For more than 40 years I smoked like a chimney (or “like a divil”, as Irish people used to say), and it wasn’t altogether surprising when, around 2011, I developed a bronchial condition which was categorised as a “COPD” – chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Attending the excellent Royal Brompton Hospital in London, which has catered for chest conditions since before the Crimean War, I saw written on my notes in dark letters “heavy ex-smoker”.
And so, I brought the full blare of Catholic guilt to my health condition, lecturing myself on the Wages of Sin and ruminating on Reaping As We Sow. If I was breathless and vulnerable to chest infections, it was all my own fault. I was the author of my own misfortune and the instigator of my own ill-luck.
Why was I so stupid as to puff away at two, sometimes, three packets of Gauloises, Gitanes or Marlboro a day? I did it knowingly, deliberately, and with the clear example of my mother, also a heavy smoker, who had developed emphysema as a result.
What a blockhead!
Many will disparage Catholic guilt, but it can be a useful tool for examining your conscience and taking responsibility for the errors you have made. Sometimes it’s hard to take responsibility. It’s much more comfortable to blame circumstances, or “society”, or other people, or your genes.
However, I have now had a counter-diagnosis that my bronchial condition – known as bronchiectasis – probably isn’t the result of ciggies. My doctor tells me that it is more likely to have occurred because of cavitation damage to the lungs from childhood illnesses – indeed, I had life-threatening pneumonia and primary TB as a child. Nobody’s health is improved by smoking, but my condition probably did not arise from that nefarious tobacco habit.
I felt, in a curious way, let off the hook. I now needn’t blame myself quite so forcefully. I wasn’t entirely responsible for my health problem and this wasn’t altogether a punishment for a “lifestyle choice”. I was simply unlucky to contract those childhood illnesses (though very lucky to have survived them, surely).
Still, I can’t quite shake off that Wages of Sin feeling.
…….
Some commentators claim that modern feminists have become too hostile to men. It is said that “white males” are the only group of people who can now be insulted with impunity.
But such misandry isn’t new: a knowledgeable source has sent me the facsimile of a notice which appeared in the newspapers around 1907, headed “Advice on Marriage to Young Ladies”, and this is the advice offered:
1. Do not marry at all.
2. But if you must, avoid the Beauty men, Flirts, and the Bounders, Tailor’s Dummies, and the Football Enthusiasts.
3. Look for a Strong, Tame Man, a Fire-lighter, Coal-getter, Window Cleaner and Yard Swiller.
4. Don’t expect too much, most men are lazy, selfish, thoughtless, lying, drunken, clumsy, heavy-footed, rough, unmanly brutes, and need taming.
5. All Bachelors are [thus], and many are worse still.
6. If you want him to be happy, Feed the Brute.
7. The same remark applies to Dogs.
8. You will be wiser not to chance it, it isn’t worth the risk.
This missive is signed “A suffragette wife”.
(On the plus side, a survey published by the Marriage Foundation has found that marriages that survive for 20 years
tend to be increasingly happy. So the old best-man joke about the first 20 years being the worst may still hold.)
…….
Barbara Bush, wife of the first President George and mother of the second, who has just died aged 92, was a huge fan of the stories of the Irish writer Maeve Binchy. Indeed, she was probably Maeve’s number one fan in the US, and entertained her at the White House to say so.
Many American women of Mrs Bush’s vintage loved Maeve’s books, because they were “wholesome” and didn’t contain swearing. Maeve told me that when she toured Middle America, women would sometimes buy half a dozen of her books at a time, often including an extra copy “for our minister”.
Barbara Bush’s endorsement, of course, greatly added to the following that the Binchy canon enjoyed.
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