MENS SANA IN CORPORE SANO

A famous drawing by Leonardo of
a healthy man in perfect proportion

It is usually translated as ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’ as the two usually tend to go together. The only problem with this, as I see it, is that a healthy body requires a good deal of exercise, which I find boring, even as I approve of it in theory. I constantly read about the importance of doing stretches or running, taking part in pilates or yoga. I do start the day by doing a series of stretches to strengthen my knees which takes twenty to thirty minutes.

And that is about it. My work often involves waking a good deal and I am not afraid to do that. By its nature tourist guiding means moving from place to place. Sightseeing can be quite tiring for people away from home and outside their comfort zone and I am always conscious of the need to pace a tour in a way that clients can cope with. The tourist guide is always expected to cope with the pace of a tour he is leading.

 

My oldest friend spends a good deal of time running, swimming and cycling and hopes to win – or at least take part – in an elder’s ironman competition in which he does these three activities. I could join him in at least some of them but, frankly, I cannot be bothered. I do not mind doing necessary exercises to strengthen worn out joints and muscles but I simply get more enjoyment from sitting at a computer than running along a road (or cycling, etc).

 

We live in a society that increasingly worships fitness. The healthy body is considered a prerequisite to a a successful life. Even I, who do not share this view, find myself mentally tutting if someone is seriously overweight or obviously unfit, even if I am a bit overweight myself and reluctant to do much to get myself fitter. There is always someone in worse condition than you and I can (and do) take some comfort from that.

 

I am also suspicious of going to the doctor, although I conscientiously do all the tests I am summoned to complete. As a result of these, I am now taking a statin and diabetic pills every day. My mother and grandmother bot suffered from diabetes and I have had problems with ingrowing toenails, which seem to be an indicator of diabatic a condition, so the news that I had higher than healthy levels of blood sugar was not exactly a surprise.

 

The problem – there is always a problem – is that the pills I am now taking seem to be causing constipation. I am sure that readers do not want to hear about problems with my bowel movements so I will skip over that issue. Suffice to say that David Sedaris, a comic writer I love, has written that he and his partner Hugh (he is gay) do not have bowel movements, or at least do not talk about them in public. Not everyone shares Sedaris’ shyness about shitting. He refers to couples who discuss their bathroom habits and compare effusions from their nether regions but he (and I) are not among them.  

 

This is not the first time prescribed medication has caused constipation. I once had a pain in my leg that was not responding to the usual pain killers of ibuprofen and paracetamol – so I prescribed a stronger type of pain killer. This was codeine, which cleared up the problem but caused me to feel bunged up for a week. I have forgotten the pain but I will never forget the constipation that the ‘cure’ caused me.

 

I sometimes show people is the line of pills in the British Museum taken by the average man and woman in their lives. No longer, however, can I do so with a little feeling of smug superiority at the amount of pills people obediently take. I too have joined the list of senior citizens being dosed up daily byt the pharmaceutical industry. One of the perils of growing old< I suppose. As Mark Twain said, only two things in life are inevitable -death and taxes. 

 

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide,blogspot.com

Edwin Lerner

  

 

SOCIALISM AND CAPITALISM

Communist tyrant Joseph Stalin

I always thought that the phrase ‘democratic socialism’ – which seems to have fallen out of fashion nowadays – contained a contradiction in terms. Socialists believe that their preferred method of organising society is, or should be, permanent, whereas democrats believe that freedom of choice is paramount and every four or five years voters should be free to kick out the incumbent governing party if they have not been running the country properly.

People living in communist societies do not have that freedom, of course. ‘Permanent’ socialism equals communism in practice and the last thing you want to do if you are establishing a permanent system is to give people a chance to change it at the ballot box. It is tempting to paint Joseph Stalin, who ruled over communist Russia for years, as a sort of cuddly figure. This is a temptation to be resisted, however. He was a brutal dictator who ruled until he died.

I put the phrase permanent in inverted commas because communism is now dead where it was invented – Russia – and capitalism has been adopted in nominally communist China. While it survived it was the most horrible system to live under and could only survive by stealing the secrets of nuclear bombs from the USA. Communism did not encourage the kind of inquisitive thinking that led to the development of the nuclear bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

 

Neither Russia nor China have embraced democracy fully. They have a version of it in Russia but Putin rules the roost and I would not be able to write critically of him if I lived there. Fortunately, I don’t and I live in a free(ish) country where I can express my opinions. For what it is worth, I think that Putin, who is a former KGB officer dedicated to preserving state communism, is trying to go down in history as the man who kept Ukraine Russian.

 

I also think that the decline and death of communism has had an adverse effect on capitalist societies. Without having to look over their shoulder to an alternative system in communist countries, the ultra-rich seem to have lost their inhibitions and increased their wealth exponentially. According to the internet, in the early 1970s the average CEO earned twenty times what the average worker made. By 2021 this ratio had increased to 350 times.

 

There is no hard evidence that this is the case, by the way, but the available evidence is overpowering. As communism went down, unfettered capitalism rose and top earners felt able to increase their wealth dramatically. A coincidence? I do not think so, although I would be hard put to prove it conclusively. It is one of those occasions where two systems diverge but are surely related to one another. As an egalitarian system dies, inequality takes off.

 

I am, incidentally, a big supporter of capitalism as well as democracy. Ken Follet’s Century Trilogy of novels shows how people who are theoretically attached to communism and equality start to doubt their communist commitment as they realise that capitalist systems actually work better at providing people with what they want. There is something about the human spirit which demands freedom of thought with freedom to make money.

 

Interestingly, however, it seems that capitalism does not need democratic freedoms to flourish. China can hardly be said to be a free country and is still nominally a communist one, yet it has long abandoned real communism and embraced money-making as a creed - even though the Chinese people do not seem to want a democratic multi=party society. It seems that you do not need to be free to make money but you need to live amongst money-makers to be free.

 

I support capitalism knowing full well that it is not a perfect system and needs restraints built into it to function fairly. This is what democracy is for. The job of politicians is to decide how much tax we should pay and what it should be spent on. There are good arguments in favour of taxing the ultra-rich with higher rates. The only problem is that you tend to create tax-exiles in doing so by driving people out of the perfect society you are creating.

 

You could always build a wall to keep people in but few people mourned the destruction of the wall which did precisely that in Germany. The celebrations which accompanied the destruction of the Berlin wall must give pause to those who want to prevent freedom of movement, one of the most fundamental freedoms we enjoy in a capitalist society. If you buy a train ticket nobody want to know why you are travelling, just where you want to go to.     

 

Another freedom that people enjoy in a capitalist society is the chance to organise themselves by creating trade unions. Those who run companies hate trade unions but they are merely examples of workers exercising their freedoms, playing the system to protect themselves by getting a fair slice of the cake. Although trade union leaders like to portray themselves as socialists, they are inherently a feature of the freedoms of capitalism.

 

I write this as a trade union member myself. Increasingly, self-employed people need the freedom to negotiate what they are paid and it is because of this that the Association of Professional Tourist Guides was formed; to set fees that the industry broadly respects and honours. When top London hotels charge a thousand pounds a night for their rooms, a few hundred pounds for a tourist guide is not that much of an expense to add to it.

 

The alternative is a race to the bottom. One of the reasons I make a living as a guide but not at writing is that guides have a fee system, which freelance writers do not.  Any guide can work outside the fee system, of course, but not many do and the fees seem to work quite well. It is a good example of socialism parachuted into but ultimately dependent on capitalism. You do not, after all, find free trade unions in communist countries. 

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

 

I DON'T LIKE ULYSSES

Ralph Fiennes, Juliet Binoche as Ulysses and Penelope

I dare he does not care. He is long gone and is no longer in a position to worry. Maybe that is his secret of his survival, not caring about other people’s opinion of him. I have never warmed to Ulysses, however, and my opinion of him has been brought into focus by a new film called The Return in which Ulysses is portrayed by that fine actor Ralph Fiennes. The film only looks at his return to Ithaca and ignores the various adventures he had on the way back from Troy.

It was Ulysses who thought up the idea of cramming a group of soldiers into the wooden horse which was left as an apparent gift to the Trojans but turned out to be a trap, releasing them into the city they had supposedly besieged unsuccessfully for ten years until they appeared to leave to go home. In fact, they returned to destroy the city and its inhabitants having tricked their way into it before leaving the wooden horse as a supposed gift.

This trick gave us the phrase ‘beware of Greeks bearing gifts’. It was not bravery in battle or superior siege weapons which led to the Greek victory but a rather sneaky sleight of hand thought up by Ulysses. This resulted in an orgy of massacre (and probably rape) by the victorious Greeks. They made sure that all the Trojan males were killed – even the babies – and all the women enslaved after they had sacked the city, leaving no trace of Troy.

 

Then Ulysses begins his long journey home, taking another ten years and having numerous adventures on the way, as described in The Iliad. All his men are killed in this journey until he limps back to Ithaca to reclaim his crown and his long-suffering wife Penelope and their son Telemachus. This is what The Return is about - not the adventures, both military and romantic - that kept him from returning for so long and convinced people that he was dead.

 

Penelope is surrounded by suitors who want to marry her. Not only they are all killed by the returning Ulysses, but the servants who looked after them, most of whom were female, were strung up and hanged. This is what turned me against the so-called hero of the story, the killing of the servants, who were only doing their job in serving the men who were wooing their mistress. This incident is, interestingly, left out of the film. Only the suitors die.

 

Maybe this is a modern way of looking at the story, feeling for the workers, who would surely have been put to death by the suitors themselves if they had refused to serve them and remained loyal to their absent master. The servants were dealing with the reality of the situation, not the impossible ideal of a man returning after being away for two decades. Of course, Ulysses does return but the servants had to deal with the situation as they found it.

 

They had a living to earn, after all, and had to deal with the situation they were in, not one that might occur sometime in the future. Killing the servants as well as the suitors served to cleanse the court thoroughly as their king returned home. Ulysses could start anew with a clean slate, with just his wife and son by his side. No account is given of his death, which surely happened, unless he discovered the secret of immortality as well.

 

In a way, he has done, of course, living beyond the story of what happened at Troy and on the journey home. Ulysses is the ultimate survivor, being a warrior – he dispatches his enemies ruthlessly in the films, even as they beg for mercy – and a clever schemer who does not declare his identity as soon as he comes home, but allows to people think of him as an old drifter who is only recognised by his dog, who cannot speak of his knowledge to humans.

 

Fiennes, who is an excellent actor on screen and stage, plays Ulysses as a survivor, who shelters with a slave, as he slowly but surely reasserts his kingship in Ithaca and disposes of his enemies. This motley crew does not seem very realistic to me. Although Penelope (who is Helen of Troy’s sister) is a great beauty, surely they would in reality have pursued younger and more fertile women, especially in the unforgiving Mediterranean climate.

 

However, this is letting the truth get in the way of a good story, anathema to film-makers around the world. Ulysses has to battle for his crown and ruthlessly dispatches all the suitors with the bow he has managed to thread to prove his worthiness. They die with a whimper as he and his son dispatch them, saving the last blow for the most sympathetic suitor who accepts his fate and is killed, despite Penelope’s pleas, by Telemachus.

In those days men did not expect to die in their beds and to survive you had to be a killer. Being a pacifist was not enough to ensure survival and so Ulysses has to dispatch those who were after all trying to usurp his place. But the servants as well? We live in an egalitarian age when their feelings and motives are taken into account and getting rid of them seems unnecessary and over-vengeful. No wonder the film-makers left that part out.

 

Films and stories demand a high body count these days and a man strolling back to claim his crown unopposed would not have made much of a story. Still, I think that killing the servants was unnecessary and have never forgiven Ulysses for doing so. The film-makers probably agreed and cut this part out of the story, as much to make him sympathetic as to control the length and killing in the film. Still, I have never forgotten - or forgiven - it.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

 

 

ON THE EXISTENCE - OR NOT - OF GOD

Always smartly dressed: Richard Dawkins
 who rather curiously converted me to God

The very fact that I am asking the old question about the existence of God (or god if you are an atheist) shows that, in a way, he does exist. If I ask if He exists then I am bringing him into being. The question is probably better put – does God exist as a concept or as a being. It is probably better to ask, how much is God a concept and how much is he a being? Did God invent people or did people invent God. Which came first – the chicken or the egg?  

I have always believed that people invented God rather than the other way around. This is not to disparage belief, merely to say that it is a prerequisite of living. A part of the process of coming into being is to think that we are not alone, that we are part of a larger plan emanating from a deity who remains unknown. God does not interfere in our daily lives or he (He?) would not have let horrors like the World Wars claim so many millions of lives.

 

How could a benevolent God who was watching over and controlling us allow so many young men be cut down by machine gun fire as they climbed out of the trenches. How could so many innocent Jews – women and children especially – be slaughtered in gas ovens at Auschwitz and similar concentration camps, their bodies burned after death to dispose of them without any kind of proper funeral or burial, just tossed away like so much rubbish?

 

When you see the terrible things human beings have done to each other and which Nature does to us in the form of earthquakes and natural disasters it is hard to believe in an all-controlling and benevolent deity who has our best interests at heart. After Charles Darwin’s ideas were eventually published – he kept them under a staircase so as not to upset his pious wife – we gradually began to believe more in chance and less in a just god.

 

Nowadays, people are increasingly indifferent to religious belief. They ignore the idea of a deity and an afterlife and accept, for all the talk of being ‘in a better place’ after death, that we live in our bodies until we die and we can only expect oblivion afterwards. I think this indifference is far more of a danger to religious belief than the atheism of people like – to quote a famous example – Richard Dawkins, who takes a more approach to the question.

 

Yet, it is surely because atheists are often very moral people that we still maintain some kind of belief in a deity, a greater power than a purely human one. I like Dawkins the scientist and read one of his books, The Blind Watchmaker, once. He presents the Darwinian idea that human life gradually evolved on this planet rather than it being created by a greater power. He is backed up by Darwin and geology so his arguments remain hard to contradict.

 

In his book, however, Dawkins makes several moralistic comments which have a kind of almost undergraduate flavour about them – against the boiling alive of lobsters and in favour of abortion rights, for example. It is these which spoke most loudly to me and which I remember best of all, long after I have forgotten the rational scientific arguments he makes.

 

Take the boiling alive of lobsters. Afficionados of their preparation (of which I am not one) believe that the flavour of the finished product is improved by boiling them alive rather than killing them quickly. Just say you were given the choice at a restaurant between boiled alive lobster and the quick-killed variety. This is not too crazy an idea, by the way. We have the choice between free range and factory farmed chickens when we go shopping for example.

 

A scientist believes that taste and smell are senses that developed to tell if food was poisonous or had gone off and might make you sick if it did not prove fatal. This has now developed to the extent that people spend thousands of pounds on meals and wines to go with them. They also have extended their moral senses to give priority to free range foods or to eschew animal and meat products entirely by embracing vegetarianism and veganism.

 

Yet science is factual rather than moral. It does not give priority to moral considerations when choosing, for example, to embrace quick-killed or gradually boiled alive lobsters. One is merely supposed to taste better than the other. Our sense of morality helps us to make the decision here and morality developed as a mechanism to make it easier for us to live together. Put bluntly, moral people tend to make better neighbours than immoral ones. 

 

This sense of morality has now been extended to non-human species who are afforded rights they could only have dreamed of once. These are not universally adopted by humans (which is why many still boil lobsters alive). Scientific investigations may explain this process but, in doing so, it also explains them away. If analysis tells us that we are acting in a purely moral way, we can just as easily reject this morality in order to enjoy better-tasting lobster.

 

Despite being a classic fence-sitting agnostic, I am sure that it is right not to boil lobsters alive (even if Woody Allen can make a good joke out of it in Annie Hall). I join the team of both atheists and believers who want their lobsters killed humanely and quickly, even if this results in a poorer taste. Yet I do so not because science is telling me to – science is indifferent to the matter – but because God is saying that this is the best way to behave.

 

So I believe in God even if I accept that he/she/it is a largely human creation. The most pious person would probably admit that form of his belief is partly an accident of history and geography and, if he had been in a different time and place, he would have followed a different path. Yet the most militant of atheists would be hard-pressed to explain why he or she adopted a very moral position if it was not partly due to the existence of a higher power.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is DiaryofaTouristGuide,blogspot.com

 

NOBODY'S PERFECT

Billy Wilder's tombstone in Hollywood

I have often wondered what a successful relationship consists of. I can hardly claim to have had a particularly good record in this field, although I have been with my partner for nearly a quarter of a century now. We got together early in the twenty first century, which is now in 2025 a quarter over. I have a memory of going to see the new century in with my family on Dartmoor but it turned out that was one of last we things we did together.

We have certainly had our ups and downs in that time, almost splitting up at one stage and never formally tying the knot by getting married. However, we realise that we are both much happier inside a relationship than outside one and, after a while, you get tired of looking for the ‘right’ person and settle for what we have in front of us. So there is a part of any successful relationship that is settling for what you have got and stopping the search.

 

That does not sound very romantic, I would be the first to admit. When you are young you tend to believe that there is somebody meant for you and it is just a question of finding them. As you get older, however, you realise it is more a question of making choices from what is available. A lot of this comes from deciding that, in the old cliché, no-one is perfect and coming to terms with someone’s imperfections is the way to nurture a relationship..  

 

The film Some Like It Hot ends with just this thought as the Tony Curtis character admits to the man determined to woo and marry her that (s)he is really a man in disguise. (To cut a long story short, she and Jack Lemmon are trying to escape from murderous gangsters and think that the best way to do so is to dress in drag.) The film, which was made in the late 1950s, actually anticipates some of the transgender debates raging at the moment.

 

It is a frothy sort of film but. It has stood the test of time and pays rewatching today. The director Billy Wilder spoke with a foreign accent throughout his life, even when he was making films entirely in English later in his career. He was born in 1906 in Poland and moved to Hollywood to escape the Nazis, directing dark films like Double Indemnity and The Lost Weekend as well as light comedies. He was surely one of Hollywood’s great film directors.

 

The phrase ‘Nobody’s perfect’ is inscribed on Wilder’s gravestone. It is not actually the full epitaph (photograph above) and was meant to be a joke but there is a good point there. Nobody is perfect and the secret of having a long-lasting relationship is to STOP LOOKING FOR PERFECTION. There is a temptation to believe that somebody who is just right for you is out there and achieving happiness is just a matter of finding them.

 

But surely the secret of a good relationship is coming to terms with the other person in it, their imperfections and all. Both my partner and I want to be in a relationship while my ex takes the attitude that being on your own is better than being with the wrong person. It was, of course, this perfectionism that I fell for but was unable to live up to. Nobody, however, could have done that so she remains alone while I am with someone.

 

Each to his (or her) own. Yet I cannot help feeling that it is better to be with someone than otherwise. To have someone for company and conversation, for practical help and support and the feeling that you do not have to try too hard. I feel no envy towards those who are in the singles marketplace and are still out there looking for a new partner. It is, if nothing else, it is simply too much like hard work and I am happy to have left that all behind.

 

That may sound unbearably smug of me but it is genuinely the way I feel. As Saint Paul says in his letter to the Corinthians, 'When I was a child, I talked like a child. I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the way of childhood behind me.'

To be searching for a partner – or to be on your own – seems someone childish to me as I embrace my old age. Searching for someone new – too late, too late for all of that now.

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com 

Edwin Lerner

WHAT YOU DO NOT WHAT YOU MIGHT DO

The three victims of the Southport killings 
 

This article is about the killing of three young girls at Southport last year and the person who committed the crime. He has deliberately not been named in it so as not to boost his profile. Instead I have included pictures of the young girls who were victims of this terrible crime.

 

Now that the killer’s punishment has been handed down – fifty two years in jail, no less – we begin the hand-wringing exercises. Politicians queue up to both condemn the killer and to say something like ‘it must never happen again’. The problem is that it is very difficult to prevent it happening again for the simple reason that in our society you are imprisoned for what you actually do – not for what you might intend to do at some future date.

 

Of course, no politicians can say this. They would have to admit that they were powerless and could not stop a poor, deluded person killing others in order to make the world a better place and possibly helping them to get to heaven in the process. There is just the small matter of spending the next fifty two years in jail before you can achieve that: eighteen years growing up and becoming a person, the rest locked up in a cell with little company.

 

It is worth emphasising this point because politicians are in the business of creating a perfect world. Unfortunately, the world is actually far from perfect and our freedoms have to be hedged around with protections, which sadly include the freedom to do evil things – like killing innocent young girls while they attended a dance class. He intended to kill all the adults and others attending the class and would have done so if he had not been stopped.

 

The only way he could have been prevented from killing those girls was if he had been locked up in advance. We then move towards the sort of situation imagined in that Spielberg film Minority Report in which people are arrested before they have a chance to commit a crime. Forget about human rights and the presumption of innocence and old-fashioned concepts like that. Lock them up first to prevent criminal activity.

 

To be fair, Minority Report is a science fiction film set in the future, featuring psychic characters who can predict crimes (‘precogs’).  As far as I know, precogs do not exist (yet) and the story can be safely stored in the fantasy category. Precogs have a 100% success rate and the business of putting people on trial and judging whether they had committed a crime or not. The fact that the crime had not yet been committed could answer that dilemma.

 

The government does have a programme called Prevent which aims to stop people being radicalised into terrorism. The official description says it is, ‘a national initiative … that aims to prevent people from becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism. It's part of the government's counter-terrorism strategy, CONTEST. The extent to which the killer of these poor girls was a radical or simply a nutcase is disputed but Prevent seems like a decent idea.

 

Whether it is successful is open to debate. For all we know, they could have prevented plenty of similar massacres like the one recently at Southport but I think it is unlikely. Such programmes inevitably find it hard to convert people who have travelled down the path of extremism. Eight people were killed on London Bridge and Borough Market in 2017 by men who actually met with each other at a supposed terrorism prevention centre.

 

I do not think that we should abandon such measures, but let us be honest. They have limited success in what they are tyring to do. It is simply impossible to lock everyone who might attack another who we all (except the killers themselves) regard as innocent. ‘This is for Allah,’ the killers shouted as they killed bystanders in Borough Market in the 2017 attack. Yet Allah did not ask them to kill people and should not be blamed if they do so.

 

We tend to lump people together and a lot of people will blame all Moslems for thse killings. Yet, Moslems are, on the whole, law-abiding and hard-working people who do not deserve being lumped with the fanatics who perform these killings. I remember that there used to be a DIY shop run by a Moslem family which closed up at around midday every Friday so that they all could go to the mosque on what was their holy day.

 

I never resented this if it happened when I was in the shop buying something, even though it meant I would have to come back later. Good for them, I thought. They are showing that something is more important than making money. In this case, it was religion, which some customers might not sympathise with, especially if it was Islamic, but I liked the way that they simply stopped for a short time and thought about God rather than Mammon.

 

That was – for many – a positive side of Islam. The negative comes out in the acts of terror that can strike at random and with devastating suddenness. It is all very well identifying those who could potentially commit a crime but punishing them before they have done so is against the rule of law. This means that they have to commit the crime before they can be punished, as the killer of these girls did – suddenly, viciously and with little or no remorse.

 

Allowing someone to commit a crime inevitably means that there will be victims and my heart goes out to the parents of these girls. Who could be more innocent than a young girl at a dance class? Who could be more guilty than the person (usually male) who attacks and kills them? Yet, until their murder has taken place, he has to be regarded as innocent. No amount of hand-wringing can alter this, even if it means we have to allow evil to flourish.

 

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

Edwin Lerner