THE SELF AND WHERE TO FIND IT.

 

Around seventy years ago, someone I call Me was born.  As far as I'm concerned, I'm still that same person; the same self-aware person that I've been since, well, since I've been aware of myself.  The memories I've stored up for all those years, although they may not be exact and full replicas of events, are still mine and don't vary too much.  I have memories that I'm very fond of, and others that I'm not so fond of.  Nonetheless, they're all there in the melting pot that is my brain.

One of those memories, or titbits of learning that I've picked up along the way, is that the cells of our body die off regularly and are replaced.  Now that's a pretty broad statement and lacks any academic parameters, but it made me think how, if the self is contained in cells, it remains the same when the cells it is made of are constantly regenerated.

Dash it, I decided, this means research and so I began, and, what started out as a simple exercise, became complicated.  Now I don't read full tomes to do research, I like to glean pertinent facts, and, in my research, I discovered that different types of cells have different life cycles.

According to Scientific American: "About a third of our body mass is fluid outside of our cells, such as plasma, plus solids, such as the calcium scaffolding of bones. The remaining two thirds is made up of roughly 30 trillion human cells. About 72 percent of those, by mass, are fat and muscle, which last an average of 12 to 50 years, respectively. But we have far more, tiny cells in our blood, which live only three to 120 days, and lining our gut, which typically live less than a week. Those two groups therefore make up the giant majority of the turnover. About 330 billion cells are replaced daily, equivalent to about 1 percent of all our cells. In 80 to 100 days, 30 trillion will have replenished—the equivalent of a new you."  April 1, 2021

Which is exactly why I wonder why Me hasn't had numerous incarnations, but remains the same old Me.  This meant that I had to study neurons, which I thought is what makes up the custard of our brain.  But it's not just neurons.

Next, from the Dana Foundation, Authors: Elizabeth A. Weaver II, Hilary H. Doyle, August 8, 2019:

"The brain is a mosaic made up of different cell types, each with their own unique properties.  The most common brain cells are neurons and non-neuron cells called glia.  The average adult human brain contains approximately 100 billion neurons, and just as many-if not more- glia.  Although neurons are the most famous brain cells, both neurons and glial cells are necessary for proper brain function."

But that's not all.  The interesting point to note about neurons comes from The Harvard Gazette and a talk given by W.A. Harris and Joshua Sanes, director of the Center for Brain Science at Harvard, May 11, 2022:

"Adult neurons survive a lifetime and remain malleable for several years."

However, "New brain cells are continually produced in the hippocampus and subventricular zone, replenishing these brain regions throughout life."  Fred Gage, PhD, president and professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. 15 April, 2020.

So, enough excerpts taken from respected sources and brilliant minds, from which I've produced a soupcon of pertinent facts regarding cells and their lifespans.  It certainly wouldn't do for a thesis but gives me something to go on.

I wonder how many cells, of whatever kind, make up the self in our brains.  I suspect they must be lifelong neurons, but as yet, no one has pinpointed the region in the brain in which our self hides out.  Perhaps it isn't in one region but is comprised of a number of regions networking with each other.  It is a very odd thing that we cannot figure out the location of our very ego.  I feel that mine is somewhere towards the forefront of my brain in the frontal lobe.  I don't feel like I'm coming from the sides of my brain or the rear but, of course, I may be mistaken.  When you think about it, the retina of the eye sees the world upside down and then the brain turns it right side up for us.  In the same way the self may be in hiding somewhere else in the brain and, somehow, beamed to our frontal lobe.

On a slight, but relevant, detour; I once had a wonderful doctor, a general practitioner.  She studied Medicine in England and then specialized as an anaesthetist.  She eventually moved to Australia and, to practice her specialization, would have had to retrain here so she decided to work as a general practitioner as Australia accepted her level of training for this.  During one of our conversations, I must have mentioned brain surgery, I no longer remember why, and she wrinkled her nose at the thought.  She then said something to the effect that she couldn't have stood being a brain surgeon, that the brain is like custard and, I deduced, this made it a very difficult thing to deal with.

So, somewhere in this custard, the self and all its minions reside.  Basically, I think of it as a chemical and electrical soup, or custard if you will.  In fact, it's a fatty custard, being made up of at least 60 percent fat and fatty acids are crucial to our brain's performance.  No wonder we often get cravings.  We are being driven by an ego that doesn't care how it looks.  It just wants fuel.  It doesn't care about our hips or waist.

Given the brain's custardy nature, it is also no wonder that neurologists and surgeons have to stick electric probes into it to discover what part of it is doing what to which.  It is rather interesting that the part of us that thinks, at this stage, defies our ability to analyze it.  I mean, we're in the thick of it, it is us, but we don't comprehend how it works.

All power to the brain, I say, because, when we do figure it out, we (not me personally) are going to try and copy it or fiddle with it in ways not to do with its health.  Humanity has a bad habit of thinking that its level of progress indicates that it has the ability to interfere with a system way smarter than it is and based on millions of years of evolution.  It's fine if they're trying to save a life; it's not so fine if they're trying to alter things for the sake of it.

It will be a bit like giving your seven-year-old some tools and telling him/her to tinker with your car's engine, find out how it works and try and improve it.  Personally, myself and I will be happy to hide out in the labyrinth of my custard and see out my time before this happens.

END

FINDING GOD WITHOUT RELIGION.

 

Using the word 'god' is problematic in a discussion regarding how the universe came into being.  It is difficult, neigh, impossible to mention the term without associating it with religion; not just one, but any religion, past and present.

Atheists say that mankind created God no matter what religion we are talking about.  In a sense that is correct, but it isn't necessarily fair.  The god that I am going to propose in this blog, as potentially existing, is not defined by religion and must be divorced from it entirely.  In fact, let's leave the word 'god' out of it and consider instead a self-aware cosmos.  It is something that humankind has considered a possibility since it became self-aware enough to contemplate the nature of existence itself.

Each one of us possesses self-awareness that popped into existence, seemingly, from nowhere and yet atheists find the idea of another life after this one, ridiculous.  Think about this: if an amino acid, the foundation of all life, was floating around the cosmos and had the ability to imagine becoming the life form that we are, would it not think the possibility as fantastical as we do the idea of an afterlife?  Had we been able, we would never have conceived of this lifeform that we have become in the first place?  This, basically, is what mystifies us.  We've won the lottery once.  What are the chances of it happening again?

It is possible that as our brains evolve, we may come to understand how our life and intellect came to be, but I believe we are so far from that happening that, in comparison to that level of awareness, we are as microbes floating about in a pool of sludge.  Before that happens, we will upload our consciousness into an advanced computer to where there is little hope of it evolving further, once it is set into a computer chip.  We will just be happy to have made our unevolved conscious, eternal; that is, until we begin to fester in our inability to change or move forward.

The thought of this made me contemplate something.  For many years I have considered that the universe, at some level, is self-aware and intelligent.  In fact, I'm certain of it.  I came up with the notion myself without reading books on philosophy, however, I have recently been reading of the idea of a pan consciousness by some philosophers, which is basically along the same lines as my thoughts.  I'm not surprised as it's a consideration many people who ponder the mystery of life would have come up with.  

My other thought is that this cosmic intellect has reached into life forms that have developed adequate brains so that they share its self-awareness and can wonder at the nature of existence.  Then I had a new consideration, and it arose from this: I am prone to terrible boredom; there are days I wish my brain could find an outlet that would satisfy itself enough to give me a break.  In other words, I wish it would find somewhere else to go, just for a little while.

Infinite time is hard for us to even contemplate and yet we hope for eternal life, but how on earth would we cope with it?  If the cosmos is self-aware and has always existed, how do you suppose it has coped?  My simple-minded guess is that it evolves, changes, experiments and expands.  Nothing eternal could remain in stasis.  If I were this entity, I'd get mighty tired of my self-awareness so I might come up with a nifty idea: I'd subcontract it out; I'd give myself a break from myself by putting pieces of my self-awareness into myriad, unsuspecting life forms under my omniscience, without memory, temporarily, of my eternal nature.  As such, I'd fill the cosmos with infinite pieces of my consciousness born into various states of being to learn, grow experience and die, without any idea of why they came to be.

Once dead, their consciousness would be reabsorbed into mine.  Parts of my consciousness would, therefore, have had a holiday from the eternity of my existence; would have looked at everything with a new, blank memory slate and mind, and returned to me refreshed.  In other words, I would reinvent myself over and over; wonder at the universe with my smaller, initially ignorant particularized selves, at the nature of existence, and try to make sense of it because, while my outsourced selves are terrified of death, I am terrified of an endless eternity.

By facing death in many, many short and unknowing lives, I am living on the edge.  I am feeling.  I am living through the beings I created.  As each of these entities is separate and with an infinite number of possible existences and experiences, I can spend my eternity experimenting and experiencing new possibilities.  They may be terrible or wonderful but an infinite, eternal, unchanging existence would be death, and I must be life.

Reaching the age of seventy and, having become a bit bogged down in my life, wondering what to do next when I've tried pretty much everything I've wanted to, is what set me to thinking about an intelligent, eternal cosmos.  If I am bored, what would this entity do?  Simplistic thinking on my behalf you may say but look at life and the universe.  It is in a perpetual state of life and death of stars, planets, galaxies.  On this planet the essence of life in nature is birth, life and death; of constant renewal.  The universe is ceaselessly reinventing itself.  There is no stasis.

We may not remember if we have lived before, thinking that before we were born we've been in a state of nothingness before for unimaginable billions of years, but I doubt that.  In all that time?  Really?  I think we are part of a universal conscious and return there; not in a state of mind we can imagine, but in some state.  The idea of being part of something I felt many decades ago when I had something of an epiphany.  I was simply talking to someone I didn't know very well and, suddenly, felt how very odd it was that we were separate entities.  It was as if I suddenly became aware that our separateness, as individuals, is unnatural.  It was a one-off kind of mental insight that never left me.  I don't get that feeling anymore, but I remember how it struck me at the time, out of the blue.

Some of my most profound thoughts came when I was twelve years of age and through my teen years.  My mind went into overdrive at that stage, contemplating existence and all manner of things.  I was also severely depressed at the time and going through puberty.  Nonetheless, in retrospect, I admire my young self.

I had the benefit of a deep-thinking mother who would discuss with me the nature of existence.  My father, a very intelligent man, had a different type of mind entirely and could never really follow our line of thought, or decided it was unnecessary.  He was a devoutly religious man and really didn't feel the need to question the nature of existence.  All the same I rather wish I had inherited my dad's excellent and much happier type of mind than my mother's more insightful, philosophical but also depressive mind.  Depressive or not, having a mind to think, to wonder and to be overwhelmed by both the beauty and terror of existence, the many life forms we share this planet with, not to mention the others beyond is an extraordinary happenstance.

No wonder we don't want to lose it.  Life is too extraordinary to believe that it appears like magic and then disappears again.  It is a mystery and, like all good mysteries, you've got to wait to the end, of this life at least, to find out.

END

ROADS I HAVE TRAVELLED.

 

A road in the Australian Outback

If you were born in the age of the motor car, and anyone alive today has been, then you have travelled much further than your ancestors who were born earlier than the nineteen hundreds.  Before the car was invented, ground transport relied on horses and horse drawn carriages or trains.  If you travelled by train you had be going on a pretty specific journey and if by horse, or horse and carriage, you weren't likely to be taking scenic detours but going somewhere for a purpose.

Because of this modern humans have clocked up a lot more distance than our predecessors.  I was brought home from hospital (I wasn't a home birth) in a car and, for me, a car has been something I have loved and appreciated since I can remember.  They have taken me on some wonderful journeys, to events and given me access to places I needed to go.

Let's face it, any good invention comes with it's downside.  That's the case for most things in life but for now let's consider the benefits of the car.

Life was once urban or provincial.  Suburbs began to spring up in the mid nineteenth century around cities that became overcrowded.  In London a catalyst for suburban growth was the opening of the Metropolitan Railway in the 1860's.  At that time London was the largest city in the world.  By the 1950's, when the motor car became affordable to normal families and the US Interstate Highway was built, suburbs fanned out around cities in that country.

Australia, with its massive size and tiny population relative to the US had still, by the 1950's, managed to link its far flung major cities with roads and, by the time I was born in 1952, suburbs had spread out far and wide from city centres .  By the time I was seven my family and I had made a long journey by road from Sydney south to Melbourne then Adelaide on sealed roads.  We then put the car on a train, the famous Ghan, and travelled north to Alice Springs.  I don't think the road between those two cities was sealed until the 1980's.  After that we drove further north to Darwin and from there eastwards to Cairns and then back to Sydney.  It was without doubt the best trip of my life even though I have since travelled many places overseas.

My first memories of being driven are of excursions to the local shops with my mother and to school.  In those days we didn't have seat belts and I remember many a time when, if Mum had to brake suddenly, she would fling her arm across me to hold me back.  Years later when seat belts arrived, she would still do it by habit. There was also the time before indicators became fitted to cars that I remember her making hand signals to stop or turn.  I loved it when, after my parents had visited friends, we would drive home at night and I would fall asleep in the back seat.  Once home, my father would carry me into bed.  I so loved this that when I got older and woke as we arrived home, I would fake being asleep so I could be carried to bed.  Sadly Dad grew tired of this as I grew heavier and I would have to walk.

Once I was seven and left the local school some three kilometers from home, my mother would drive me to a primary convent school at Avalon on Sydney's Northern Beaches.  The journey was about ten kilometers and the last two were around some spectacular but winding roads on headlands around the beaches.  While I just sat and enjoyed the view and the time with my mother she did not enjoy it although she was very sweet about it for the three years I remained at the school,.  She had to drive me as there was no bus and then drive home and repeat the exercise in reverse in the afternoon.  She didn't do paid work so this, as such, was her job among her other housewifely duties.  Mum was an excellent driver even if she didn't like being my chauffeur.

Living so far up the North Shore from Sydney city as we did, a car was a necessity.  The train lines were further inland than the beach suburbs and the bus journey to the city was a long trip.  On Sunday's my father and I would go to church and when we returned home he would stop the car at the base of our long, steep driveway so that I could drive up it.  I was twelve by this stage and it was my introduction to driving.

Also at this age I was sent to a school in the Eastern suburbs of Sydney, some thirty kilometers distant.  Here I endured weekly boarding and Mum would drive me in Monday mornings and pick me up Friday afternoons.  By this stage she moaned considerably about having to drive me.  I had no sympathy as I loathed the school and felt it was just punishment for her making me go there.  She did occasionally manage to wiggle out of this by getting Dad to drop me at the Hydrofoil in Manly that took me over Sydney Harbour to Circular Quay in the city.  From there with my suitcase full of a week's clothes, I took a bus to the school.  As I was prone to panic attacks by this stage, I did not enjoy this exercise but managed it nonetheless.  But I had my revenge because I was mostly driven to school during those six years even though I had to endure my mother complaining about it.  If my parents had had the sense to send me to the local high school a mere three kilometers away, I could have done the bus trip without an issue so they made that rod for their own backs.

I give them their due, however, by the time I went to University they presented me with a brand new car that I loved and enjoyed for ten years and would even carry my baby son in the rear when he arrived.  Driving to University became the way I overcame my panic attacks.  It took an effort but the car became my home away from home.  It was a very snazzy, mustard coloured Datsun 1200 Coupe and I am forever grateful for this gift from my parents.  I have never since been without a car and would feel I had lost a limb if I was.

Driving my new born baby proved a challenge in my little coupe.  He was too young for a baby car seat and there weren't the snazzy contraptions for carrying a baby in the car in those days.  My solution was, with great difficulty, to put his carry basket minus baby on the rear seat.  This involved putting the front seat forward and getting the basket through the opening.  Then I would put the rear seatbelts through the basket's handles and clip them in to their fasteners to hold it in place.  Then baby went in and finally there was a nifty webbing I had bought at a baby shop that I put over the top of the basket that was then secured around its edges so my son was safe and would only hit the soft criss-cross webbing rather than being hurled around the car should I have an accident.  Of course once I arrived at my destination I had to retrieve son from this device and put him in the pram I carried in the boot of the car.  It was quite a business.  When he was big enough he went into a child car seat and when he turned five he just sat on a booster seat and was strapped in with a seat belt.  There was none of this being in a child seat until the age of seven or a specific height.

Whenever my parents drove me I would look out the window and enjoy the scenery.  Even on repetitive trips to the same places I would still enjoy the view.  Not so my son.  Scenery did not enthrall him at all.  His three children have video screens to watch when they are being driven and this makes me roll my eyes to heaven.  I suppose it's anything for peace but he, as a child, was never a problem even without amusement.

When my son was two and a half we moved to Hong Kong where they also drive on the left as we do in Australia.  The public transport was brilliant but we liked taking excursions and I also needed to drive my son to playschool.  Life was just easier with a car.  We bought an old Toyota Cressida whose favourite pastime was breaking down and led me to my first initiation into the local mentality.  I have mentioned in earlier posts that I was young and glamorous during my Hong Kong sojourn and one early morning I was dressed in a long turquoise coloured velour shift with a long side split up one leg when husband decided he needed to be driven to work for some reason.  As we had a maid, I could drive my husband and leave our son with her and, as I wouldn't be seen, it didn't matter what I was wearing.

We got down to Wanchai easily enough where I dropped husband and then proceeded towards Central, then up Cotton Tree Drive to the Mid Levels.  There, on a hill on a single lane road in traffic, the car conked out.  I tried to restart it.  No luck.  I tried again a few times and then, dressed as I was, I got out of the car and spread my arms in a helpless gesture to the cars behind me.  In Australia a couple of able bodied fellows would have jumped from their cars and helped push mine out of the way.  No one honked and no one helped.  The Chinese man in the Mercedes behind me just sat impassively waiting.  This had a profound effect on me.  I decided if no one wanted to help they would thus be stuck sitting on the hill and that was their choice.  I got back in the car and relaxed.  I've never felt so calm in such a situation.  Why panic and feel bad when no one was willing to help me and, thus, themselves?  I sat waiting a few more minutes and eventually decided to try the ignition again and, lo and behold, the car started and I drove home but I had learned a very important lesson.  I don't know why no one tried to help but I thought it might have come down to Chinese 'loss of face' but the episode taught me to go with the flow.

We would lend the car to a Swiss chef who lived in our building because he let us use his parking spot.  He would use the car some weekends to take his family out but would take it as a personal affront when it broke down even though he knew it wasn't reliable.  There's one thing about the Swiss, they expect things to run like clockwork.

When my husband sentenced us to life back in Australia after three years we bought a new car and he also had a company car.  I am not fond of Perth and we would take drives south to Margaret River and Dunsborough, where my parents would end up living some years later.  There are places north and east of Perth where there is something akin to greenery for a short stretch but it isn't lush and eventually runs out.  Even so we went east and explored Toodyay, York and even Kalgoorlie.  One forgettable holiday we went north to Kalbarri, which was meant to be tropical.  It was not but has some spectacular gorges.  We also went north on the coast to Yanchep and even the awful Lancelin.  The beach there is as barren and glary as you would wish and my son, then six years old, and I ran into a snake coming out of the men's toilet block.  We turned and ran and then one of our friends, who had come in convoy in another car, decided to chase it with a spade against everyone's advice.  Fortunately it out slithered him.

We dared to visit Lancelin another time but not the beach.  We drove past it to visit the remarkable Pinnacles, a petrified forest an hours drive north of the town reached first by sealed road and then a very rocky dirt track that we somehow managed in our sedan.

Our son climbing a Pinnacle

While we lived in Perth, Australia had an airline pilot strike.  This was in 1989 and when their bona fide demands were not met, 1,640 domestic pilots resigned throwing the airlines into chaos for well over a year.  By that time my parents lived in Dunsborough but my husband's family lived in Sydney and we toyed with the idea of taking a train or driving all the way there to visit them.  Driving only as far Adelaide, two thirds of the way to Sydney, would take up to four days across the treeless Nullabour or, by train, two days and then on to Sydney and we decided not to attempt it.  At this stage my panic attacks had begun to recur due to the strain on our marriage and by the time the effects of the strike ended, I couldn't get on a plane.  It took a couple of years to beat the attacks that I'd never thought would come back and, once I did, they never returned.  I continued to drive while I was prone to the attacks because my cars have always helped me to contain them and the only trouble I had was gritting my teeth and sweating as I drove over the very long Mount Henry Bridge on my way to Murdoch University to lectures.  I have loved driving too much to let the attacks get the better of me.

There was a time on a vacation in Hawaii that I tried to drive on the right and immediately handed the car back to my husband.  That was way too dyslexic a feeling.  When I went to France years later with my partner, who is Polish, I didn't even try the right side driving and pulled my weight by way of being navigator from Paris to Versailles then through the Loire Valley.  We loved the villages in the countryside and the Chateaux with their magnificent gardens.  We then drove through the Alps down to beautiful Nice and stunning Monaco.

Another earlier vacation that I took with my husband and son was to Sri Lanka and the Maldives on our way back from Hong Kong.  We stopped in Sri Lanka one night on our way to the Maldives to which we would fly in the morning.  I have no idea where the hotel was that we stayed in as we were driven there in the dark.  I think the reception had some light but, after being led to our room in the one story building, when we entered there was no electric light, or any light for that matter.  It was pitch black and we groped our way to the beds, found them, felt for bugs and put our son to sleep.  I just lay on the covers of the bed and hoped nothing would bite me.  In the morning, on going out the door, there was a beach in view but everything in the night was so dark we had no idea of our surroundings.

We spent over a week in the Maldives and it's a place you couldn't pay me to return to no matter what the brochures look like.  We had arrived during Ramadan and the food we were subjected to made my then fifty kilo frame drop another two kilos.  I'm sure the water looked pretty but you needed shoes to swim as the sand was made of broken up coral and hurt your feet.  We were the closest island to the capital Male because we wanted to be close to civilization if our son was sick.  Happily he wasn't but I'm really not too sure there was any civilization if we needed it.  The view from our bungalow consisted of rotting ship hulks as the Maldives is the one of the cheapest places in the world to moor them.

After that we had a driver take us on a five day driving tour of Sri Lanka.  He was a local and had no personality and little English.  If I managed to get him to stop to take a photo, he did so two hundred meters after the photo opportunity.  People had their hands out wherever we went and it was a thoroughly miserable place.  The travel brochures and television advertisements in Hong Kong quoted Mark Twain as saying it was the most beautiful place on earth.  It wasn't.  I had no idea the people there were so poor and felt for them but the whole place had a bad atmosphere.  No doubt our driver's pay was a pittance so we tipped him well.

I haven't travelled overseas for twenty four years now.  Hard to believe I know but divorce, lack of employment opportunities and a failed business all added up.  At least I found employment driving a cab and it only paid the bills, but I'm extremely grateful I managed to do it for twelve years before Covid hit.  I thoroughly enjoyed those years and part of the reason for that is I love driving.  You are your own boss in a cab and, being outdoors in a pretty place like Brisbane, is a bonus.

I'm overdue for a long driving holiday and am even considering going as far as Dunsborough where my father's ashes rest.  We've all been cooped up because of the pandemic and now domestic travel appeals to me as much as foreign.  Another consideration in regard to foreign travel is that there are places I would no longer consider going because, if I catch the virus, I want to be very certain the hospitals in a place are excellent.

There are many places I am sorry not to have seen but I'm also fortunate to have seen many.  I've travelled around New Zealand by car.  I've ridden pillion behind my father one day on a motorcycle on Norfolk Island.  I've also had a driving lesson in a Fiat Bambino bouncing across a golf course on that island with Dad beside me and Mum in the back seat as I kangarooed across the fairways learning to change gears.  The course was as much paddock as it was fairway.  The year I finished school my parents took my cousin and I to beautiful Fiji for Christmas.  We were there for three weeks and were driven between Suva and Lautoka  We stayed on both Viti Levu and Vanua Levu and also did the three day Blue Lagoon cruise around some outlying islands.

I spent only four days in London and experienced its traffic on a bus from the airport to my hotel.  I've also visited Penang in Malaysia, Bangkok and Phuket in Thailand, the Phillipines, Bali and passed many times through Singapore where I've also stayed.  In all these places I have been driven in some form of transport and I find it to be the best way to see a place.  My only regret is the frequency with which I've travelled.  Travelling blows fresh air through the mind and also makes home more appealing when you return.

I hope I have journeys yet to make.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

END

THE BOWEL: the body's in house tyrant.

 

Image courtesy of jasonlove.com

Have you ever noticed, if you have looked at internal imagery of our innards, how much our intestines and colon resemble the brain?  Just like the brain they appear to be meandering tubes packed tightly together and, like the brain, they appear to have a mind of their own.

I watched a recent documentary on the digestive system by Doctor Michael Mosley.  In it he said that the gut has as many neurons in it as a cat has in its entire brain.  That interesting titbit packed a wallop for me as a piece of information and, I would say, explains a lot about Irritable Bowel Syndrome.  The brain and the gut communicate.  If we are stressed, even subconsciously, the gut conspires to give us a bowel spasm to force the brain to relax.  It's revenge by the gut on the overthinking, over worrying brain.  It doesn't work of course, but just gives us one more thing to worry about.

From the time I was born my gut has been my enemy.  Before I was six months old I had a bout of gastroenteritis that put me in hospital.  At another time a doctor prescribed an antibiotic for me that literally stripped my bowel lining.  It wasn't meant to, it just did.  It was called Chloromycetin and was given to me orally.  It is now only used topically for eye infections and can cause aplastic anemia taken internally.  Later in my life a doctor told me that I was lucky not to have developed leukemia because of it.  I sometimes wonder if a lot of my digestive ailments arose from this but I doubt it.

When I complain about my bowel I will stress that I have not had anything life threatening from that area, or any other part, of my anatomy but mainly debilitating ailments.  All that is except for an appendix that had started leaking by the time it was removed and left me ill for three months afterwards.

I think that every single one of us, with the exception of a few lucky ones, have an ailment that is the result of stress, whether conscious or subliminal.  These manifest as migraines, a bad back and/or neck, irritable bowel syndrome and such.

From the age of five I suffered from stomach upsets.  These would involve me waking from sleep every few months very nauseous and then heaving my guts out before making it to the toilet.  In fact, I didn't even make it out of bed and learned to sleep with a bowl beside my bed.  My parents couldn't work out what was causing me to be sick.  A number of theories came up but none proved to be the answer until, after many doctors, I visited a naturopath at the age of twenty one.  The naturopath advised me to steer clear of milk, cream and ice cream.  All through the years I had drunk milk but it seems my body tolerated it only so long before I had one of my nauseous episodes.  Now that I'm older, even one glass of milk would make me ill immediately.

For years my mother thought I was allergic to pork as, when we had dinner with friends of her and father's, we were often served pork with gravy and vegetables, but I'd eaten pork without trouble before.  Eventually we realized that the lady of the house would stir cream into her gravy, not something ever done in our house.  Her delicious meals would bring on violent nausea attacks.  Now if cream is brought to the boil I can actually tolerate small quantities of it.  I am also fine with cheeses thank heavens.  It must be the enzyme process that matures cheese and the breaking down of molecules in cream by boiling it that make them digestible.

There was one thing that I loved as a child that should have given us the first inkling that I was lactose intolerant and that was an ice cream soda.  When I was young ice cream didn't make me throw up but one ice cream soda, now called a spider, did and I knew that I'd be sick in the middle of the night but would have one anyway.  Eventually I decided it wasn't worth the after effect and stopped having them.

By the time I was twenty one and went to my boyfriend's twenty first birthday party, I knew what to avoid.  Unfortunately people slip ingredients into recipes you think you are familiar with and so think will do no harm.  Have you ever noticed what happens to orange juice and cream together?  It curdles.  At the party I was given a glass of champagne and orange juice.  I don't care for orange juice but drank it.  We then sat down to a formal dinner that started with prawns in a cocktail sauce sitting in half an avocado.  My mother didn't put cream in a cocktail sauce but this family did and I didn't know it.

I didn't make it to the main course but spent the next six hours on their lower level bathroom floor heaving even when there was nothing left to heave.  Happily there was an upstairs bathroom for non afflicted guests.  Boyfriend's father spent the entire time sitting beside my prostrate self, who was leaning on the toilet, trying to sooth me convinced I had drunk too much.  I'd had one glass of the champagne orange mixture.  Nothing I said between heaves would convince him otherwise.  At midnight they hauled me upstairs to a bedroom where I dry heaved once more before falling asleep.

It was a night to remember and made boyfriend feel so much better as he had spent the night of our first date throwing up garlic snails and feeling mortified.  I was very understanding, which he couldn't believe as he thought he had ruined his chances with me.  He said that any other girls he knew wouldn't have had a bar of him afterwards if they'd been with him.  Oddly enough he was the brother of a girl that I'd been to school with but I didn't meet him through her but four years later when he and I did a computer course.  His sister was one of the nice girls in my class but most of them were prize bitches.  He lived in the Eastern suburbs of Sydney where most of them came from and so I'm not surprised he had this opinion of them.  I didn't make a single friend at that school.  To this day, however, I miss my old boyfriend and wonder what has become of him as, while I went on to marry someone else, I remain very fond of his memory.  Our stomachs would certainly have been in sync.

Many years later, in my thirties, I began to suffer from bad lower abdomen aches that could render me useless for days.  It was considered to be IBS but persisted until I was forty one and became nauseous for three months and then the pain grew too much to ignore.  One doctor felt my side and said the swelling was a muscle and sent me home. I hadn't been able to get into my usual doctor but, by afternoon, my partner rushed me there and she took one look at me and put me in hospital.  The next morning my appendix was removed.  The oddest thing about this was that my father had appendicitis at the age of forty one as well.  I told my surgeon that other doctors had told me that appendicitis could not be chronic and rumble for years.  He laughed and said that of course it could.  He had tried to remove it by laparoscopy but it had swollen to two and a half times its usual size and he had to cut me open.

He released me from hospital a week after the operation even while I felt terrible and couldn't keep food down.  A locum I called to the house the next day diagnosed an abscess and put me on antibiotics.  A week later I went back to the surgeon and, with puss still oozing from my side, he apologized.  It's very hard to stand up for yourself and your rights when you are very ill.  All hospitals should have patient liaison staff.  It took me three months to recover from the poison in my system.

When I reached my fifties I began driving a cab and this is when the fun began.  Having a case of IBS with associated diarrhea  and sometimes needing four to five serious toilet stops made for some nail biting trips.  After these I would feel punched in the belly.  I give myself credit, I managed to keep on working in spite of this.  I put off taking a probiotic for years thinking it wouldn't help but was proved wrong.  After they began to do their magic I could occasionally have what I called purges, that is four to five toilet stops in a day but I didn't always have to run to the bathroom.  In fact, when I finished working eighteen months ago I felt that part of my anatomy had calmed down.  Foolishly two months ago I stopped taking the probiotics and the IBS has suddenly started again.  Not so much the rush to the bathroom but bowel spasms and pain after going.  I had a colonoscopy eighteen months ago and again six months ago and, typical of IBS, nothing shows as wrong.

I honestly think that the human body is the most remarkable thing.  It is an incredible symphony of functions that mostly run smoothly without any interference from us.  That we have to put up with pain and discomfort when things are out of whack is the price we pay for being biological entities.  I have essential tremor in my hands, nothing serious but a nuisance.  I have reasonably bad eye floaters but my eyes are in good shape so the floaters are only a nuisance.  I have spectacular bunions that I refuse to have fixed as they don't hurt and they're so misshapen that each big toe will have to be fused to the foot and I'm not crazy about the idea.  The one thing that has bugged me all my life, however, is my gut.  It can take the joy out of a day and I know how many people out there have the same problem.  I'm not whinging on my own account, I'm just saying that I'm one more person out there with IBS and some other irritating conditions.

Thank God that in my sixty eight years these things are the worst that has happened to me.  Oh, I've had some psychological problems but most of us do.  I'm lucky to have all my limbs, my senses and my faculties but when people say that something is a pain in the butt, I know exactly why that expression came about.

END

FUSSY EATERS: the bane of a cook's existence.

 

I remember not being a particularly fussy eater as a child.  I believe the only problem with me was that I didn't eat much.  This may have been because I wasn't very well until I was about five years of age.  After my antrums were drained my health was restored but, judging from childhood photos, I remained a string bean.  Boarding school made me a fussier eater but hunger drove me to eat all but the most gross offerings.  These included beetroot and junket.  To this day I can't stand either.  I gave beetroot a good try when it was served with salad three days in a row at lunch.  I forced it down the first two but on the third I gagged too much and gave up.

I hadn't run into a fussy eater until my son came along.  As a baby he was just so easy care he was a dream and remained that way in all but one respect.  He was a fussy eater.  Once he went onto solids there was a repertoire of foods he would stick to and from which he would not vary.  These were: eggs, sausages, fish fingers, corn on the cob, salami, cheese, noodles, bananas, ice cream and spaghetti without sauce.  He did eat cereal with milk and may have eaten toast, I can't remember.  Straying outside these lines just wasn't worth it as he would just stubbornly refuse to open his mouth.  I told my doctor about it and he said that my son was getting enough protein and sustenance and not to worry.

I would give my son his dinner early when he was young and cook for my husband and I and we would eat later.  Eventually son developed a liking for my Spaghetti Bolognese, a passion he retains to this day now he and his wife make it.  We lived in Hong Kong when he was between the ages of two and five and a half.  We would take him with us to restaurants and one of my favourite memories is of watching him eat a bowl of noodles with chopsticks.  His head would be just above table height and he would use two hands to stick the chopsticks into the bowl then bring the sticks together and grip them in one hand, raise them up high with their clump of noodles, bend his head to the side and then lower the noodles into his mouth.  He enjoyed doing this and didn't want help.  To me it remains a sign of his tremendous self reliance that has endured and I admire to this day.

I remember being five years old and having breakfast with my parents.  My mother, father and I would sit at the dining table and eat poached eggs on toast.  I used to have cloudy apple juice to drink with mine.  I would watch fascinated as Dad would cut the egg that sat atop his toast into nine squares by slicing two lines one way and another two the other way.  This left the nice, soft, runny yolk sitting on the middle square and that was the best bit.  He always did it this way and for years I did too.  Over time, however, I realised that to get some yolk with the other parts of the egg I had to be less tidy and after that I carved mine up so I can get some in every mouth full but I am still nostalgic for Dad's method.

As I grew older my father would become very frustrated watching me eat a roast dinner accompanied by vegetables.  Dad would put meat with gravy on his fork, add potato, pumpkin or whatever and then squeeze some peas on it as well.  I ate everything separately.  One night he took my fork over and made a compilation and asked me to try it.  I did and went straight back to eating everything separately.  Mum told him not to worry.  Eventually I ate the way of adults.  It all comes around in the end.

This brings me back to son.  There is something particularly galling about trying to encourage your teenage child to try some salad with dinner.  Once he began to eat the same meals as we did, I would put out salad with certain dishes like spaghetti or steaks and urge him to try.  I gave up pretty quickly and the salad remained untouched by him for years until one day when he was about fifteen.  We were eating and, all of a sudden, son puts some salad on his plate and, lo and behold, begins to actually eat it.  I gazed at him in wonder and said, "And when did you start to eat salad?"

"Oh, I tried it at a so and so's place," he replied.  I can't remember his friend's name now, hence the 'so and so'.  I was pleased I suppose, but also a bit miffed.  What had so and so's mother or father done to make salad so appealing?  My thought is, however, that it wasn't the appealing look of the salad but the fact that another teenage boy was eating it.  I think that was why he deigned to try it or was shamed into it and then discovered that he liked it.

The worst experience his father and I had making him eat was on our return journey from living in Hong Kong when he was five and a half.  We arrived in Perth, Western Australia on a weekend.  Now Perth was a bit backward about opening anything on weekends and that meant we had to rely totally on the kitchen of our upmarket hotel to feed us.  I think the chef was deeply insulted at having to create dishes for our son that were to be delivered to our room.  In fact we didn't want him to create anything.  When we ordered an apple and some cheese that's all we wanted but, not only did it take an hour but what arrived was a cored apple with cheese grilled in the centre.  Guess who wouldn't touch it?  We sent a message: simple please, no embellishments.  Next time we ordered a bowl of spaghetti noodles.  Please don't add anything.  Either the chef was brain dead or toying with us.  He melted butter over it and then ground fresh parsley on the top.  Again son starved as he wouldn't touch it.  I think he survived on milk the entire weekend.  There was simply not a shop open where we could buy him anything.

I also spent years trying to get him to spell properly.  You know how parents have to go through the spelling exercise at night with their children on the words they are learning that week.  This went on into high school and, brilliant as son was in most subjects, his spelling was never perfect until year four of high school and then suddenly it was.  I will add here that I was a brilliant speller from the get go.  Son, however, was like a chrysalis in regard to things such as food and spelling.  At some stage he just emerged from the pupa and did it properly.  Actually I think he just made the decision to do so and before that happened he just went with the flow.

Having a child is like being handed a self drive car that comes with absolutely no instructions and is designed to be self autonomous and take no passengers.  First you have to figure out what fuel it takes, and it spits quite a few types out, then you must maintain it until it can start its own motor and begin to steer itself.  Having then put your heart and soul into looking after it until it reaches self sufficiency, you then watch it putt putt off into the distance and hope it comes back to visit.

Of course it's not just children that sometimes prove difficult to feed.  My ex husband had a grandfather who used to demand a roast lamb dinner every night of his married life from his long suffering wife.  Apparently he put her in a mental home for a few years but she eventually returned home.  He was eccentric and my guess is that he had driven her to a nervous breakdown.  It's not always the nuts who end up in the nut house.

I live with a Polish man and have for many years.  He is lovely in so many ways and so utterly perverse in others.  So many meals I used to make are now off the menu as he simply refuses to eat them.  I ask him what his ex wife used to cook and tell him to get the recipes.  But it's not just that.  In his world and his past he could open the refrigerator door and find all manner of goodies to eat.  You know, pre-cooked meals and so forth as well as smoked meats, sausages and cheeses.  It never occurs to him that food goes off and also that it costs money.  My fridge always has the necessities but I'm not going to keep it fully stocked with different meals to fancy someone's hunger pangs at any hour of the day or night.  When I dare to ask him in the morning what he wants for dinner so I can get something out of the freezer to cook he grumbles.  I then tell him that he's lucky he doesn't have to go out and hunt for something to bring back to cook.

As for Polish food, some is good and a lot of it is not.  I recall a meal at his friend's house that began with an entree made up of a boiled egg around which was wrapped a herring, both of which sat on a potato, carrot and pea salad in mayonnaise.  As for Bigos, well it's basically a hunting stew that, in the past, you would keep adding to as time went by.  Modern versions have smoked sausages, pork and I honestly don't know what else but it always tastes distinctly suspect to me.  My partner will bring things home from his ex's house that she has kindly cooked.  We all get on famously.  I love her pirozhki and some of her desserts but some things I leave to him to consume and there is always so much.

He also loathes lamb.  I think they used to get mutton in Poland that wasn't very good when he was growing up and nothing will make him eat it.  There is also one other thing I simply can't get him to try and that is a prawn.  I don't much like fish but I love crustaceans.  A prawn does not taste like fish but he just says they are the cockroach of the deep and won't touch them.  I love lobster too but when I realise some are boiled alive, I'd have to be pretty sure they were killed humanely.  Even so they can live to be one hundred and I would just feel like a spoilsport if my desiring to eat one cut short a long life.

My partner also just goes off things at a whim.  One moment he'll like my curry, the next he won't.  I make a pretty mean Chili con Carne but, no, it's too spicy and besides, like Bolognese, there's tomato in it.  He hates tomato in cooked dishes and there aren't many stews and sauces that don't have it.  My one staple for him, pork rissoles, he decided the other day I was making too thick so he formed the patties next time I made them.  They were just as thick but smaller in diameter.

Now I come to my grandchildren.  The eldest boy lives on not much but noodles and wraps, sometimes with chicken in them.  Oddly they all love my Spinach Pie.  Granddaughter likes Taco boats with sour cream and she also likes noodles.  Youngest grandson isn't picky yet but I'll bet you anything he'll like noodles too.  The Chinese really came up with a winner there.

Children usually grow out of their choosiness but I am blessed with an adult who is like a child but he makes up for it in other ways.  Aren't we lucky to be able to be so choosy?  Imagine if we had to hunt and grow things to eat to survive without any farmers or supermarkets to help us.  Also imagine the time when humans ate what they caught raw.  Apparently cooking food led to us being smarter but what on earth made us so picky when we have so much choice?

END

 

 

BOREDOM MOST FOUL.

The trouble with boredom is that it is accompanied by inertia and a disinclination to do anything to resolve it.  Boredom demands something happen but it also puts us in the frame of mind that we couldn’t be bothered.  The effort of making an effort is its greatest ally.

We all suffer from it at some time or another.  We can be bored when we are busy and also when we're idle because boredom is a state of mind.  If we become bored when we are busy it’s usually because we are sick of the monotony and repetition of a task.  Conversely when we are bored because we are idle it is because we need something to do that really interests us.  I have looked up the definition of “boredom” and it states that it’s “a lack of interest”.

Apart from humans some animals can also become bored but it is generally because they are contained in restricted environments.  House bound dogs need a walk to channel their energy and zoo animals need large habitats similar to their natural environments to fend off boredom.

This makes me wonder why humans, when they are unconstrained by external factors, become bored.  Is it something in their psychology that is a side effect of intellect?  Is boredom a motivating force?  If fear is the motivating force for survival, what it the point of boredom?  Is it also a survival mechanism of some kind?

Instead of getting too analytical about this let’s look at what happens in childhood when you tell an adult you are bored.  The result will be (and I know from experience): -

                You’ve got plenty of toys, how can you possibly be bored?

                Tidy your room and there’s plenty more I can give you to do when you’ve                          finished.

                Have you done your homework?

If, on the other hand, you sit quietly pondering the immensity of the universe, they get suspicious.  My mother couldn’t stand seeing her five year old idle before school and would say:-

“Plump the cushions” or, worse, “Get the dustpan and broom and clean out the ash from the fireplace.”

 Now cushion-plumping is not high on my list of priorities nor will it cause earth shattering repercussions if it is not done. The long term effect of being made to feel that idleness was not a virtue carried over into my adulthood and caused me to feel guilty whenever I felt like doing nothing.  I’m sure I’m not alone in this or in having parents who encouraged activity.  There’s a lot to be said for channeling a child into productive enterprise, however, a parent should also remember to balance this with letting a child have quiet time.

The ability to enjoy doing nothing is an underrated pleasure and should not be denigrated.  Boredom will always drive us on in the end but so many of us suffer guilt because we are found sitting, doing nothing and just enjoying being alive.

Sometimes don’t you just want to stay in bed a whole day without having the ‘flu and be brought food and drinks?  What a treat especially in winter.  When I’m home, however, I always feel that I must achieve something and I resent this.

In my house cobwebs trail delicately from corners, the surface of kitchen cupboards are a bit grimy when I look closely but I’m fortunate to be shortsighted, which saves me from being too critical of myself.  Dust calmly builds up on wooden surfaces and I don’t see it.  I ignore floors until even my myopic vision notices the dirt.

I attend to the basics of course, it’s just that I’m not a fanatical housekeeper.  Sometimes I would love to spend all day reading a book or writing but that little voice from long ago is ingrained into my subconscious.  What makes us need to do or achieve something to see ourselves as worthy?

If you are bored not a single activity is appealing unless it is new, exciting, expensive or adventurous.  Holiday brochures display people enjoying guilt-free idleness.  Is it the exotic surroundings that make it leisure as opposed to indolence?  Do you need to be far from your everyday place and chores to be able to enjoy doing nothing?  It’s not surprising that the words ‘idle’ and ‘idyllic’ have the same prefix.  Do you have to physically pay money to assuage your guilt for doing nothing?

People who retire from work and who have no hobby are often ill-prepared for a life of leisure.  Some return to part-time work or do volunteer work to stop falling into depressive boredom.  People who worked and also had hobbies fare better.  My own father just managed to complete a pet project in time before he passed away at 78 years of age.  I don’t believe he was bored a single day in his life.  My mother had the beginnings of dementia at the time and spent the next six years before she died, bored and depressed as she became unable to read, her greatest passion, or to even cook.

When I feel bored I try to think of the fact that I am healthy and able.   Boredom is a self-centred beast and doesn’t care about such mundaneness of course.  So I give myself a good kick in the rear and force myself to attend to a task I generally hate such as filing.  Why, after all, waste a good mood on filing or some other vile activity?  If I succeed in motivating myself, I feel quite saintly afterwards and have also managed to achieve something.

I suggest being productive in a menial way to overcome boredom.  Make the self-centered beast suffer.  Clean the oven; clear out your pantry of things that have passed their use-by date; dead head the flowers on the garden shrubbery.  Very soon boredom will shut up and skulk away to the dark and dingy cupboard where it belongs.

Some people go to extremes to alleviate boredom.  I believe adventure sports were designed for easily bored people.  If they can get over their inertia they can go bungee jumping, sky diving or scuba diving in caves.  Nothing puts the thrill back into life like the fear of losing it.

The late author Grahame Greene says in his autobiography that he twice played Russian roulette in his youth to assuage his boredom.  He survived this folly to go on and be an author.  It’s a bit extreme for my tastes.  I’d rather survive to be bored another day and face the challenge it provides.

These trying times of Covid-19 have brought boredom to the fore but no matter how much it affects us we all still want to survive and go on even if we remain bored out of our minds.  Eventually, of course, we’ll find something to do because boredom won’t tolerate our idleness for long.

The End.