It’s still mighty mild, but as the evenings draw in you may feel a slight sense of depression, if not impending doom as months of grey, wet, stormy weather lurk just over the horizon. But consider, without Autumn and Winter there would be no Spring, the most joyous of seasons. Remember the thrill of those early snowdrops poking through the frost and leaf mould, the banks of pale and bright yellow daffodils populating roadside verges, colourful camellias bursting forth in profusion, trees taking on their green cladding to disguise the wintry skeletons and eventually the carpets of bluebells coating the forest floor. Anyway what would Vivaldi have done; we would have been deprived of marvellous violin concerti.
If my Spring therapy fails you could always have a matchbox sized pacemaker fitted to the brain. It’s been developed by neuroscientists at the University of California San Francisco and disrupts suicidal thoughts with electrical impulses. It has a one hundred per cent success rate. Mind you Sarah is the only recipient to date. If you think it might help, please apply to UCSF, where they are enrolling more patients to assess its true efficacy. My source doesn’t reveal whether the matchbox is fitted internally or whether it’s worn externally as a detachable item of jewellery, only to be switched on when needed? Perhaps it comes with its own turban. I would be slightly alarmed at the prospect of finding room for a matchbox inside my already overcrowded skull; not that I possess an oversized brain, merely that nothing seems to rattle around inside so presumably all space is accounted for? Still, they are scientists and experts in their field so they obviously have a workable plan…..
I am finding a certain mordidness can envelope septuagenarians, even in the height of a glorious summer. Where before one felt impregnable, the dawning realisation that the cooker might be calling is hard to avoid. It’s quite humbling to think that we make such a short contribution to Earth’s life cycle. The first dinosaurs printed their proud hoofs in the receiving earth roughly two hundred and thirty million years ago, in the Triassic Period (whatever that was) and lasted through the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods. Once they’d all had enough it was another sixty five million years before some sort of humanoid appeared. It does make you wonder where God was all that time and what he was doing?
The front page of today’s Times has a picture of four Brighton College students in various stages of mirth. Apparently they are having hour-long laughter therapy classes to ease anxiety amid concern over the effect of Covid lockdowns. The lessons, run by therapist Emma Jennings, start with pupils being instructed to laugh in the style of a James Bond villain. (Try it) Research shows that laughter can reduce cortisol levels, the main stress hormone. The story doesn’t relate what sort of laughter you finish the class with…or whether everyone has been reduced to tears. I have a much simpler remedial recipe. I just call my old colleague from BBC Radio days, Tony Adamson, and my oxytocin levels soar. Let me know if you want his number, he’s not a qualified therapist (as far as I know) but as quack’s go he’s gold dust.
ADayInTheStrifeOf 