the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Since my diagnosis of Bells Palsy, I’ve been visiting an acupuncturist in an area of south London that has according to estate agents been up and coming for the last 20 years. (If this area were a man then he’d need Viagra.) Not that I believe in acupuncture, anymore than I believe in UFO’s, the Loch Ness Monster or god, but what I do believe in is the placebo effect. The power of the mind has on producing beneficial outcome on health. The placebo effect has been the subject of double blind randomized trials, evidence gained and made open to scrutiny with the results peer reviewed, which is more than can be said for alternative medicine.

I’m with Richard Dawkins on this one when he says, “If alternative medicines actually worked, they’d be called medicine.” Of course some people will get better of whatever ailment was troubling them, but then that proves not that alternative medicine works but a lack of understanding of regression to the mean. Basically most minor ailments would get better without any intervention whatsoever. (For a detailed explanation of it see here, but for a less detailed explanation of it see here. Or you can believe me without any evidence whatsoever. Rather like alternative medicine.)

Sorry about that, but it makes me weep for the continued existence of the human race, people who believe in all that claptrap. The moon landings were faked? If the KGB had found any proof of that whatsoever, you think we’d have heard about it at the time. Maybe? It’s not as if the Russians had a vested interest in sparing Americas’ blushes during the Cold War. And lets suspend rationality for a second and imagine that they were faked. The conspiracy would need to have been huge. Sure those involved at the upper echelons might have had an interest in keeping schtum. But think about the people who did the catering. Or prepared the fake moon surface. Don’t you think some credible expose of the fraud would’ve emerged by now? Homeopathy? Water has memory, you say? Of course it does! This glass of water in front of me has a faint memory of it being turned into wine once!

People who believe this trumpery moonshine deserve to be disqualified from the human race. I’m not advocating killing them. But rather, by them having demonstrated their abject failure to engage in any deductive reasoning, they should be barred from partaking in civil society. Ask yourself, if you were on trial accused of a serious crime, for which there was a lengthy custodial sentence and social isolation on release, who would you want on the jury? A jury whose job it was after a careful and sober examination of the evidence presented to them, to decide your fate? Equally at elections. Why should anyone manifestly devoid of the requisite skills needed to evaluate one party’s policies from anothers, why should they have the vote? I’m serious.

Participating in democracy isn’t a right, more of a responsibility.

Anyway.

The point I was going to make before I got side-tracked down Tangent Street is that an up and coming area necessarily provides many and varied opportunities for businesses to creatively relieve people of their money. This area of south London isn’t particularly well off, but a tiny pocket of it is reported to be, and businesses charge accordingly. No doubt you will have encountered Artisan bakeries, which gives rise (no pun intended) to the joke, ‘What is the difference between an artisan bakery and a normal bakery?’ ‘About three pounds a loaf!’ I was reflecting upon this in the café I normally go to after my acupuncture, this bizarre notion that expense somehow equates to honest and/or authentic as I was having some tea. Not a lot of tea. Some tea. Now a pot of tea conjures up images of a large pot that you could at least get two cups out of. Unfortunately this café has prices well above its portions, meaning that the pot of tea was only capable of filling just one and a quarter cups of tea. By cups I mean those little dainty things that force you to make that little dainty maneuver with your little finger. This wouldn’t be so bad if I wasn’t paying £1.95 for the privilege.

I’ve the menu in front of me, their brunch menu offers house baked beans topped with Gruyere cheese on sourdough toast for £5.95. To you and me that means beans on toast with a bit of cheese. They also do a smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel for £5.95, but the item on the menu that really takes the (overpriced) biscuit is a croissant with butter and jam for £2.95! One feels like handing them an empty cup and when they ask what it’s for, you can tell them it’s for the p*ss they’re taking.

This is café Twatteratti – not its real name – but a café that is popular with men who have floppy hair, unique facial grooming and worrying amounts of free time. And mothers, forced into the pretence of being mothers while their nanny’s are on a lunch break, loudly praising their portable fecal factory, for doing what an adult would be chastised for. Looking around at all of them I am struck by numerous thoughts none, of them edifying. The first is that the café is a triumph of style over substance. Secondly, and more worryingly, is the fact that when I look around at the easy confidence displayed by the customers, their fastidious sense of appearance, their casual insouciance, it only serves to remind me how far removed from that world I am now. Not that I was ever in any danger of being subsumed into that world before, but now even if I wanted to I couldn’t afford the price of admittance.

Literally. Whilst I wasn’t encumbered by a massive amount of savings, over the years – and thanks to a very lucrative death – I was able to squirrel away a tidy sum. All of my savings have gone, evaporated like a puddle on a hot day. How is now a matter of history, the facts don’t change the end result. Not that I’m angry about this.

I’ve got too many other, more important things to be angry about.

Next time…According to the bible, God would go all Bruce Banner…