The Accidental Optimist E-Book

Emily Joy

• Herausgeber: Eye Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 332

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2005

Beschreibung

Exploring an inimitable philosophy of hope and humor through a variety of ups and downs, this quirky recollection illustrates the author's search for the meaning of life. Depicting her experiences as the only doctor on call for an entire hospital in Sierra Leone in the midst of civil war, this portrait tells a story of optimism triumphing over what might elsewhere be the makings of disappointment and despair. From births and illnesses to family deaths and problem pets, this frank and unpredictable memoir demonstrates the remarkable insights that can be discovered from living through the seemingly unremarkable.

Leseprobe

Copyright © Emily Joy 2005

All rights reserved. Apart from brief extracts for the purpose of review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the permission of the publisher.

Emily Joy has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

Names and places have been changed.

The Accidental Optimist: A Guide to Life

1st Edition

August 2005

Published by Eye Books Ltd

29 Barrow Street Much Wenlock Shropshire TF13 6EN Tel/fax: [phone]

website: www.eye-books.com

Set in Frutiger and Garamond

ISBN: 1903070430

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

“Life is a series of accidents.” Tony

accident aeksident n. a chance; that which happens.

optimistop’tim-ist n. one who follows the doctrine of Leibniz (1646-1716) that this world is the best of all possible worlds.

lifelaif n. a chance

“One of the most humorous and insightful books I have read on the “big issues” and happiness.” Mark Setton CEO Teaching Happiness, Inc.http://www.Pursuit-of-Happiness.org

“An unexpected inspiration.” The Herald

“There are two ways to live; you can live as if nothing is a miracle, or you can live as if everything is a miracle.” Einstein

Acknowledgements

My thanks to all those who I cornered to ask for the meaning of life and those poor souls who feature. In particular Terry, Martin, David, Jo, Tony, Nadine, Craig, Paul and Kristin for some great ideas, my Mum for her biological perspective and, grudgingly, my Dad for sending me off to look in the Dictionary. So I must thank the compilers of the Chambers, Oxford and Collins Dictionaries. Generally I started with Chambers, since I’m a Scot whose favourite colour is red, but if I didn’t like their definition, I tried the Oxford or Collins. Most quotes were collected direct from source, but I checked the ones I could in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Michael Eysenick’s Psychology: An International Perspective was a suitably impressive (but remarkably readable) tome to check up on my distant memories of psychology lectures and Philosophy FOR DUMMIES was a suitably unimpressive (but very informative) tome for one who has never officially studied philosophy. Dorling Kindersley children’s non fiction books are fantastic sources for facts on dinosaurs and the beginning of the world. And of course isn’t the internet a wonderful source of info and total rubbish?

My thanks must also go to Dan at Eye Books for believing in me, Rick for the cartoons, and Chris and Vic for their editing input - in particular for actually seeing some potential in the first draft!

Any spelling mistakes, typos or factual errors are entirely my own fault (largely because I haven’t let my Dad read it yet).

Special thanks go to my friends, especially Angela, Heather, Heather, Anne, Suzannah and Wendy for looking after my children so I had chance to get this written. And Terry, of course.

This book is dedicated to Pete

Contents

Prologue

Section 1: Climbing The Pyramid

1. Life is Fragile

2. Optimism: Another Word for Denial

3. All You Need is Love

4. Am I Worth It?

5. Life Is A Lot Of Questions

6. A Beautiful Life

7. The Dizzy Heights

Section 2: Tumbling Off The Pyramid

8. Back to Basics

9. Life Begins at Home

10. Family Life

11. The Value of Life

12. Womb With A View

13. For Dear Life

14. Life Won’t Wait

15. Optimists Don’t Worry

16. Dr. Jones’ Double-Glazing

17. Life’s Too Short

18. Your Life in Their Hands

19. Life at a Higher Latitude

Section 3: So What Is Life?

20. Death

21. The Answers?

Prologue

Why were the philosophers such pessimists?

“It’s bad today and every day it will get worse until the worst of all happens.” Schopenhauer (1788-1860).

How are these grumpy old men going to help anyone understand the meaning of life? Only three out of the ‘great philosophers’ ever married. So there they were, oblivious of over half the human race, naval gazing in their caves, private rooms or gardens, undisturbed by small children, the need to make dinner or change a nappy.

The only women to make a grudging appearance in the top one hundred philosophers were St Julian of Norwich (a nun with a man’s name) and, depending on the compiler, Simone de Beauvoir and Mary Wollstonecraft. Simone never married either (lived with Jean Paul Satre, no children) but Mary Wollstonecraft married after her first child, then had a second daughter. At last a parent – a mother even! (I’m not saying everyone has to reproduce, but mankind does rather rely on someone doing it.)

“Virtue can only flourish among equals.” Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97)

Unfortunately Mary died after childbirth. The women were obviously too busy risking their lives for the continuation of life itself to philosophise about it. Maybe it is this fact of death that gives the pessimists the upper hand?

So we are left with 97% men telling us what to think. Do they really also have to be grumpy and old? Old people know more of course. I have many magnificent older patients who are cheerful, grateful and stoic, often having lived through huge hardships and loss. For them, death is a fact of life, and may even be a wonderful thing. These are the people I want to listen to. The grumpy old man, however, assumes death will be a ‘bad thing’ so no wonder that as they approach that ‘bad thing’, each ache and pain and disappointment is another nail, and they get a bit scared, and thus even grumpier.

“The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.” Mark Twain (1835-1910).

Help! I’ve only got 6 years left! I’ve always been an optimist, I can’t help it, I was born that way, but suddenly I feel like part of an endangered species. What’s worse is that as I get older, I can feel pessimism infect my being. I can no longer call myself a cheerful young woman. I’m not getting enough sleep; I’m tired and grumpy; I shout at my kids; I get to the end of the day and would rather slump in front of the TV with a glass of wine than save the world. And I confess I’m not at all serene and accepting of death, not for me and not for my family.

I’m also a bit disappointed in Mr. Twain. He was one of the few great novelists who didn’t wallow in misery (even Shakespeare was only allowed to give his plays happy endings if he called them comedies). Is the only way to avoid coming down with a nasty dose of pessimism is to stick our fingers in our ears and go ‘la-di-da-di-da’? Why is negativity deemed wisdom? I need these great minds to chivvy me up, not push me over the edge! Optimists don’t have to be deluded, even though I’m a firm believer that a bit of healthy delusion can be a lifesaver. Are there any intelligent optimists, or is that just an oxymoron?

“This is going to take brains, not brawn.” Bagheera.

“You better believe it, and I’m loaded with both.” Baloo the Bear. (Jungle Book, Walt Disney 1967).

Ah, that’s better – Baloo always cheers me up. There are brainy optimists who are truly loaded with both.

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” Thomas ‘the Light Bulb’ Edison (1847 – 1931).

Mr Edison isn’t smiling (they didn’t in these old photos) but he doesn’t look grumpy. Neither does this next chap…

“Only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible.”

“There are two ways to live; you can live as if nothing is a miracle, or you can live as if everything is a miracle.” Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)

Good old scientists, not just thinking, but trying to prove. Whilst I’m feeling positive towards and scientists, researchers at the Mayo Clinic have shown that being an optimist is good for your health – Optimists live 19% longer (and enjoy it more). Martin Seligman, a Professor of Positive Psychology, wrote Learned Optimism and Authentic Happiness as part of his crusade to teach people to be Optimists on purpose. I must applaud the valiant effort by this Purposeful Optimist (and a highly educated man). The world needs more optimists!

But we also need to nurture all the optimists we already have. Optimists are a precious resource. We cannot afford to lose any to the Contagion of Pessimists, just because some things don’t go according to plan. I was an Accidental Optimist, with my happy childhood, job that I love, adventurous travels, lovely husband and three beautiful children, but now I’m getting a bit older, I’m finding I have to try. I wrote this book, not to convert pessimists, but to encourage my own inner optimist, and any other optimists out there, with a few optimistic goals:

Prove Mark Twain wrong. Getting older shouldn’t mean an inexorable slide into pessimism.

Redress the balance of thinkers: more optimists, more women and more parents thinking as well as doing. (I wondered about including those naturally optimistic beings – children - but decided that they should just be having fun.)

Get some perspective. This is life. Things go wrong, but optimism remains the best defence against adversity.

Encourage all Optimists (Accidental, Purposeful, Trainee or Lapsed) to stay out of the closet. Perhaps we can reach a critical mass to provide optimistic ‘herd immunity’ from the pessimists.

Discover the meaning of life...

The Meaning of Life - Where to start?

“Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.” Jane Austen (1775-1817)

Ms Austen might have been the Queen of Happy Endings, but that was fiction. If you really want optimism in the face of adversity, then St Julian of Norwich (1342-1423) is your woman. She wrote this whilst living through the Black Death.

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

That’s more like it. See, don’t you feel better just reading that – even though I do wonder if she is protesting just a little too much? No, no, I will not let sleep deprivation, middle-age and cynicism destroy my inner optimist, just because she was a saint and didn’t have a husband or children to contend with. All shall be well. It shall! It shall!

What I really need is a happy intellectual, preferably not a saint, who led a normal sort of life, didn’t dwell on guilt and misery and who can give me a practical, realistic framework for leading a better life; somewhere between ‘we’re all doomed’ and ‘don’t worry, be happy.’ So I Googled ‘life’ and the ‘meaning of life’, and scrolled down pages of philosophers, biologists, theologians and psychologists to try and find someone who was smiling. (Okay, I have too many children and too little time to look up the resulting 500 million entries, but I did spend 20 minutes on line with my daughter on my knee and half an hour in the library whilst the boys were at a swimming lesson). Anyway my smiler is…

Abraham Maslow (1908-1970).

Admittedly he’s a man, but I think Mary Wollstonecraft will forgive me (she wanted equality for women, not power over men). What Dr. Maslow did have was six siblings (I’m an only child, and am always impressed by the life survival skills siblings bring), a wife and two children. His hierarchy of needs is rightly famous – a nice simple triangle to explain everything. Not a circle with its complicated mathematical variables and philosophical considerations of beginnings and ends, nor a rhomboid or even a double helix, but a triangle.

Maslow said you couldn’t fulfill your ‘higher’ needs until your basic needs were met. These ‘lower’ needs he termed ‘deficiency’ needs, implying you only seek out the oxygen, food, water and sleep that you need, and once satisfied, you don’t want more. (Rubbish, there’s always room for more chocolate). Oh dear, I haven’t made it to the end of the Prologue without falling out with Dr. Maslow. Never mind, life would be boring if we all agreed.

In the first section I’m not only going to challenge Dr. Maslow to dig me out of my enormous pile of needs, but I’m going to ask anybody else who might have any useful insights on life that take my fancy. After all, life includes blue green algae, dinosaurs and the Universe - not just the over-evolved psyche of a few selfish bipeds. Asking around might make me a bit of philosophical slut, but Socrates asked people on the streets of Athens what they thought. What’s good enough for the Great Granddaddy of Philosophy, is good enough for me. And Socrates had a wife!

If you want to skip to the third section for the ‘Answers’ then that’s fine, but in the second section, I’m going to apply all this good advice to my own life and see if I could have rescued myself from those moments of optimism failure. Everything that happens will have happened to someone else, and perhaps I could have learned from others’ mistakes rather than having to make them all myself? Having said that, you can’t help a chicken to hatch, it has to break its own egg. I suspect you’ll have to mess-up all by yourself for maximum development. Still, if you’d like to try cheating a little, here’s my guide to the series of accidents that make up the triangle of life.

Section 1 Climbing The Pyramid

1. Life is Fragile

The Bottom Rung: Basic Needs

“Life is defined by the ability of the organism to metabolise, excrete, breathe, grow, respond to external stimuli and reproduce.” My Mum (retired biology teacher)

“Look for the bear necessities, the simple bear necessities.” Baloo the Bear

“To live at all is miracle enough.” Mervyn Peake

Prioritise Your Life

Prioritise Your Life! I came across an article whilst sifting through a pile of junk mail and children’s drawings looking for my chequebook. Hmmm. It talked about financial investments and aromatherapy facials. Not a single mention of the bare necessities that apply whether you’re the Queen, a tree, an amoeba or a bear. Not even a suggestion that food, water, oxygen or sleep might be a priority. Nor any acknowledgment of the need for our other miraculous biological homeostatic mechanisms to be functioning, such as maintaining our pH and temperature within tiny margins. Nor did it suggest that it might be more important to have the smooth disposal of our bodily wastes rather than a smooth face or a very smooth extra percentage point on our interest rates.

Never mind, Dr. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to the rescue. He constructed a list of priorities inspired by his study of monkeys. And Dr. Maslow’s monkeys knew their priorities. If they were hungry and thirsty, they would satisfy their thirst before their hunger. Once they’d had a drink, they forgot all about thirst, and could think about their bellies. Bellies full and bladders and bowels emptied, they could then start making more monkeys.

So forget my chequebook, the mortgage, my wrinkles and my cellulite, I’m going to prioritise my life according to a more fundamental analysis than the one offered by today’s hyperbolic marketing gurus. Let’s start with my favourite basic need. Food. Baloo’s favourite bare necessity too, although his preference was for paw-paws, prickly pears, honey and ants. I must say I’d have to be very hungry indeed to eat ants (with or without honey). Give me chocolate any time.

Food

You Can Never Get Enough Chocolate

Chocolatechok’ (a-) lit, n. preparation in the form of a paste or solid block made from roasted and ground cacao seeds, usually sweetened.

Well if you put it like that, it doesn’t sound terribly exciting. So why are there 28 million entries if you Google chocolate? That’s 11 million more entries than for the meaning of life! Is chocolate the answer to life the universe and everything?

“He’s just adorable,” the waitress said. Yes, Art, our nine month old baby, had the capacity to be most adorable. “Would he like a chocolate?”

“That’s kind, but no,” I answered, a first-time middle class doctor mum with all sorts of nutritional ideals for our precious child.

“No thank you,” echoed Danny, Art’s doting Dad. “He’s never had choc…oh.”

Art had already snatched the chocolate from the waitress and was ripping off the shiny wrapper. Why? Why did he know it was something he really, really wanted when he had never had it? Was it the smell? Was it the shiny wrapper? Was it that we had said ‘no’?

Our springer spaniel is no better. Bo can sniff out chocolate, double-wrapped inside a box inside a carrier bag sitting amongst ten full carrier bags of the weekly shop. Why? Chocolate is poisonous for dogs (and horses and parrots, apparently). A three stone dog will be poisoned by a half-pound bar of chocolate. A pound of chocolate will give it fits, internal bleeds and heart attacks. But does that put Bo off? No way! Chocolate is poisonous for humans too (if you ate twenty pounds at one sitting - no mean feat, even for me). But look at its benefits!

Chocolate contains over 300 chemicals, including the flavinoids, which lower blood pressure and protect against heart attacks and cancer. Chocolate triggers all the same responses as falling in love, with its secret ingredients such as the psychoactive theobromide, phenyl ethylamine (a cousin of the amphetamines), and small quantities of anadamide (a cannabis-like compound). Chocolate’s so good, it’s banned in racehorses.

But it’s bad for your teeth and will give you spots! Wrong, wrong. Cacao butter is thought to actually protect you from dental plaque and several trials have shown that chocolate doesn’t make acne any worse. It will of course make you fat* as it’s full of sugar and saturated fats, which we humans are genetically programmed to love. Breast milk, for instance, is full of sugar, so we had a sweet tooth before we even had teeth, and in Stone-age days you might go for a week without food, so you crammed in as many high energy fats and sugars as you possibly could to stave off the forthcoming famine.

Obviously we fat people are just perfect evolutionary survivors from the Stone Age, when the ability to pig out was a lifesaver. Unfortunately, all stuffing yourself does in our times of plenty, is give you diabetes, painful hips and knees and a broken heart (both literally and figuratively).

I have a theory about fat people and thin people. Under stress, thin people lose their appetite, whereas stressed fat people comfort eat. And of course, chocolate is the perfect comfort food, with its melting point being just below human body temperature, so that it melts in the mouth. Ah! Chocolate!

Chocolate covers the whole of Maslow’s pyramid:

Basic needs. Eat it or use it to buy other bare necessities (many Central American tribes used cacao liquid or beans as currency) and of course there’s 20 reasons why it’s better than sex (good when soft, not scared of commitment etc.).

Safety needs. You’ll never feel safer than drinking a nice warm mug of hot chocolate.

Love and belonging. Casanova and the Aztec Emperor Montezuma used it as an aphrodisiac and the Aztecs associated cacao with the god of fertility. Today anyone bearing gifts of chocolate will increase their chances of being loved.

Esteem. It makes you feel good.

Cognitive needs. It’s full of brain-enhancing chemicals.

Aesthetic needs. It looks and tastes beautiful.

Self-actualisation? Hmmm? I’m sure I’ll think of something.

It seems miraculous to me that mankind managed to live without it for thousands of years. The first recorded chocolate beverage was made from the chocolate tree (Theobroma Cacao) and drunk by the Aztecs in the fifteenth century, although the Maya Indians were probably using it long before that. Actual chocolate bars didn’t make an appearance until the nineteenth century, which means, I regret to say, that chocolate cannot be a panacea for our needs. Perhaps, just perhaps, chocolate is masking unfulfilled needs?

Give up chocolate and get a life? No, no, I can’t believe I just said that.

Fat People and Thin People

Lisa (thin person) and I (fat person) were sent to Sierra Leone with Voluntary Service Overseas. Lisa was a nurse tutor and I was a doctor and we shared a house at Serabu Mission Hospital. After sixteen months of chocolate deprivation (me) and three months deprivation (Lisa), we had visitors from the land of chocolate who presented us with two bumper bars of Toblerone. Wow! Now they could come again! My last remaining piece of chocolate (a Minstrel, I remember it well) had been borne off by an army of ants, and my best friend’s attempts to fulfil my chocolate needs resulted in a sticky brown package covered in teethmarks, a few shreds of foil and a paper doily that had once been the letter wrapped around the bar of rich dark Bourneville. (And I hope chocolate is poisonous to rats too!) Anyway, this time I was going to nurture my chocolate, so we laid our Toblerone carefully in the fridge, side by side, hoping that eight hours electricity out of twenty-four, would be enough to keep the chocolate under melting point.

I was ENORMOUSLY impressed with myself for making my Toblerone last nearly three days!!!!! Lisa’s however, sat in the fridge, with just the tiniest of nibbles from the corner, for over SIX WEEKS.

Every day I would gaze on Lisa’s Toblerone and salivate. One night I had been up for hours, repairing the ruptured bowel of a man who had fallen from a palm tree, with the DIY instruction book in one hand and a scalpel in the other. I came home exhausted in the small hours and could bear it no longer. I took my kerosene lamp to the silent fridge, pulled out the chunky triangle from its sleeve, shaved a sliver from the back end with a knife and let it melt in my mouth. Aaah! I covered the evidence carefully with the foil wrapper and replaced the chocolate bar in its cardboard sleeve. Lisa never knew.

Two months passed and over half of Lisa’s Toblerone remained. Then SHE STARTED GIVING IT TO THE CHILDREN. I wanted to hurl myself in front of her like a protester in front of a bulldozer in the Amazon forest. Why was she giving her Toblerone away to the African children who had never had chocolate in their lives and were never likely to have it again and probably (possibly) didn’t even particularly like it? Surely it was just cruelty, yes cruelty, especially after leaving it there in its full triangular glory to torment me for weeks, to feed it to them when there were others (ME, ME, ME!!!) who would eat the chocolate and be eternally grateful if indeed it was really true that Lisa didn’t want it herself (and how could that be?)

I have another theory about fat people and thin people: thin people eat because they have to, but fat people have to eat. (Really inspirational stuff this - STOP PRESS. FAT PEOPLE LIKE FOOD!) Are we fat people just morally deficient? Can enjoying a basic need be morally deficient? Probably. Possibly. Let me tell you about my dog.

A Morally Deficient Dog?

Bo was six weeks old when I first saw her in a freezing barn in the middle of winter, head lost in the foodbowl, little tail wagging, forcing the other puppies ‘sharing’ her bowl to lick scraps from the edge. Bowl A finished, Bo bounded over to bowl B, where her other four siblings were dining and barged her way in to finish that off too. That’s my dog!

Two weeks later we went to collect her. A cluster of adorable springer spaniel pups frolicked in the courtyard. “Aren’t they cute?” I sighed. “Which one’s Bo?”

“Well…” said the farmer’s daughter, embarrassed. “I’m afraid she’s got a little, er, fat.”

And out rolled a little barrel of fluff and blubber, nearly twice the size of her siblings. Well surprise, surprise, who’s been eating my food?

Our other puppy, Rogie, was lean and beautiful. Bo would hoover down a whole bowlful of food and be halfway down Rogie’s bowl before Rogie even noticed that dinner had been served. Does that make Bo morally deficient? No. She’s a dog. It did make her very unpopular on occasion, e.g.: eating half the Christmas turkey, and it does, of course, make her fat. But not morally deficient.

To make up for my moral deficiency, I once gave up my favourite bottom rung need for a 48 hour sponsored mouth shut, along with my second favourite activity, talking (which bizarrely doesn’t appear on the bottom rung, nor anywhere else on Maslow’s hierarchy). By the end of the two days I was, not too surprisingly, STARVING - the only time in my life that I’ve been properly hungry. Westerners (apart from supermodels and other anorexics) are dying of obesity because although we might understand ‘peckish’, we don’t really know what hunger is. In fact we take most of our bottom rung for granted, because generally it’s just there without any great effort: food in our pantries, fridges and shops; clean water from our taps; oxygen rich air to breathe; a sun to keep us warm and our marvellous bodies which perform little miracles every second just to keep us functioning without us ever even noticing. But it’s an even greater miracle that we exist at all. There was a time when there were no basic needs. When it was minus 273 °C and there was nothing at all.

Heat

The Big Thermostat

Twenty billion years ago it was a bit chilly, but there’s nothing like a big bang to warm things up. It was another ten billion years before Earth made an appearance, along with our own personal energy supply, the Sun. Then we had to wait a few million years for our fiery earth-ball to cool down a bit. When it was cool enough to stop all our water boiling off, God could start stirring up his primordial soup. After a few false starts, he perfected the recipe for blue-green algae. God had made the Sun, the seas and (courtesy of his blue-green algae) an ozone layer, so he could keep Experiment Earth at a pretty constant temperature for 350 million years. God even managed to tweak his thermostat to adjust for the occasional obstacle like a meteorite the size of Everest crashing into Earth, which rather disappointingly spoilt his star creation: the dinosaurs.

Then some big-headed bipeds came along and thought they’d get in on the fire thing too. Fire did wonders for man. It gave us heat and light and the courage to leave our caves. It also gave our pretty puny species power over other much more impressive specimens of life with bigger teeth (dragons excepted). No wonder King Louie wanted Mowgli to give me the power of man’s red flower, so I can be like you. Shoo be doo. Sorry. As I said, my favourite film. Anyway. On with the bare necessities…

Some Like It Hot: Our Internal Thermostat

Hot-blooded animals function best at 37 °C whether you’re a polar bear, Marilyn Monroe or a blue tit. We can sneak ourselves a few extra degrees on either side with our fat stores, feathers, fur and shelters. Technology may push that a bit further with fancy central heating, air-conditioning, Gore Tex mountain gear and titanium covered space ships. Leave your Gore Tex jacket behind on Everest and you’ll soon drop four or five degrees and your systems will shut down. Throw in a little mosquito in Sierra Leone, and suddenly you have malaria, a temperature of 42.5 °C and, with another couple of degrees, you’ll stop functioning permanently.

“Anyone who thinks they are too small to make a difference has never shared a bed with a mosquito.” A popular volunteer mantra.

Oh dear! How I hate to be told too much of a good thing is bad for you, but …

At least too much food will only make you fat, but too much fire is much more destructive. God coped with big meteorites, but can he cope with his unruly monster offspring, man, whose over-consumption is messing up his delicate thermostat in just a few hundred years?

Oxygen

Inspirein-spir’, v. to breathe in.

Isn’t it funny how the things we want the most are bad for you? But the same goes for the things we need the most. If you think chocolate is bad for you, then oxygen is much, much worse. Oxygen feeds the fires, makes cars rust and our cells age, become cancerous and die. A premature baby given 100 percent oxygen will develop all sorts of nasty side effects, like cataracts and brain damage. We can try and protect ourselves by eating lots of antioxidants to prevent the toxic side effects of oxygen. So, eat more chocolate, it will protect you from the air you breathe. Okay, so you might be better to eat more vegetables (although weight for weight the cacoa bean contains ten times more antioxidants than spinach). Plants photosynthesise, so they produce oxygen, so they produce lots of antioxidants to protect themselves. Aren’t they clever?

But even though I feel I must have chocolate, I KNOW I must have oxygen.

If you’re choking on an organic truffle at the fanciest New York restaurant, Dolce and Gabbana clinging to your fabulous toned curves, just about to sign a multi-million pound advance for your next bestseller, you won’t care if it’s George Clooney or the ugliest man in the room doing the Heimlich manoeuvre. Nor will you be very interested in that fabulous double chocolate torte that just caught your eye on the sweet menu when you were only supposed to be ordering a starter. Oxygen, oxygen, oxygen. Like most of Maslow’s basic needs, you don’t miss it till it’s gone.

The only time it actually occurred to me to be grateful for oxygen was while scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef (with a Japanese buddy who spoke no English), too much of a novice to realise I really didn’t need so many weights with a thinner, shorter wetsuit. I plunged into the three metre swell, the oxygen regulator bouncing out of my mouth as I torpedoed downwards, panic rather inefficiently wasting any residual circulating oxygen. Would Madam like a lifetime’s free Toblerone? No? A diamond ring perhaps? Oxygen, oxygen, oxygen. Anyway, since I’m still here, I would now like to give a belated tribute to those responsible for my oxygen. And the Oscar goes to…blue-green algae!

Blue-green algae were there long before any of us, living five metres down in the oceans, protecting themselves from all that UV radiation that made the Earth’s surface even more inhospitable than the moon. Together they photosynthesised, producing oxygen (O2), which gradually formed ozone (O3). With the ozone layer protecting Earth from the sun’s killer radiation, the rest of us could then creep out of the oceans, first into shallower waters and then onto dry land. And still the blue-green algae photosynthesised, making yet more oxygen for us to breathe. What stars! Inspirational!

But even the blue-green algae couldn’t have survived without water, and neither can we.

Water

Our bodies are about 60 percent water (more in babies). We might manage a day, possibly two (if it was cool and we just lay about doing nothing) without it. Oh, how we take it for granted! My hospital in Sierra Leone did have taps, but it was a day for celebration if anything came out of them. Mostly we were rationed to one or two buckets a day for drinking and washing. “God, only one bucket today,” I would complain, pitying myself for my traumatic deprivations, when there are millions in this world who would thank their God many times over for that single lovely bucket of water. And I didn’t even personally have to carry the big metal bucket the mile from the well. And there was a well. And although in the dry season the river dried up to a trickle, it never dried up altogether. In the rainy season you could roll your water barrel under the corrugated iron roof to collect fresh rainwater. But sometimes, in some places, it doesn’t rain at all for months and months and months. Sometimes it rains too much and flood water disrupts the sewage systems, then there’s not a drop fit to drink.

Excuse me, I’m just going to the loo, which I expect will flush, then I’ll have a nice hot bath followed by a long cool glass of water on the rocks.

Talking about going to the loo, there’s another, slightly less romantic need…

Excretion

What Goes in Must Come Out

“Kings and philosophers shit and so do ladies.” Montaigne (fifteenth century French philosopher)

“Shit happens, but it’s not your fault.” Seneca (paraphrased a little, perhaps.)

“Shit happens, but then constipation can be very painful.” Dr. Em.

Is excretion just a basic function which happens as a side effect of our need for food, oxygen and water, or is it a need in its own right? Well, if you have to do it, it’s a need.

If you need to go, you need to go. There’s a certain look of bliss, recognised by nurses the world over, on the face of a patient who has opened his bowels after days of difficulty. Children will strain, then preen over their produce in the potty and you must admit there’s still a residual sense of satisfaction in a good bowel movement.

Passing urine is also pretty unromantic until you can’t do it, due to anatomy (a man with an enlarged prostate), or just circumstance (e.g.: on a long bus journey) and then, oh boy, you want a pee more than sex or even Toblerone! And there’s an almost orgasmic sense of relief when you do find that toilet.

Oh look, I’ve managed to get it back round to chocolate again…

Chocolate Mousse

There’s been a lot of poo in my life recently, what with two dogs and three small children. Of course I might have had a lot less trouble if I had followed most of the world and gone for ‘Natural Infant Hygiene’ - “http://www.naturalinfant.com”. No need for nappies, you just respond to their needs, with a little encouraging ‘psss, psss’ or a ‘poo, poo’ when you need your little baby to go whilst holding them over a suitable receptacle. Wow! Saves the environment, leaves you totally in tune with your baby and (they say) is no more work in the long run. I am impressed (no, of course I didn’t do it!) Clearly I wasn’t in tune with anyone.

Art had just turned three. My little boy, fabulous though he was, was sent to try me, and I am no saint. He had been winding me up all Sunday morning. Competitive attention-seeking with his new baby brother, Frankie, who, rather annoyingly for Art, just gurgled and smiled and was generally adorable. Whatever. We’d been up since six and by seven-thirty I’d had enough. Art was looking for trouble. Goading me. Refused to pick up his toys, refused to have breakfast, refused to put his clothes on, refused to go to the toilet. No, no, no! A friend of mine said she never agreed with smacking until she had children. “I never realised that I would actually really, really want to smack them!”

Finally Art vanished…”I’m going to the toilet Mummy”…and returned a few minutes later, prancing around with a big blob of poo on his forefinger, laughing and tormenting me with this loaded gun. Look at me, look at me.

“No!” I warned, in the middle of changing baby Frank’s nappy (more excretion). “No. No!” Art looked me in the eye, then slowly, purposefully and dramatically he brought the fingerful of poo to his open mouth…

“NOOOOOOOOOO!” I yelled, launching myself across the room like a slow motion stunt by the hero saving the child from the jaws of death. I rugby tackled my three year old to the floor, grabbing the offending finger and wiping off the…chocolate mousse. Oh.

The next twenty minutes were spent attempting to console my hysterical son.

Sex on the Bottom Rung

People are accused of being basic when they talk about poo, wee and sex. But is sex really that basic? Do we need it to survive?

What is it with psychologists and sex? What is sex doing on the bottom rung? Amoebae for instance manage very well without it. Let’s hear it for asexual reproduction. It would save us all a lot of angst. Maybe it’s just that psychologists love angst?

It is surely possible to live without sex, although admittedly, the human race can’t all live without it indefinitely. And can’t you be self-actualised without sex? What about Mother Theresa?

Reproduction, or at least the ability to reproduce, is in the definition of being alive, but we don’t all need to reproduce. In fact it’s just as well that we don’t, as we can’t have the entire population exhausted with multiple children. Perhaps that’s why bees have a Queen to do all the egg laying, leaving everyone else to do the work? Exhaustion leaves you very selfish - too crushed by the minutiae of life to be worrying about world peace, or the environment. Someone somewhere has to have the energy and inclination to run the country, make miraculous scientific discoveries, write beautiful books, make music, paint pictures, save the world, save souls, save lives etc., etc. Perhaps that’s why God invented philosophers, nuns and priests and homosexuality, so at least he’d be guaranteed at least 10 percent of the population available for the above duties? Then there are those who are either too busy self-actualising to find the time to have children. Nothing wrong with that. It just boosts our pool of potential great achievers to 20 percent. And there are those who reproduce, then ignore their offspring and try to get on with their own self-actualisation (trying to write books about priorities, perhaps?)

Of course if you take reproduction out of the equation then you can have loads of sex and still self-actualise. Look at James Bond, for instance (saved the world several times over), or Captain Kirk (saved several worlds), Bill Clinton (would liked to have saved the world) and Ghenghis Khan (who cares about the rest of the world, anyway?)

You’ll note that these are all male examples, but for the females of pretty well all species, it’s very hard to take reproduction out of the sex equation.

And don’t x (and y are probably worse) babies play havoc with that most longed-for basic need? Sleep.

Sleep, Glorious Sleep

“There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, (1803-82)

I think lack of sleep is the greatest enemy of optimism, lowering your immunity to pessimism.

Food might have been my favourite bottom rung need, but since having babies, sleep is now the one that I want. I thought I knew about sleep deprivation as a junior doctor, but at least you weren’t on call every night.

The Nazis knew a bit about sleep deprivation too, and (supposedly non-Nazi) scientists have done studies on how long we can manage without any sleep. After about three days we start to go psychotic, which was generally thought to be a good time to stop the experiment. They had no such qualms with lab rats, and found that without sleep; they died within two weeks.

Intellectual ability falls by 15 percent if you miss a night’s sleep, so after three children, it’s a wonder I can even talk. Art, in particular, just didn’t want to miss out on any life by wasting it asleep.

Banned from the B&B