To blog or not to blog

I’ve been somewhat remiss in not having blogged for quite a while now; I think my muse has finally succumbed to the need for hibernation, and with the cold weather who am I to deny? And to be honest, there hasn’t been any major event of interest worthy of its own journal. So today I will aim for a catch-up of what has been happening and share with you the few insights that the last few months have brought.

I last left you  with our house in disarray as we were in the middle of having our boiler replaced. All went remarkably smoothly, despite having chosen to undertake this challenge when the country was colder than the chiller cabinets in Asda, and still in a state of panic due to ‘the coldest winter since the last time it was this cold’.  But despite the ‘idiosyncratic’ nature of the old heating system, and fears that every pipe would explode under the pressure of the new one, all went to plan and we now bask in the comfy warmth of consistent heating, a thermostat that actually works and the savings of not having to heat a huge tank full of water every time we wanted to take our coats off indoors. Let’s hope the fuel bills reflect all our efforts and at least we can enjoy the smug inner- glow of knowing we are now several shades greener with smaller carbon footprints.

I talked also last time of our Residents’ Association and the fated pool, which was leaking faster than a cabinet enquiry and in need of much TLC (aka money).  The various interested parties did indeed meet and, as expected, we spent a good few hours in heated debate, name calling and tantrums the like of which I have not witnessed since primary school. We really were back in the realms of, “My dad’s bigger than your dad”, “You kissed her behind the bike sheds”, “He stole my sweeties” , “…’cos…”, “I don’t want to play any more”, “I’m telling on you” and, “You’re smelly so there”. The playground bully demanded most of the attention (and our dinner money), employing the tactic of just repeating the same thing over and over and at increasing volume, then staring with an “I’ll get you” menace at anyone who challenged that point of view. When the representative from the Management Company tried to answer questions he was pelted by verbal eggs, and the incontestable argument of “Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?”  before he could actually make his point. And reason was thrown out the window long before the bell went for the end of play time and the various gangs skulked off, presumably to either set off stink bombs in the lifts or at least nick off down the 7-11 for some fags and a bottle of Lambrusco.   Needless to say, nothing was resolved, progressed, or promised and our pool remains as empty Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard the day before her child benefit’s due.

I have also suffered the annual indignity of the ‘birthday celebration’ which, for anyone over about 20, serves only as a reminder that you are just another year closer to oblivion, that your mortal coil is showing grave signs of rust and that your allotted ‘Three score years and ten’ [*] is sounding much more like a marketing ploy than any sort of promise.

* [Figures based on recent  Bureau of Statistics survey in association with Hello Magazine and Laboritoire Garniér – sample of 32.7 people surveyed, 8.92 responded and of the responses, 83.4% said that they were not dead. Oh, and 8 out of 10 cats prefer not being dead too, which is like, over half but they have nine lives anyway so what do they know?]

I tell you, I think myself lucky to get to the end of the week, let alone having any aspirations to reaching retirement age. Which is a shame as I think I’d make a very good grumpy old man and have no problem at all with being a burden on all around me. I’m practising slurping soup, afternoon napping, wearing slippers and complaining that music is too loud, but the TV too quiet and pointing out random things that were better when I was your age. Of course, with medical advances average lifespans are increasing and with stem-cell research we’ll soon be able to re-grow any bits of us that drop off, fail or turn to mush. Soon enough we will become real life examples the indestructible stars of the cartoon world. No plummeting  anvil will stop us. No head-on collision with a rocket-powered train will derail us for long. Falling from a mountain precipice into a near-bottomless ravine, with an enigmatic ‘pfuutt’ of dust to mark our demise, will not in fact mark anything but our exit stage left in the direction of the nearest Acme Stem-Cell and Burger drive-thru. “A new left leg Sir? Certainly, and would you like fries with that?”

I mention this on the anniversary of the announcement of the successful cloning of Dolly the Sheep (1997) and a recollection of the amusement that I felt back then at the negative propaganda and scaremongering that surrounded all things genetically modified. We would all soon be growing third ears and x-ray vision! We’d be creating designer babies by the crèche-load and mutating into human-triffid monsters. But that was such a knee-jerk reaction when you consider that we have been playing around with genetic manipulation since the first farmers realised that certain types of crops grew better than others, and that they could breed fatter livestock with better pelts if they only mated the ‘best’ of their animals.

We have been cross-breeding plants and animals for thousands of years, to steer production towards the characteristics we felt desirable at the time. We breed grain for certain conditions or for its resistance to certain disease. A cultivar by definition is a cultivated variety of a plant that has been deliberately selected for specific desirable characteristics (such as the colour and form of the flower, yield of the crop, disease resistance etc.). When propagated correctly the plants of a particular cultivar retain their special characteristics. THAT is old school, Ladybird book of Agriculture, Farming for Dummies.

Travelling on the train last Autumn I was struck by how much shorter the wheat seemed to be in the fields we passed, compared to what I remember from a few decades ago, as farmers have bred short-stemmed varieties much less susceptible to wind damage.  This is nothing new – agriculturalists pick the crops most suited to their needs and prevailing market forces. We used to call it ‘cross-breeding’ – these days we opt for the more sinister connotations of ‘genetic modification’ but what difference does it really make if the process happens  over a few generations in a field or a few months in a laboratory? The end result is the same. As are the risks and the benefits. If we are going to survive as a species we will have to embrace these technologies, find ways to increase yield and grow crops in ever-more inhospitable environments.  We can’t afford to take some hippy moral high ground based on ignorance and a fear of the latest buzz word. It is stem cells today, was genetic modification last week and cloning a fortnight ago, but they all amount to the same thing: a scientific development to which the public have a pre-programmed reaction – fear. These days social network sites are blamed for sparking public outrage, but the process has been happening ever since mass communication allowed viral spread of such hysteria. It is just a bit quicker with Twitter. We seldom stop to consider how much the media colours our opinions on all matters from politics to science, the weather to Cheryl Cole’s relationship challenges. I remain undecided whether we need quite the amount of ‘news’ with which we are bombarded, especially when that news is heavily weighted with opinion and commercialisation. And I wonder if this doesn’t sometimes negate us from the responsibility of making up our own minds.

When we are told that “Thousands sign petition to stop embryonic stem-cell research” are we not then almost incited into adopting a similar opinion? It is easy to get enraged with the rest of the mob.  Sometimes just reporting a thing is an act of influencing opinion. We used to call it propaganda and we used it as a weapon.

This dalliance with genetic engineering isn’t something limited to food supplies either. There are plenty of examples through history of our experiments in Eugenics – the selected breeding of humans to try to improve the race. The obvious example is, of course, the Aryan experimentation programs of Nazi Germany and the killing of disabled (or otherwise ‘broken’ people) through involuntary euthanasia. But similar thinking has been applied in countries across the globe, from Australia to Japan, Scandinavia to the USA. We do it every time we terminate a pregnancy on the grounds of likely disability or illness. Even going back through time the writings of Plato and his stories of Atlantis are based around the concepts of Eugenics, with the Atlanteans  representing a Nordic super-race at war with the Athenians. (And there is some suggestion that Hitler was trying to recover the genetic purity of Atlantean blond-haired master race.)

Taking a wider perspective, it could be argued that any medical interference is unnatural and a disturbance to the order of life. Be that through medicines to prolong life to prenatal embryo scanning. How is the mother who decides to abort a Downs child any different to the farmer who plants wheat which has been cultivated for its yield, or indeed the child who is inoculated against polio? What about the patient who accepts a heart transplant or chemotherapy for cancer? What about the couple who can’t conceive without medical intervention – I remember the frenzied news reports of the first test-tube baby, although the practice is commonplace today and hardly newsworthy. These are all meddling with the natural order but all provoke different emotional responses – usually depending on how close we are to the discovery. The mark of civilization is surely how we deal with these things and how we ensure that they are focused for good. And we WILL come to terms with cloning, genetic modification and stem-cell organs because these things can never be un-invented. Pandora has a very leaky box. We can’t go back, we can’t undo the research so surely better we embrace it and look to the future with open eyes and considered safeguards rather than drive the experiments underground?

Maybe I am biased – after all, I have taken many medicines in my times, to prolong my life (some of them were tested on animals, all of them were tested on other people), I have eaten bread made from cultivated corn (but I have not yet mutated into some horrendous carnivorous UK version of Audrey II), I have chomped on a steak or two which were undoubtedly sliced from farmed cattle (yet I show no signs of growing horns, hooves or a second stomach), I have grown carrots known to be unaffected by fly, and, heaven forbid, I have even eaten battery-produced eggs.  When I was a kid, if someone in the neighbourhood contracted mumps or chickenpox they held a ‘party’ with all the local children attending to try to catch the disease – these illnesses are much less dangerous in pre-adolescence than if contracted in adulthood and offer some degree of immunity if caught as a child. Is that not just a primitive form of stacking the medical cards and trying to outsmart nature? I have taken inoculations against tetanus and to allow me to travel to foreign lands without fear of dying of some local pox. I’m guilty of having chosen both the seasonal and swine flu jabs, preferring that to the potential ‘natural’ risk of death. Not content with that though I have also been guilty of using ocular enhancements, removable devices to correct my failing vision, without which I would almost certainly have fallen off the aforementioned precipice in my near-blind state to land at the bottom of the ravine with a billow of dust – which is just as well as there are so few Acme stem-cell drive-thru establishments in Salford. I was born prematurely, in a time when the chances of survival were much lower than they are today and practices were barely one step up from casting spells, pointing bones and sacrificing baby lambs to appease the Gods of midwifery. Without medical intervention I would not be alive. The same can be said of my battle with cancer. If the natural course of events had been unhindered I would not be here now. As an individual I guess I make a mockery of Darwinian Theory – I’m certainly NOT the fittest by any measure, but in that there is also some hope – as a species we are finding ways to adapt, to survive and to overcome the current challenges we face; this starts at valuing and preserving the life of an individual and is then expanded exponentially to benefit the whole race.

In historical terms, a few centuries ago someone who administered potions to cure the sick was seen as a witch, a Sharman, one who conjured magic and fear. Then they became apothecaries, chemists and medics and held in the highest esteem. Our attitudes change as benefits are proven. So too will they change with body-part replacements. After all, we have organ replacements now, and even whole face replacement, as macabre as sounds to our current sensitivities. But how many of us would refuse the surgery if we found ourselves in need? Moral high grounds are very dodgy places to build an ideology.

I have not yet commented on the other factor which comes into play as part of the argument for or against scientific advancement. Sooner or later someone will raise an objection on the grounds of religion, usually citing arguments that we should not try to play God, or that what we are doing is sacrilegious and a corruption of God’s will. I guess the stance taken by Jehovah’s Witnesses is an extreme example, with their religious refusal to undertake life-saving blood transfusion treatments. My religious views are no secret but I wonder how a Jesus known for having found a way to feed several  thousand people with a few loaves and fishes, would object to us looking for modern equivalents. This also was the man who healed the sick, drove out madness, returned sight to the blind and raised Lazarus from the dead. Surely there can be no serious religious argument against medical research and if we are guilty of interfering in God’s great plan, then so is his son.

On the subject of Jesus, i was amused to read that Elton John has recently expressed an opinion that Jesus was in fact gay. Wake up Elton – that conspiracy theory has been going around since people were first nailed to trees for being different! I assume you are basing your argument not just on his sense of compassion and taste in open-toed sandals but also for the fact he spent most of his life getting pissed with a bunch of twelve other blokes and singing Tim Rice Lyrics? Way to go Elton. That is almost as funny as the hype and fanfare which preceded the live episode of EastEnders last week. Was I the only person in the country to be completely underwhelmed?

Why all the fuss? What was SO special about the BBC broadcasting live television? After all, it isn’t so many years ago that ALL television was live. I wonder what percentage of new output from the BBC is live – a fair amount I would speculate, when you consider news and current affairs programming, sports, coverage of major events, political debate and even phone-in shows. Live drama is hardly a new concept – THAT has been going on in theatres for centuries. Combining drama with a live broadcast isn’t new – look at the early soap operas, sketch shows and so forth. Okay, so drama is faster paced these days, but current technology, sets, lighting should all be able to cope with that. And EastEnders was far from a totally slick production – I noticed camera goofs to rival anything seen on Acorn Antiques, and it was very clear where spacing shots had been written in to allow for time slippage. Did I see Miss Babs loitering behind the bar in the Queen Vic and was that Mrs Overall poised just off camera with a plate of macaroons and a fresh mug of coffee?

Still, as Marion Clune, AA producer [*] once said: “We professionals notice – Joe Public never clocks a darn thing”

[* Thanks for the correction!]