Advent Thought 11

It's taken me a while to come to terms with being a glasses wearer. The first signs of deterioration came when, aged about 45, it was commented that if I held the newspaper any further away it would be in the next room.

Off I went to Specsavers, returning with a prescription for reading glasses. From then on, every couple of years, I had to remember that if I was finding it hard to concentrate on reading it was probably because I needed an eye test. Cheaper than an arm extension.

Wind forward to about 2007 and I had become the sort of person who put their glasses on and off a lot, or kept them on the end of my nose and looked over them. My Dad wore his glasses on a chain round his neck. Never liked that look.

And so it was back to Specsavers again to embrace varifocals. It was, as many have said, weird at first. My peripheral vision was full of kaleidoscopic fault-lines for a couple of days. It takes longer for others but your brain soon works out how to interpret the images.

I became a permanent glasses wearer and now I can't do without them. That said, many years of being comfortable walking around the house in the dark have meant I don't need to put them on to pop downstairs in the night for whatever you need to pop downstairs in the night for. But otherwise I wear them all the time.

I have a terrific advantage over many generations of ancestors for whom the end of eyesight would have meant the end of close-quarters work.

Advent. A time for seeing things as they really are. What do you take for granted? Devote a moment or two to gratitude.

Thought for the Day

As delivered at BBC Radio Bristol Breakfast with Emma an hour ago. If you click on the link you can go to 'Listen Again' if you really want to and hear the intro and outro badinage and repartee:

The Bible has a lot to say about food - fish, bread, red wine, wedding feasts, great banquets - but I had to think for a long time to recall references to exercise.

It's that time of year when our TV schedules are about to challenge us as to what sort of couch potatoes we are? Watching people making bread and cakes or getting strictly exercised on the dance floor?

Sit and sponsor Emma as she gets running? Or be encouraged to run too?

Take our places at the roadside as the lycra-fit guys on bikes come through? Or take up our cycles and stretch our legs?

Regular listeners to this spot may have heard me a lot but never seen me. I am of slender build although pretty fit for a man of my age. I had the blessing of not putting on weight in my early and middle years. One friend told me I wouldn't get fat if I ate a greased pig. Another that I only wore clothes so people could see me. Well with friends like that...

In his wonderful book Sapiens (A Brief History of Humankind) Yuval Noah Harari says:

'Consumerism has worked very hard ... to convince people that indulgence is good for you, whereas frugality is self-oppression.'

He has a point. Al Murray's pub landlord is fond of saying that people who think they have slow metabolism actually have a fast pie-arm.

In fact the biblical material about exercise is indirect, but blunt. Look after your body. Treat it like a temple says St Paul. That way, say I, you'll, maybe, give your friends and family the gift of living with them longer.

Pooh sticks

Warning. There will be a lot of crap gags in this post.

For readers under sixty, allow me to introduce you to a delight to come your way. Shortly after your 60th birthday you will receive a bowel cancer screening kit in the post. This will involve you taking three samples from three separate stools on three separate days (going through the motions?) using a small cardboard stick and smearing some of the result on a small slide. You will then seal this (pretty damn carefully) and post to the screening service agency.

Roughly 20% of the UK's population of 65 million is over 60. 13 million. Assuming an equal distribution of birthdays, and noting that this test is repeated at two year intervals, that makes, again roughly, 20,000 kits a day with six smears of delight in the post.

I have recently received my second kit. I followed the instructions as previously but received a letter back in the post 'insufficient sample'. I had smeared it too thin. Damn. Go again. I went again (and again, and again) and resmeared. (That a word?)

I received a reassuring letter back in the post saying that although it was probably piles or cracked lips (anal lips, my dear arse) there was a trace of blood in my sample and would I go again three times.

We may have a problem with junk mail, but there is far more crap in the post than we think.

Thought for the Day

I used to be quite intimidated down at my local gym. Everyone looked so fit.

I expect there are tired limbs today. Some of the 6500 runners in yesterday's inaugural Bristol-Bath Marathon were equipped and experienced enough to wake up without stiffness this morning.

Others will have strained every sinew to do something remarkable for themselves.

Yesterday our church was looking at one of Jesus' stories. After the parable of the rich fool, where he criticises a man for building bigger barns to store his surplus when he could have been generous, Jesus tells his listeners not to worry about tomorrow, food or clothing.

Not - don't plan. Not - don't care. Not - don't act.

But, don't worry. Easy to say; hard to hear.

It is true that you can't add an hour to your life by worrying. Whilst you can add several days to it by eating well and exercising.

Is the massive upsurge of interest in getting sponsored to run marathons a way of not worrying? Particularly in situations where I cannot do anything to help.

I can't do anything about my friend's illness. But perhaps I can raise money for the cancer charity which means so much to her. Certainly more use than worrying.

I may not be able to do much about my family finances right now. But running in the countryside is free and good for me.

I may not be able to do much about improving my image, fashion-wise. But everyone looks the same in running gear.

I used to be quite intimidated down at my local gym. Then I realised that we are all united in doing something good for our health. Worrying - no. Caring - oh yes.

Thought for the Day

Today's thought, delivered at BBC Radio Bristol:

As I heard of heart transplant patient Kevin Mashford cycling from Bristol to Newcastle another name popped into my head. Louis Washkansky. Followed by that of Dr Christiaan Barnard. Hidden in my mind, but stuck there by constant repetition. In 1967 Washkansky was given the world's first heart transplant; Barnard the surgeon.

Washkansky died after eighteen days. He knew the risks. Without the transplant the future for him was very bleak. Today the complex operation is relatively routine.

In one of the Nailsea churches I serve there are several wall memorials to children. One eighteenth century family lost three under fives, probably to illnesses simple treatment could today cure. I never cease to be grateful that I have survived chicken pox and measles to be here.

And I've been stitched up a couple of times without pain. Thank you anaesthesia.

We are blessed to live in a time of amazing medical progress.

From ancient times we have had a simple mantra that health is good and illness bad. The stories of the Bible, especially of Jesus, all show disease or death interrupting the action and having to be dealt with. Take up your mat and walk again.

The people then asked 'Who is this man? Sickness obeys him.' Astonishing.

Broadcaster Garrison Keillor always ended his Lake Wobegon monologues with this. 'Well, that's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.'

It is not possible for all our hospitals to be above average. But we do well to note that all are getting steadily better, as indeed, are we.

Off with my head...

Forgive me but...

Would it be a great stretch of the imagination to guess that somewhere on the Mediterranean today, in a crowded boat of asylum seekers, a woman gave birth to a baby, salty water the only aid to hygiene.

And maybe in some deprived inner-city area across the world the words of Elvis remain true as child number six arrived:

For if there's one thing that she don't need
It's another hungry mouth to feed
In the ghetto

And perhaps somewhere on a Nepalese mountainside a mother gave birth to a healthy daughter just days after she lost her other children, crushed under rubble.

And also, somewhere on the continent of Africa, a child was born with HIV because the retroviral drugs necessary were simply not available to a family of their means.

And the world's press concentrates its energy on a child the least likely, of any child born anywhere in the world today, to come to harm.

I wish the royal family and new daughter well, but really...

Thought for the Day

As delivered this morning at BBC Radio Bristol:

A Bristol GP recently told me he had never known a period so busy in his surgery. Not with any particular ailment. Just a lot of patients with different problems.

So we try to relieve pressure on our Health Service. Don't visit your doctor with a cold. Don't take bumps and bruises to Accident and Emergency if you're tipsy. Buy your own headache remedies.

Many of us see the doctor seeking reassurance - tell me this lump isn't cancerous - sort of thing.

Ambroise Paré in the sixteenth century said the physician's duty was 'to cure occasionally, relieve often, console always.'

So we might applaud local businesses coughing up cash for a Drink Tank - a place to keep inebriated people safe while nature takes its course. People who don't need a doctor; they need a sleep.

Jesus, amazingly, was quite short with the sick. He is reported as arguing with one Canaanite woman that he didn't heal outsiders. St Mark writes of an occasion when Jesus came down to a crowd of sick people at his door. His reply 'Let's go somewhere else'. He had something more important to do.

Our National Health Service has left us all feeling as if we ought to be well all the time.

I wish you the best of health in this week before Christmas. It's rubbish being ill at this time of year. But also a sober and realistic assessment of what it means to be well. I have known some very poorly people who simply didn't let their illness be the most important thing about them.

Health, someone once said, is what you have when you don't notice it.