Simon Morgan – Freelance

A Happy New Year to you all. I trust that all your resolutions are still firmly on track. Some friends of mine have decided that their New Year obligation is to forgo alcohol for the entire month of January. Not exactly life changing but a reasonable gesture none the less. I have not joined in. We did it once before and all agreed come 1^st February never to do it again. I am afraid with me Hope seldom triumphs over experience.

However, I am conscious that this is not a good time to be either complacent or resigned. Hope must not be abandoned because the alternative is total despair. I am, after all, entering my 55^th year. I once read somewhere that one minute past midnight on a man’s 55^th birthday is akin to Zero Hour on the Somme battlefield back in 1916.

The hapless Birthday Boy is effectively clambering out of the security of the trenches of youth to face the horror of a multiplicity of dangers in a sort of health no-man’s land that is late middle age. Stroke, cancer, heart disease, diabetes even suicide come winging towards him like tracer bullets and he must trudge forward, teeth gritted, as best he can.

If he makes it to 60 he stands a good chance of carrying on to record his threescore years and ten. Otherwise he falls to litter the ground with the bodies of his miserable contemporaries. A sad and desolate scene livened only by the cackling of the widows as they drink a toast to death in service e benefit!

So, faced with this cheerful prospect I have made a positive start. I have bought myself an exercise bike which is now in my study and from which I now regularly watch television or listen to the radio whilst pedalling away. To enhance the cardio-vascular benefit of the exercise I have developed a sort of crude interval training system. It seems to be working so I might be on to something. Maybe I could start a whole new system of TV watching fitness; a sort of couch potato callisthenics.

Like all brilliant ideas the concept is quite simple. Take, as an example, ‘University Challenge’. This is a half hour programme which is an ideal period during which to exercise. When Jeremy Paxman asks the teams a starter for ten you put on the clutch and commence a period of maximum effort and stress. Keep this going until the next starter for ten when you can ease off and start a period of light effort. Keep alternating until the gong goes. You’ll be amazed at how impatient you become at slow answers!

‘Just a Minute’ and ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue’on the radio also lend themselves to this treatment. However, I have yet to work out a system for ‘the Archers.’ Perhaps some of you could make some suggestions. One that immediately comes to mind is to alternate between each occasion that you feel like reaching through the ether to give Pat Archer and her insufferable drab of a daughter Helen a good slapping; but as that happens so often it might not give you enough time on either effort level to do any good.

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All in all it is enough to drive anybody to drink but then we hear that those tedious interfering prigs who we have put in charge of us are trying to impose a minimum price on alcohol. This is, to put it mildly, bloody outrageous. In support of this tedious campaign these thin lipped, desiccated miseries point to the costs to the National Health Service of all those with drink related illnesses and injuries and the trouble in town centres from drunken revellers fighting and brawling. Added to this is a generous helping of mean spirited puritanism.

But this is an absurd argument. The National Health Service is also heavily involved in repairing the carnage that takes place on our roads. Many lives are ruined by the stupidity of idiotic drivers. Do we hear of a minimum price on cars? No, instead efforts are directed to improve the standard of driving. If efforts were directed to improve the standards of behaviour amongst our populace the problem of excessive drinking will soon end.

If young men and women are allowed to go out looking like tarts; if they are allowed to drink out of bottles; to shout obscenities and behave boorishly then they will not develop the sort of self control that is essential if one is to drink responsibly.

Now, before you crash my broadband connection with cries of ‘hypocrite!’ ‘fraud!’ and ‘imposter’ let me make two points. Firstly I make no excuses about hypocrisy. Regular readers will be aware that I am entirely in favour of it. The relevance or value of a message is not affected by the bearer’s own human frailty and failure to live up to the demands.

Secondly whilst, when it comes to alcohol abuse, there is little over the years that I have left unexplored I did, at least, have the decency to be ashamed of my activities and resolve never to act in that way again. That, sadly, no longer seems to apply and youngsters who have performed quite outrageous activities seems to just shrug it off and start again and we, more fool us, just let them.

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I am conscious that I recently dedicated this medium to happy stories so I had better lighten the mood. This may seem difficult in these times of financial recession, global warming and the threat of world wide Muslim fundamentalist terrorism. Well, let me tell you that looking back as I am now able to do these things are actually pretty small beer compared to what we used to be threatened with on a daily basis.

We talk glibly these days of crisis. There is the Credit Crisis, the Environmental Crisis, the Food Crisis, the Iran Crisis. Well as crises go I can assure you that they are in the weeny league. I can recall the Cuban missile crisis. Now, there was a good reason to be scared shitless. At any moment the entire civilised world could have been immolated in a nuclear holocaust. Indeed that threat was a constant companion during much of my youth and is now, mercifully, almost completely gone.

So polar bears with sun stroke might be an unfortunate possibility but I prefer it to Mutually Assured Destruction any day.

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I see that the strange case of the shrieking lovers is about to enter the regime of the Courts. For those unfamiliar with this bizarre story it involves a married couple: Steve and Caroline Cartwright, who live in Washington in Northumberland. For years now these two have been tormenting their neighbours by indulging in extremely noisy lovemaking.

Eventually, as a result of numerous complaints, their screams were actually recorded by Environmental Health officials. At their height they reached a maximum level of 47 decibels: the equivalent of having it happen in the same room. They were accordingly served with a noise abatement order which they have so far failed to comply with.

The next step will be recourse to the Courts. Mrs Cartwright complains that she has tried to minimise the noise but finds it impossible. I have an idea that might help. If the noise is as loud as being in the same room with them why not have a crowd of neighbours come into the bedroom to watch. I have a feeling that might quieten them down a bit.