 key performance indicators … unless you want to make a sitcom out of their misery.

  Is dogging anything to do with dogs?

  Cramped sex with random strangers in cars has its moments, particularly if you chance upon the gear stick (increasingly likely with smaller, eco-friendly models). Dogging outdoors is less restricted, with more chance of breathing space and nettle burn. The name apparently derives not from the position but from the pretence, when discovered, of searching in the bushes for a lost dog. (TIP: Pull your pants up first or it won’t sound quite so plausible when read out in court.)

  Is it healthy to sleep with a pet?

  Not if you’re allergic to animal fur or the pet normally lives underwater. A surprising number of people sleep with their pets, particularly in-between marriages. They can fart, moult, snore, hog the duvet, spread fleas and dribble as well as any man, and some are natural hunter-gatherers during the night, so expect the restless legs. On the plus side, they’re warm, usually affectionate, damp at both ends and are generally happy to see you in the morning. And you can always compare dog breath.

  What are the side effects of ‘budgie smuggling’?

  ‘Budgie smuggling’ is Australian slang for wearing swimwear so tight that the outline of your genitals resembles a small parrot. It generally only applies to men. Wearing tight pants of any sort, particularly in a hot climate, may lessen your sperm count and increase your chances of a fungal infection under the testicles (athlete’s crotch aka scrot rot). Other than that, the only side effect is aesthetic. Not everyone enjoys public protrusion and some parrots are smaller than others, especially after a bracing swim.

  Budgie smuggling in its literal sense is generally applied to a visitor who sneaks a companion bird into prison for a lonely inmate. The most recent documented example was in Ireland’s high security Portlaoise prison in 2007, when a woman is alleged to have concealed the family pet ‘inside her’. Budgies are sociable, but not generally that sociable. Still, she must have trained it well because it got through undetected and was later found, fit and well, in her husband’s cell.

  Many prisons now openly encourage budgie buddies because of the health benefits of having something pretty to care for that won’t answer back (budgies can mimic up to ten words but rarely construct the sort of sentence to send a prisoner over the edge). Check out the Sony-award-winning podcast The Prisoner and the Budgerigar. It tells the story of lonely Les, doing six years for violent crime in Bristol, and his relationship with Pig, his budgie. Les was able to ‘get me a bird’ not from inside his wife but from the budgie breeder on the inside. He haggled over the price, chose an egg and marked it with a pencil. ‘I’d go down there with some of the other prisoners, and we’d check on how our eggs were coming along. We were fully grown men, worried about a batch of eggs, waiting for ours to crack. When mine did, I scooped him up and took him back to my cell to start his education.’

  Pig was restless in his cage (probably coming to terms with his name) and his scratching and scuttling at night drove Les to distraction. So he took him to bed with him. ‘At first I was worried I would squash him, but it never happened and he spent most nights sleeping with me.’ Les likened looking after Pig to bringing up a baby: ‘If I hadn’t fed him, he would have died.’ This new found responsibility seemed to help Les reflect on his life and make him want to be a more responsible person on his release. ‘That bird did me good. Getting Pig was the best decision I ever made.’

  If I was living in a cell, I’d be first in line for an egg. In fact, I’m thinking of starting up my own budgie therapy. I’ll mate them in the waiting room and let the eggs pop out and hatch in full view. Anyone thinking of becoming a parent but not sure they’re up to it could try a budgie first. If it’s still alive after six months, they could swap it for a gerbil, then maybe a cat, gradually building up to a baby over a couple of years. I could also do a trial of budgie versus counselling for anyone miserable, lonely and tired of life. Obviously, you’d need to provide round-the-clock support for questions about cage size, faddy eating and bird fanciers’ lung. But what is NHS Direct for? Budgies on prescription. You know it makes sense. Until bird flu returns.

  Is it really good to touch the green, green grass of home?

  Yes, if you’re lucky enough to have any grass around your home. According to Natural England, ‘access to green space’ is diminishing year on year. Our parents and grandparents had far more to run about in than we do. Everyone needs a bit of green. It improves your mood, makes you feel less stressed, makes you recover more quickly from stressful situations and makes you want to get off your arse. Ask anyone over forty where their favourite childhood space was and it may well be up a tree. For many people under forty it’ll be in front of a screen.

  You don’t just want to touch the grass either. Roll off into the long stuff. Look at the wildflowers and name the beetles. Put a blade between your thumbs and blow. Burn off each other’s ticks. And don’t forget your antihistamine. One study of American children found they could recognise a hundred corporate logos but not ten local flowers.

  The song itself was written by Claud ‘Curly’ Putman Junior and recorded by (amongst others) Tom Jones, Elvis, Johnny Cash, John Otway (the funniest version) and Björn Ulvaeus’s Hootenanny Singers. It’s a cheesy, sting-in-the-tail country classic. A man is homeward bound, about to jump off the train and into the arms of his sweet Mary (with her ‘hair of gold and lips like cherries’) and then you realise he’s daydreaming on death row with a sad old padre. The closest he’ll come to climbing the old oak tree of his childhood is when they bury him beneath it. In recent versions, the old oak tree is replaced by the X-Box 3.

  Is pulling your nose a polite way to masturbate in public?

  Politer than going the whole hog, certainly. Men are more likely to pull a nose or ear in public than women. Some therapists say it’s a substitute for masturbation, others claim it’s a partial regression to thumb-sucking, a few say it’s a mark of a liar. Some people pull the nose and squeeze the nostrils together because they enjoy the smell of the inside of the nose. The nasal glands are a poor substitute for smegma but better than nothing. Rubbing greasy hair against your scalp and sniffing will also get a few pheromones on your fingers.

  Is swearing good for you?

  There hasn’t been much research into the health benefits of swearing except at Keele University, which suggests they’ve got too much bloody time on their hands. Sixty-four ‘volunteers’ were invited to put a hand in a tub of freezing water and keep it in there while repeating a swear word of their choice. Then they did it again while repeating ‘a more commonplace, neutral word used to describe a table’. And guess what? When you swear, you can endure pain for
fifty per cent longer (or an average of forty seconds).

  Researcher Richard Stevens has several theories to explain this. The first is the competency theory – when you hit your head on a low lintel, you look like a skeletally-incompetent idiot, but swearing quickly reasserts your competency and control of the situation. Angry swearing also increases your heart rate and puts your body into fight mode, which in turn increases your pain tolerance (in case some bastard lintel hits you again).

  My theory is that people (particularly men) can’t multi-skill and if you ask them to think of ‘a more commonplace, neutral word used to describe a table’ it uses up all their powers of concentration and they can no longer fight the pain. I can’t even think of one when I’m not in pain. Clearly, more studies are needed.

  Dr Stevens also postulated that – like antibiotics – the over-use of swearing can negate its beneficial effects when you really need them because it no longer provokes the required emotional response. So you should swear sparingly. But swearing is far more versatile than just an angry, surprised response to pain. It can convey pleasure and love too. Just take the word ‘fuck.’ Derived from a Germanic verb meaning to move quickly (often far too quickly), and perhaps borrowed from the Middle Dutch fokken (to strike or copulate with). But now it’s most often used in a non-sexual sense. It can be a transitive verb (‘Tony fucked Gordon’) or an intransitive verb (‘Gordon was fucked by Tony’). It can be a noun (‘Tony doesn’t give a fuck about Gordon’) or an adverb (‘Gordon is fucking angry with Tony’). For more examples of deeply sensitive swearing, see The Blair Years by Alastair Campbell.

  Do people in glasses get more passes?

  No. They just spot the passes better with their glasses on. I did consider having my eyes lasered in the mid nineties, when the treatment first became popular, but all the eye surgeons I met still wore glasses, which put me off. They were waiting to see what the long-term effects might be. I then (rather foolishly) asked the audience in Edinburgh what they thought of me without glasses and the first heckle was ‘psycho killer’. And after thirty-six years of them framing my world view, I’ve grown rather fond of glasses.

  There are side effects. The triad of ginger hair, freckles and glasses leaves you wide open to John Denver/Joe Ninety/Milky Bar Kid abuse. It’s harder to snog in specs and your dance movements are a bit restricted. The first time I wore mine to a village hall disco, I lost them two bars into the guitar solo on Freebird and it took me an hour to find them. I refused to wear them for a while afterwards, so my sex education behind the French hut was a purple haze.

  I was desperate for contact lenses, and at sixteen, I got them. Within a week, I crashed out after a party, put them in a glass of water by the bed, woke with a raging thirst and swallowed them. The optician told me that my insurance didn’t cover gross acts of stupidity but I got both of them back with a bit of determination and a sieve. But the old hard contact lenses were hopeless for a junior doctor on call. I couldn’t sleep in them and I couldn’t spend five minutes putting them in when I was called out to a cardiac arrest. So I switched back to glasses and have stuck with them ever since.

  Glasses have lots of health benefits. They stop nasty things going in your eye (rose thorns, squash balls, champagne corks, semen). Cuddly tortoiseshell frames can make you appear more empathic than you really are; little round ones or reading glasses can make you look scholarly. If you’re blond or ginger, they add definition to your eyebrows. Also, patients are less likely to punch you if you wear glasses, and if they won’t shut up, you can take them off and suck the arm while ‘mmmm-ing’. This gives the impression of listening while drifting off into a pleasant blur, before waking up and guessing, ‘It’s probably a virus.’

  Should MPs tell us what they’ve snorted?

  Only if it was bought with public money. I did once ask Boris Johnson (on Have I Got News For You) if he’d ever snorted cocaine and he said: ‘I tried it once, and I sneezed. It went everywhere. But it was a very, very foolish, naughty, stupid thing to do.’ This had a touch of the Clinton ‘sucking but not inhaling’ defence, but was much funnier. And politically cute, as it took the heat off David Cameron who was refusing to reveal what went down at the Bullingdon Club.

  In Victorian England, politicians were far less coy. Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone used to take slugs of liquid morphine before rising unsteadily to defend himself in the House of Commons. And even though Queen Victoria complained: ‘He always addresses me as if I were a public meeting,’ she never took issue with his opiods, probably because she liked to dabble with tincture of cannabis for her period pains. Heroin, cocaine and morphine were all available on prescription and widely dispensed by male doctors to deal with difficult ‘lady patients’ (and taken by the doctors themselves to cope with the stress of the job).

  We admire honesty in politicians but a culture that goes apoplectic over a state-funded trouser press is unlikely to look kindly on a teenage skunk habit. So I suspect politicians won’t go public beyond ‘the occasional toke at a student party and it did nothing for me.’ At least, not until Boris Johnson becomes Prime Minister.

  Drugs (and women) were demonised in the UK during the First World War, when alcohol was restricted and troops in London attended cocaine and sex parties (and ended up with an addiction to syphilis). Possession of cocaine and heroin was outlawed in 1916 under the Defence of the Realm Act. If I was going over the top at the Somme, I’d want something to escape reality.

  What’s the most dangerous recreational drug?

  A drug is probably most dangerous when you’ve got no idea what it is or what dose you’re taking. Doctors and nurses kill thousands of people every year by mistake, even though drugs are clearly labelled, because the margins of error are often very small. Take the anaesthetic painkiller Fentanyl. Get the decimal point in slightly the wrong place, or forget to monitor the vital signs closely, and it can be curtains. So to inject supposedly the same drug, sold as ‘Apache’, in an unknown dose through a dirty needle, in the dark, after three hours of happy hour seems a bit risky.

  Nothing causes as much damage as alcohol, but perhaps the most destructive illegal drug is methamphetamine (crystal meth). You can make it yourself from over-the-counter cold remedies (although explosions are common, and a common reason for getting caught). It causes an unbelievably intense and highly addictive euphoria, like a chemical electrode straight into that pleasure centre; an instant escape from hell. It can also make you incredibly horny, yet unable to come. Meth users rarely use condoms, feel less pain and don’t know when to stop, so sores, tears, pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections are common. And when the fun’s over, you’ve leeched your brain and lost your self-respect and dignity, leaving a dried-up, depressed, husk with very bad teeth. Until the next fix.

  The German military dispensed methamphetamine in the Second World War to take away fear on the front line. When your chance of not making it was 1 in 3, spiked sweeties were enticing, never mind the side effects. You could choose between Fliegerschokolade (airmen’s chocolate) or Panzerschokolade (tank chocolate). Hitler was thought to enjoy a regular fix of crystal to get through the self-doubt and fatigue, but it wasn’t much good for his long-term health.

  Most of the drug addicts I’ve met think they were born that way, with brains ‘hard-wired’ for addiction. But drugs themselves can alter the structure of the brain and lead to addiction. As an addict once said to me: ‘You’re too late. I’ve gone from a cucumber to a pickle.’ Once you pickle a cucumber, the changes are irreversible and you can never turn it back again. Likewise, long-term drug abuse can change the brain permanently. Once you hit the pickle stage, your cucumber nights are over.

  Pickles can still hang round for a while, particularly pickled doctors. We have access to pure drugs in known doses with clean needles. No rubbish cut in, no bleach, no hepatitis or HIV, no hanging round dodgy estates in the dark. But any drug that has an effect also has side effects. No one ever dies of a cannabis o
verdose but it can make you anxious, dopey, paranoid and more likely to drive into a tree. Pleasure versus harm.

  The last person to offer me drugs was a patient. He had ‘some good shit’ in for Christmas and wanted to share some with me. I checked with the General Medical Council and —incredibly – they have no specific guidelines for patients giving doctors good shit. So I took a small stash, out of politeness, and fed it to the orchids. Amazing flowers this year. Truly mind-blowing.

  Is ecstasy really no riskier than horse-riding?

  This rather catchy pronouncement came from my friend Professor David Nutt, the chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. Apparently 500,000 people a week use ecstasy in the UK, and 30 people a year die after taking it. If you do the maths, your chance of death is 1 in 850,000, which is roughly the same as the combined risk of death from falling off a horse and crashing your car to avoid someone who’s fallen off her horse.