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.

Be afraid

Funny thing, fear. I thought I knew what it felt like. An emotion so essentially human shouldn't, after decades on Earth, come as a surprise. But it did to me.

Having had a couple of days to ponder what happened, I believe I've been mistaking fright for fear.

I once came off a Scottish mountain by an unfamiliar route, enticed by a virgin snowfield spread beneath me, sparkling in the low winter sun. Having negotiated the steepest part of the descent, I took my hood off, so I could sense the isolation, hear the stillness and feel the cold from the snow that stretched away from me, as far as I could see. 

Instead what I heard was an echoing sound of rushing water from somewhere below my feet. I realised that I'd wandered onto a snow-bridge high across a stream in serious spate. My stomach lurched. I pictured falling twenty or thirty feet into a raging torrent, gasping for air and being seized and tossed by the flood, with no way out of the darkness, until I breathed no more. 

Gingerly I stepped backwards, following my own footsteps, until the sound of angry water faded, then turned and walked briskly away, my boots crunching in the fallen snow. There's no denying I got a fright. But I don't think what I felt was fear. It happened too fast.

Fear, I've discovered, needs time to build, as you slowly grasp what is about to happen. It also needs uncertainty. If you can take a fast decision and act on it, fright fades before becoming fear. 

Let me share with you how I learned what real fear feels like. 

It's late at night in Killearn and the wind that's been blowing from the west all day has dropped to less than a whisper. The skeletal, leafless trees outside my house are dead still now. A small glass of Dalwhinnie and a mince pie have served as a nice nightcap and I'm anticipating the delicious sensation when I slip between the sheets and every nerve-end in my body basks in the heat from the electric blanket. The intense pleasure often puts me to sleep in seconds.

Tonight, though, I want to read a few more pages of a Peter May novel. May has a knack of writing small details of place and weather that convince you it's fact you're reading and not fiction. Cast Iron is the last in a series featuring his forensics expert, Enzo McLeod, and although it grips and I want to know the ending, I'm thinking that's enough murder mysteries for a while. 

I expect you know this, but the thing about murder mysteries is that somebody always gets murdered. Read too many and you see serial killers around every corner. 

A young woman's body is being lifted from a lake as I start drifting off to sleep. I put the book down, turn the light off and lie quietly in the darkness. There is no sound anywhere in the world that I can hear. And then ...

Two loud knocks on my bedroom door,

I am fully awake instantly. My mind races. Did I dream it? I don't think so. Was it the wind? There is no wind. Can it be one of my sons, both of whom have keys to my house? No, because they don't knock; they open the front door and call out. Is it mice, a few of which have recently got in from my garden? 

I'm clutching at straws and I know it. Only humans knock on doors. I've had a bad fright and I don't know why, or what to do about it. I'm uncertain and confused. Fear starts to build.

I realise I'm going to have to get up, go to the door and open it. My best hope now is that I dreamt it. But as I'm pulling on my trousers the loud double knock comes again. 

I scrabble with both hands at the top of the bedside table and take three steps towards the door. Fear has reached a peak. Fright plus uncertainty plus the almost certain knowledge that something bad is about to happen.

I look down to see what I've grabbed to defend myself. A small hair-dryer and a ventolin inhaler. If my midnight caller has wet hair and a wheeze, I'm in a strong negotiating position.

I open the door quickly, fully expecting to be confronted by a large male, intent on who knows what. 

There is no one there. Moving fast, I search every room in the house. Nothing. As I return slowly to the bedroom, I hear the loud double knock again and this time locate it more precisely. It's not my bedroom door. It's the loft, immediately above the door.

I search the loft with a torch. Nothing.

Eventually I give up and go back to bed. Sleep proves elusive as I try to figure out what could so convincingly simulate a man knocking on my bedroom door. 

Days later, I still don't have an answer. If anyone does, please let me know. I welcome any sensible suggestions. I did an internet search, of course, and the answer came back clearly. 

Racoons.

I don't think it's racoons.

You can keep it

Well that's enough real life for now, thanks. You can't say I haven't given it a fair shake. 

I've been doing practically nothing but real life since I got the diagnosis five years ago. That's long enough to have formed a solid opinion based on hard facts. 

I once asked a friend what he thought about a TV programme from the distant past called Muffin the Mule:

"Tried it," he replied. "Didnae like it."

Well that's pretty much my verdict on real life. I might check back in five years, to see if the psychos, liars and bastards are still running our country, as well their own. But right now I'm going to focus on friends, family and writing, all of which raise my spirits, while current affairs have, for years, been dragging them down. 

There is a small problem, though, with having writing as your occupation and main method of relaxing. 

Critics excuse me while I spit.

Even my talented friend Gregor, who used to write a light-hearted fortnightly newspaper column, got the occasional bad review. I loved his stuff. So did almost everyone else. But you can't please all your readers. 

One serious-minded soul wrote to the paper, describing one of Gregor's offerings as "worthless and uninteresting small talk." Now despite his rugged looks and firm, well-muscled thighs, honed by cycling to a hardness that makes you  ... ahem, sorry. Despite all that, Gregor is a sensitive soul and he cried on my shoulder.

But only for a brief moment. Writers inhabit a world unknown to normal people, a world filled with rejection. The phrase you hear most often is "Not for me". I once got a rejection letter from some young punk straight out of journalism school who said he "aimed to discourage tired jokes and hoary old clichés".

Eventually though, if you persist, you find a few editors who like your clichés, offer kind words of encouragement and even pay you real money once a month. But to get there you have to turn a blind ear to countless critics, and maybe possess the kind of mentality that makes someone run straight at a bull.

So having been forged in the fires of rejection, Gregor soon wiped away his tears and doubled down on his trademark style of taking a lateral look at life and drawing lessons from the quirkier aspects he finds there. He wrote an entertaining piece on how he did his ironing, which his critic described as "ridiculous and juvenile" and the rest of us really enjoyed.

And isn't this, dear friends, a lesson to us all in these dark December days, made so much bleaker and more depressing by the prospect of five more years of Tory theft, hatred, ignorance and stupidity?

Don't let people talk you into giving up or changing what you know is right. Look after friends, family and anyone less fortunate than yourself. These bad times will pass. 

Scientific studies have shown that the vast majority of us are decent human beings, genetically predisposed to care for each other. The cruel, the greedy and the selfish are in the minority. They are running things now but they won't be forever. If nothing else, climate change might drown the fuckers when the Thames bursts its banks.

And if all that science can't cheer you up, take a look at Muffin the Mule, with his good friend Annette Mills. 

Why don't we sing along with Annette and see if the little chap will come out for us?

We want Muffin, Muffin the Mule,
Dear old Muffin, playing the fool,
We want Muffin, everybody sing,
We want Muffin the Mule.

Backwards and in high heels

Jocelyn Bell, just after she discovered the pulsars

I'm sure you've noticed there are far fewer women than men on any list of famous scientists through the ages.  

There's a reason for this imbalance. Female brains are not up to the job. Science is too hard for them, especially physics, the hardest science of all. 

At least that's the story a senior male physicist presented to a roomful of young researchers, mostly female, during a conference at CERN recently on gender issues and high energy physics.

Not surprisingly his presentation went down like the Titanic. CERN promptly disowned it and suspended Prof Strumia "from any activity at CERN", pending an investigation.

Now I'm not and never have been a woman, contrary to what my friend Al says. Not in this life anyway. As a Buddhist, I probably was in a past life and will be again, which is nice. So instead of applying my currently male brain to the issue I decide to consult my friend Ann, who besides being a woman is also a physicist and a feminist. 

I have no doubt she can give me the facts and the female perspective.

But I have to admit to a slight problem with Ann. Tall, confident and clever, she scares and attracts me in equal measure. Which means when I chat to her my savoir-faire sometimes crumbles, like a gluten-free roll.

I once made the mistake of telling her she reminded me of an Amazon. "You think I sell books and don't pay tax?" she said, with a frown that pushed my panic button.

"Strong, scary warrior-women, enemies of ancient Greece, thought to be a myth but some evidence that they existed, I only meant ..."

She pats me gently on the back, cracking a couple of ribs. "Stop burbling," she says. "I know what Amazons are. Why did you want to talk to me about female brains? Are you struggling to understand them again?"

"Not me," I say, leading the way to the table in the corner of the Burnbrae, where Al and I usually take lunch after a session at the gym. "This Italian prof who claims there's loads of evidence that it's men who are discriminated against in science careers - and in life generally - and not women." 

"I saw that," she says, studying the menu. "What do you recommend?"

So we order veggie breakfast and coffee for two from the young waitress who, convinced by our constant bickering that Al and I are an ageing gay couple, studies Ann with surreptitious interest.

"Are you going to take notes?" she asks me. 

"If you don't mind. Means I can quote you accurately."

"No problem," she says, popping a mushroom in her mouth. "Let's start with the reaction from CERN and the audience of young scientists. To me it looks incredibly ineffectual. 

"This guy trots out graphs and charts and quotes scientific papers that he claims supports the idea that women are under-represented at the top of the physics tree, because their brains aren't up to climbing it, and what does CERN do?"

"Apologises for any offence caused," I say. "Then removes his presentation from its website."

"Exactly," Ann says. "They stick their fingers in their ears and go 'Na na na, can't hear you.' They try to shut down the discussion and sidestep the lorryloads of shit headed their way for hosting this guy in the first place. Does that work? Of course it doesn't. All it does is feed the knuckle-draggers' conviction that they're being lied to. That it's political correctness gone mad. That the 'cultural marxists' that Strumia explicitly blames are covering-up the truth."

I have no idea what a cultural marxist is. Maybe I'll ask her later. Right now I'm more concerned by the vigorous manner with which she's brandishing a vegetarian sausage to punctuate her points. I guess no one's ever died of vegetarian sausage wounds, but I don't want to be the first.

Moving my chair back six inches I put the key question to her. "So what is the scientific truth about female brains?"

"I'm glad you asked me," she says. "Here is what we know."

To be continued.

Head of a chicken

I don't recommend playing chicken with a bull. I really don’t. A male adult Ayrshire – that guy in the picture – weighs around three quarters of a tonne. I'm barely a tenth of that, soaking wet.

So a contest between me and a bull can have only one outcome, you might imagine.

But you're forgetting that I'm close to the pinnacle of four billion years of evolution and the bull isn’t. Well technically he is too, I suppose. But us monkeys had it harder so we should be smarter.

You have to wonder then why I'm running as hard as I can, straight at this stupendous specimen of malehood. Basically I'm playing chicken with one of the most dangerous animals in Scotland. And I'm not making this up.

Here's the explanation I figured out later. At the time I wasn't doing much real thinking, as you'll see. 

Running is like writing. If you're easily discouraged - if you need a sunny day, perfect conditions or warm words of encouragement  - you will never get anywhere.

So this morning I'd bounced out of bed resolved to increase my distance, in this comeback programme, from three miles to six. And that remained pretty much the only thought in my head all morning. So I changed into running gear, drove to the start of my usual route, parked the car, walked for five minutes to warm up and started running. 

Fifteen minutes later, as I reach the part of the track where Loch Lomond appears, way down to my right, brooded over by dark Grampians, I notice a dozen adult Ayrshires, on and around the track up ahead, chewing the cud and shooting the breeze.  

They all turn their heads to look at me with that disbelieving, “What the Hell is that?” expression cows reserve for anything that isn't grass.

The altered angles allow me to see clearly, by the fact that his head is as wide as my front door, that the cow in the centre of the track facing me is actually a well-muscled bull, with terrifying testicles the size of a sackful of turnips.

At this point, about fifty paces out from the herd, a few sparks sputter in my four billion-year-old brain, eliminating right - a barbed-wire fence – and left – a steep ditch then heather moorland. Finally they also eliminate - and here's where the runner ape-brain misfires - turning back. Because we’ve only done two miles and the plan was six.

It's a clear decision with no options. Keep running. Now 20 paces from mister bull and going well, I do my best to seem harmless, by making shush-shush sounds and easing slightly right of the centre of the track, as I run towards him without slowing. Most of the herd is to his right, my left, and I don’t want the big guy to think I’m going after his women.

At the very last moment the bull takes a grudging half-step to his right, giving me space to ease past, so close that I'm tempted to pat his ample bottom in a bonding gesture that would cement our friendly encounter. 

A lonely brain-cell, briefly sparking, tells me not to be an idiot, so I don't. I simply run on, feeling like someone has painted a bullseye on my back and dropped me in a field of archers.

After a nervy few seconds I risk a look round, to discover the entire group has lost interest in me and gone back to contemplating the meaning of grass. I relax and run. At exactly three miles out, I turn. By the time I reach the cows again, the bull has wandered off across the heather. 

I make it home entirely – though perhaps undeservedly – safe and intact.

And the moral of this story is? 

I don’t know why you’d ask a misfiring ape-brain. But perhaps this old Japanese proverb fits the bill - and I’m not making this up either: 

“It is better to be the head of a chicken than the arse of an ox.”

Different strokes

Your life is meant to flash before your eyes when you're dying.

But I seem to have suffered some kind of brain damage, so mine doesn't flash so much as flicker fitfully, and I haven't got past the time my brother wrote 'Miss Bryan is an arse' on my English jotter, getting me into terrible trouble, when we arrive at the hospital, the ambulance crew manhandles me into a wheelchair, and we hurtle along the corridor into A & E at Forth Valley Hospital.

Larbert is a place I know only through road signs, so I'm pretty vague about where I am. Who I am and how I am are also questions to which I have no clear answer. Dongles Something and not so good, I'm guessing, or I wouldn't be here.

I try to relax in the comfy bed, as smartly-uniformed young women bustle around, taking blood from my arm and measuring its pressure. Not the same blood of course. Once outside my veins it's at atmospheric. Inside my arteries it hit 180/150 in the ambulance, but is now back at a high but survivable level of 150/100. 

Having poked, pricked and questioned me, the doctors and nurses depart to deal with other patients, while using their test results to ponder what happened and how they're going to respond. 

One slim young woman, who got her nursing degree last year from Stirling University, takes my right hand in hers and tells me to squeeze as hard as I can. She repeats this with my left. "Yes there's some loss of strength in your right hand," she declares. 

"I wasn't squeezing as hard as I could," I confess. "I didn't want to hurt you."

She tut-tuts and shakes her head. "As hard as you can this time please," she says and the habits of a lifetime kick in as I follow a female's instructions exactly.

"Fine," she says and strides off, leaving me to lie on the bed and reflect on how I got here, now that normal brain activity seems to have resumed. 

The day had begun so well, as the rows and columns on the giant spreadsheet I created when I became self-employed danced into line, summing consistently in all directions. This meant I was ready to transfer the incomes and expenditures to my tax return, and submit it. 

But then a small, strange incident occurred, like the fluttering leaf that's the first sign of a violent storm approaching. 

I lost peripheral vision at one side. My right hand coming in to the keyboard kept taking me by surprise, appearing out of nowhere as if it belonged to somebody else. I'd had a similar episode a couple of days earlier, which passed uneventfully, so at first I wasn't concerned. I did email Rachel to say "I've got vision disturbance again." 

When she read "I'be got vidion disturvance" she figured there might be something going wrong, smart cookie that she is, and Skype phoned me.

The second leaf fluttered down when I tried to explain the incident as a result of visual stress caused by peering for hours at thousands of numbers. "There's 500 rows in my spreadsheet," I told her. "And 50 columns. So that makes ....."

I couldn't do the sum. Only blankness lay in my brain, where a number should have appeared. Rachel insisted it was a hard sum. But I knew it wasn't. My brain is below average at many things, such as organising, talking sense and understanding what it's told. But it is good with numbers. For simple sums it just sees the answer. 

Blankness is scary. So I'd guess this was when my blood pressure began to rocket. Suspecting a stroke, Rachel started asking questions, such as my sons' names and the current Prime Minister. I got the former but not the latter, but encouraged her to continue, hoping the mental activity would help me recover.

The third leaf came tumbling down when I started stumbling over the words I was trying to say. Clear in my head, they were coming out garbled from my mouth. Rachel asked me to count in threes and I didn't understand. She simplified to "What is 3 plus 3?"

I had no idea and the gathering storm engulfed me. I slumped to the floor, convinced my brain was suffering irreparable damage and I'd be confined to a wheelchair, unable to speak, for the rest of my life. I hoped I'd die instead.

Rachel phoned an ambulance, which came within 10 minutes, and brought me to Larbert hospital, while the paramedic sat in the back, chatting calmly and monitoring my blood pressure. My speech slowly returned and by the time we reached the hospital my brain was still fuzzy but just about working.

After all the tests and talking, the hospital staff sent me home late that day, with a driver and a diagnosis of transient ischaemic attack, also known as mini-stroke. 

The diagnosis was probably wrong, the doctors decided two weeks later. But that's a story for another day.

Friendly but forgetful

Photo by Jeff Moriarty

So I just spent 15 minutes looking for my running top, and getting increasingly frustrated because it wasn't anywhere I'd expect it to be. 

Minutes earlier I'd had it in my hand when I answered the phone. So I knew it couldn't be far away. But could I find it? I could not.

I searched the living-room, my bedroom, the bathroom, the understairs cupboard and the car in the drive. By the second time around I was getting really frustrated at this waste of time, because I've a list of things to do before Christmas as long as my python-shaped draught-excluder (that's not a euphemism, by the way). 

I was also getting annoyed with myself, both for putting the sweater somewhere stupid and for not being smart enough to figure out how stupid I could be. Getting annoyed with yourself is inevitable at these times, I find. But it's far from helpful. 

"You're an idiot."

"I know. But that means so are you."

"You're a bigger idiot."

"Shut up."

It's even less helpful if this conversation with yourself - about the only unfriendly encounter I have, since ageing suaveness eased out youthful angst - takes place when you're searching your car, within earshot of your next-door neighbour. Who's had doubts about my mental stability since she saw me refilling the bird-feeder in my underpants. (And no I don't have a bird-feeder in my underpants. Don't be a smartarse.)

In the end I give up and do an internet search on the difference between dementia and absent-mindedness. (I'll start saying 'googled' when they start paying their taxes.) 

Turns out I've nothing to worrry about because they're completely different. Dementia is far more than ordinary forgetfulness or occasional foggy thinking, according to Professor June Andrews of the University of Stirling. "You need to start worrying only if you experience a significant, progressive downturn in your mental capacity." 

So if your mental capacity never turned up in the first place you're fine, is how I read that. 

Which is reassuring. But to tell the truth I'm still a little worried. Eventually I found the sweater and I went for my run. And I was still wearing it when I returned. Which is all good. But where I found it is the worrying part. 

You'll have figured it out already, I'm sure, because surveys show that Friendly Encounter readers are in the top percentile for intelligence. And good looks.

It's a small comfort that I also worked it out eventually. I didn't stumble across the sweater, while hunting around in an increasingly haphazard fashion, searching places it couldn't rationally be, like the oven, the fridge or the dog. No, I stood still and asked myself what Sherlock Holmes would do in these circumstances.

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

"You think I'm wearing it?"

"I think you should consider the possibility."

I look down. "You're right, I'm wearing it. Damn and blast. I've just wasted 15 minutes searching for a sweater I already put on."

"What are you?"

"Shut up."

Once again this conversation with myself should ideally have taken place inside my house and not in my drive.

"Are you all right?" asks my next-door, rather atttractive neighbour. "You seem to be falling out with yourself a lot these days."

"I'm fine thanks, Stevie. I'm going for a run."

"Very impressive in this weather. Is that a bird-feeder in your running shorts or are you just pleased to see me?"

"Have a nice Christmas, Stevie."

"You too, Douglas."

And off I went on my last run before an afternoon of mince-pies and excess, to demonstrate our joy at the baby Jesus, undoes all my hard-earned fitness and means I start the coming year with the same pot-bellied arteries I did last year.

So I'd like to take this opportunity to wish a merry christmas to all our readers, in the words of Tiny Tim: "Tiptoe through the window, by the window, that is where I'll be. Come tiptoe through the tulips ..."

No, hang on. Wrong Tiny Tim. Here's the one I want:

"A Merry Christmas to us all; God bless us, every one!"

See you next year, guys. I'm looking forward to it and I'll tell you why.

It's not 2017. That's something we all want to forget.