Let me count the ways

The sign on the toilet wall in Nuclear Medicine warns me, for the sake of other users, to aim accurately and avoid the toilet seat, "since your urine is now radioactive".

Well, that's a new one. Little did I realise, as a fresh-faced physics student, learning that an excited nucleus decays by emitting high-energy particles, that one day I'd be pissing them.

"What's your superpower, Douglas?"

"I can shoot gamma rays out my penis."

"Respect, man."

Another sign advises me to avoid "young children and pregnant ladies" for a couple of days, until I no longer glow in the dark or set off smoke-alarms.

All this because I'm having a bone scan to see if the cancerous cells that migrated long since from my prostate have found a new home and started raising a family. But I almost didn't make the appointment. As I was leaving the house, I got a call from a young member of my own family.

"Hi, how you doing?" His usual preamble to bad news.

"Headed to the hospital. You OK?"

"Yeah. Well. Kind of."

"What's up?" I ask, with a sinking feeling.

"Well I was driving to college this morning and the sun started rising in the east, ahead of me. The world changed from black and white to beautiful colour - like the 1960s, I guess, for you hippies. 

"It glowed like the dawn of the last day. Trees on the horizon stood stark and black against a sky that ...

"I get it. It looked nice."

"Nice? This was a symphony in the sky. It was a Shakespearean sonnet of a sunrise. It ..."

"I'm late for a hospital test. Could we get to the action?"

"I've locked my keys in my car."

"Oh dear."

"With the engine running." 

"Bugger."

"And I'm thinking you must have done it yourself." 

Well of course I have. 

"So have you any helpful suggestions?"

"Not really," I tell him. "I did it in my drive. Car key, house keys, engine running. What I did was shinny up the ivy, force open a window and search every nook and cranny in my house, for the spare keys I knew were in there."

"Can't do that," he says. "I'm in a layby out in the country. What's a cranny?"

"Little crack, I think. What are you going to do?"

"Phone Linda and get her out with the spare key. But I'm an hour away. She won't be happy." 

Silence stretches between us. "You'll survive," I tell him confidently.

"Course I will," he says in the same tone.

And he did, I heard later. But when I told the story to a friend, her comment annoyed me initially. "What a Blane thing to do," she said.

On reflection, though, she was right. Locking your keys in your car is hard. But my son did it and I've done it. Another close member of the family went one better. 

She locked herself in her car - don't ask me how - and had to be rescued by the man next door.

It's some kind of genetic thing, I think, travelling down from my Dad's side of the family. My Mum's were all switched on, wide awake, super-alert. Dad was dopey. Two of his sisters were dopier still. My cousins, their kids, were so lightly attached to reality you felt they'd wandered in from a nearby dimension, and were searching for the door back out again. 

They used to make me smile. But self-awareness grew as time passed. I'm just as dopey and I think I've figured out why. I once met Howard Gardner at an educational event in Glasgow. He was affable and persuasive, so I read a fair bit about his Multiple Intelligences theory. 

IQ tests measure only two intelligences, Gardner says - linguistic and logical/mathematical. Quite a number of others exist, including spatial, emotional, interpersonal, kinaesthetic and so on.

High IQ runs in our family so people think we're smart, for a while. Then they realise something Gardner never mentioned. If multiple intelligences exist then so too must something else - which sadly we've got.

Multiple stupidities.