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A mite too many
EVERY pain is a progress, as my Scottish ballet master used to say, whacking our trembling teenage legs with an elegant cane as he passed along the barre -there was no Childline then - and equally, contrariwise, every progress is a bit of a pain.
Take the common house dust-mite, for instance - widely discussed last week - or rather accept it, because you cannot choose but have it, in millions and billions, even in your bed, no matter how much vacuuming you do.
These vile-looking creatures, which live on sloughed-off human skin, are far more numerous than they used to be, simply because modern houses are far more comfortable. Our homes are much warmer and less draughty, and this new-fangled luxury provides the perfect conditions for the fearsome mite, smaller than a full stop but terrible to contemplate, with its horror-movie hooked feelers. Our houses are completely infested with dead skin, dead mites, live mites and all their droppings, which we breathe in. It is the droppings to which people are allergic. Hence the enormous increase, with rising living standards, in allergies and breathing problems.
Call it the Zeitgeist - call it what you will - but in the very week when the British Allergy Foundation, unknown to me, had decided to launch its Fight the Mite campaign I had arranged for a home demonstration of a ruinously expensive German machine, which is the only weapon know that can take this creature out. My children suffer from almost every fashionable allergy, and I have finally begun to take them seriously. Besides, I have always resented the thought that our mattresses are teeming with parasites swarming in their own excrement. What the lady demonstrator got out of our supposedly clean rug was disgusting; thank goodness we do not have a microscope.
I was reminded of a wonderful book I read years ago called Life on Man, or Life on Person as it would now be called. The strange truth is that our persons are alive with vast armies of parasites, some of them Bosch-like in the hideous variety of their feelers and tentacles struggling for survival in the quaintest ways. There is even one animalcule that lives at the root of the human eyelash and has adapted to the presence of mascara. In order to show his students the huge populations that live on the gums, the author of Life on Man took a specimen from the teeth of his office cleaner and invited her to look through the microscope: she was so horrified by the wildlife she saw that she immediately had all her teeth removed. Perhaps these creepy-crawlies offer new evidence at last for the theologian's argument from design - what immortal hand or eye could frame this fearful variety? It is just like the idea of God - a reality so close, so completely unseen, so unimaginable and so completely implausible.
INCIDENTALLY, I am afraid that poor Kenneth Clarke has missed a great public relations opportunity by ignoring Fight the Mite week. With all the trouble he has been having with VAT on fuel, this would have been be the perfect moment to point out that lower temperatures will actually be good for us all. A few old people may grumble about the winter cold, but it is every bit as life-threatening to the house dust-mite as it is to them, and dust-mites cannot put on extra woollies. The boys at Central Office have not thought this thing through.
IN the aftermath of the British National Party victory in Tower Hamlets, perhaps enough has been said about the causes of racism in the East End. All the same, I do not think many commented on the role of the National Federation of Housing Associations. In the same week as the notorious election, this body published some new policy guidelines for its 2,200 members, urging them to discriminate in favour of ethnic minorities when renting homes or appointing staff, and to set 'race equality targets' for this purpose.
Under British race-relations law it would be illegal to set racial quotas, but targets, it seems, are not the same thing and therefore perfectly lawful. Lawful they may be, but in a climate of such deep suspicion on all sides it was hardly wise to set down such guidelines, let alone publish them, in a week when everyone knew that racial tensions, particularly about housing, were bound to be expressed. From a public-service organisation, it is not much of a contribution either to justice or to racial harmony.
THE older I get, the more I think people should do less of what they do, not more. Most horrible medical stories have to do with doctors who simply do things because that is what they do, not because the things need doing.
Surgeons cut things out.
That is why a gynaecologist recently aborted a pregnancy. He was simply cutting out her uterus, with the woman's consent, but given when neither knew of the pregnancy. And not cutting things out is not what surgeons do.
Physicians prescribe medicine. That is what they do and they do much too much of it.
Last year a Birmingham University survey reported that doctors found it difficult not to prescribe. 'In medical school they are trained to do things, but in half the cases you see in general practice, not doing is more appropriate.' Politicians talk, but since they cannot always tell the truth they are forced to lie, whereas not talking would have been better. The same applies to the unnecessary exertions of tree surgeons, guideline writers, armies and novelists, who impose their activities on the rest of us, often with disastrous results. Judicious neglect is injudiciously neglected.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, September 26, 1993
