Rampant Anomie

Psoriasis is the reason I skulked through adolescence like an albino leopard. I was shy enough when I started secondary school; when my pale skin developed red, angry and often bleeding plaques of psoriasis, from my bony knees to my spotty brow, my desire to disappear forever into the treetops of introspection was complete.

From the age of twelve, my greasy, gangling body added psoriasis to my list of reasons to hate myself. Not only did it make wearing clothes unbearable and taking them off unthinkable, it crept skyward to cover my face as well. By the age of 15 I’d passed 6’5” and become a towering beacon of embarrassment.

Psoriasis affects perhaps 2% of the white population. It is non-contagious, chronic and inherited. It is part of my genetic blueprint. Even apparently unaffected skin on a sufferer is bio-chemically different to that of a non-sufferer.

Psoriasis typically makes patches of skin rise, become inflamed and shed abundant silver ‘scales’. My skin generates new cells faster then the old ones can be shed, causing a dermal logjam. The skin occasionally splits and bleeds and always itches damnably. Some sufferers have a couple of patches here and there. Others have swathes of the stuff cladding their bodies like a glued-on hairshirt.

As I came to terms with psoriasis in the mid eighties, Dennis Potter’s excellent TV drama, ‘The Singing Detective’, had special resonance for me. Its protagonist, Marlowe, was hospitalised by a voracious form of psoriasis that enveloped his entire body. Trapped in a hospital bed and mired in unguents, Marlowe escaped into a world of imagination in which he was the urbane sleuth in a world of post-war noir. Marlowe wasn’t a prisoner of his wretched body and neither was I. Even if he was a prisoner, he had Joanne Whalley as a warder.

I’ve evolved a complex relationship with my skin involving a lot of cod psychology and minimal medical help. Psoriasis is acutely psychosomatic; it is exacerbated and often initiated by emotional trauma. In a few months, I went from unthinking contentment at primary school to desperate misery at secondary school. Psoriasis leapt from my genes and painted my woes all over my skin.

Psoriasis responds badly to any state of being more stressful than a coma. Any kind of emotional or physical trauma will leave its paw-prints on my dermis. Caffeine, salt and alcohol in any pleasurable quantity will exact a price in a pain like sunburn.

Besides watching my diet, I should use creams and ointments to control the plaques. In the past, this has meant coal tar based concoction ns that will turn a clean bed-sheet into a Glastonbury groundsheet in one sticky night. It has meant steroid based liquids that thin the skin and burn through floorboards if spilled. Latterly it has meant ‘Dovonex’, a less offensive palliative than its forebears.

Escaping the hormonal maelstrom of my teens cooled my psoriasis. Yet attitude is the key for me. The more I agonised about my appearance, or fretted about the unlikelihood of ever getting the girl, or any girl, or anything female with a pulse, the worse it got. By learning to treat it with the contempt it deserved, I eased my symptoms. Simplistic as it sounds, growing up, acquiring confidence and deciding I wasn’t a leper cleansed much of my skin.

Baring any part of yourself feels courageous if your psoriasis is highly visible. I remember being ejected from a swimming pool in France by an attendant who seemed to think I’d escaped from a germ warfare lab. Pushy as he was, he didn’t dare touch me. My schoolboy French equipped me to ask him for directions to the beach or whether he preferred Duran Duran to Kajagoogoo. It didn’t help me explain the pathology of discoid psoriasis. Because of incidents like this, girls treated me like a puppy with a broken paw, adorable in an entirely sexless way. Come to think of it, nothing’s changed.

Later in life, what was left of my psoriasis was aggravated by my cavalier attitude to medication, alcohol and late nights. Only in my early thirties did it occur to me to look again at what medicine could offer. I was told that creams weren’t the only answer. A drug called Methotrexate slows cellular division in the skin and will clear psoriasis within 8 weeks. It also has side effects including anaemia and liver damage. Other drugs are available, all with equally unpleasant side effects. My hunger for medical martyrdom doesn’t stretch that far.

Then I tried a course of phototherapy. Psoriasis responds well to sunlight, less so to sun-beds which only operate in cosmetic wavelengths. Three times a week for about two months, I attended the local hospital where I stepped into a clinical solarium and was bombarded with narrow spectrum UVB light.

The dosage is powerful and initial sessions lasted a few seconds, eventually building up to around three minutes. To preserve my eyesight and my heritage during treatment, I was told to wear dark goggles and a single sock. The elderly gent who turned up for his first session starkers but for a sock on his right foot either failed to get the point, or proved that nurses’ uniforms hold a timeless appeal.

After six weeks of treatment and for the first time in twenty years, my skin was entirely clean but for mottled white patches where the plaques used to be. It didn’t last; it’s programmed into my genes, so my idiotic skin cells will keep repeating their errors forever.

As chronic disorders go, psoriasis isn’t a hard cross to bear, although the coal-tar gloop with which I once had to coat myself twice daily made my grip a tad slippery. The constant itch is like the smell of oxygen, or the sound of traffic for someone living on a busy road. Because it’s there all the time, it ceases to be noticed. I only focus on it when it’s severe or when it ceases. I’m told that when my skin is bad, I tire easily and become irritable. As excuses go, that’ll do.

I don't believe in posting idle chit-chat of no substance, even though you might fairly observe that this is a good description of most of my output to date. In the interests of accuracy then, I'll just say that I don't believe in posting unless I can paint my subjective witterings with a sheen of structure and an impression of importance.

This is a brief apology to my regular readers for my meagre output of late, particularly Mark who likes the sci-fi. I've been busy, sore, lazy and evasive, in that order.

I've also been tempted by the Dark Side in the form of Helium.com. This US website publishes adequately written articles on various subjects or debates, involves contributors in a peer rating system and pays out if you do well. I've submitted nine pieces over the last fortnight, all of which have been rated #1 at some point, and my earnings just exceeded $0.20. I've worked out that if I can pump out 500 decent articles (about 300,000 well chosen words) per day indefinitely, I could make a living from this.

Helium must be the most pious and self-satisfied blog site out there, so much so that it denies even being a blog site. Still, it gives me an excuse to snipe at American cultural hubris. I only hope I haven't made it onto an NSA database as that could put a crimp in our trip to California next month.

I wanted to get back into fiction today, but my new drug regime made this challenging. I've been combining declufenac and cocodamol for 16 months; my body's so used to them that I'm getting all of the side effects and not much benefit. My new plan is to take a hefty muscle-relaxant at night to ensure a proper rest and then get by on paracetamol and machismo during the day.

My new pill, Amitriptyline, does make you comfortably numb but isn't to be recommended if you want to function well enough to drive a car, write a story or speak to anyone before 5pm the next day. I could however manage a splenetic rant of middling quality as a probable farewell to Helium. I also managed a very groggy pilates session before lunch, after which I was lulled into a long doze by the soothing tones of the Antiques Roadshow team. I was hoping my GP would prescribe me Vicodin so that I could model myself on Dr House, but sadly I don't get on very well with opiates; hospital morphine just made me paranoid, sweaty and loud (even more so than usual).

Sorry, this was supposed to be a short note. Thanks for tuning in and normal service will be resumed. Eventually.

A society in which a woman has no right to choose abortion would be a morally stunted one, fit to take its place with those patriarchal, medievalist theocracies where women remain the chattels of men and bigotry is law.

As a devoutly secular Brit, I resent and reject the assumption that faith and morality are synonymous. I therefore believe that the pro-choice position is not a loosening of morals; it is rather a moral position founded in human reality rather than unthinking religious dogma.

Human fertility is a gift, a gift that by fluke of biology some decent people of my acquaintance were denied. Yet my day job has brought me into contact with the worst society has to offer, third generation drunks, thieves, robbers and junkies, most of whom are amazingly fertile. Conceived with all the care and thought that would go into a sneeze, I met many screaming infants who, to paraphrase Dickens, would have screamed all the louder had they known what life had in store for them. Most of these tots were doomed to follow their parents into lives of misery, crime, social alienation and early deaths. Mysterious ways indeed.

I’m not for a second suggesting termination on the basis of a parent’s social status. I do however believe that quality of life matters more than life alone. If a young woman without the means or desire to raise a child sought an abortion at an early stage, which is better for the woman and her society? An unwanted child that might have a miserable life while ruining hers and making both a burden to society; or the termination of a being that is certainly alive but a long way from being a sentient human.

The debate on how and where human life begins is a tangled one, and even within the pro-life movement there are those who favour early term abortions. Yet organised religion has always found it easy to sand the rough edges off difficult moral questions and the view that a human life is created at the point of conception still holds sway for millions.

Unflinching devotion to dogma so often leads to great cruelty. The Catholic Church hasn’t been persuaded to deviate from its pro-life prohibition of contraception by the deaths of tens of millions of Africans from HIV. Can it really be the case that those who fail to practice abstinence deserve agonising death? Does a 21st century pontiff really still believe that we should be controlled by our fertility and not vice versa, however appalling the cost? Would those sufficiently devoted to this principle to target abortion clinics accept that they’re placing more value on the life of a Western foetus than on an adult HIV-sufferer in South Africa?

Curtailing the right to abortion wouldn’t prevent unwanted pregnancies and enforce sexual abstinence any more than prohibition slaked the USA’s thirst for liquor. A society can’t be that easily reshaped by a minority whose views are so at odds with the views and inclinations of the majority. Yet this minority would doubtless be happy to see young women bear the burden of their principles, either by gambling with their lives in backstreet clinics, languishing in jails for the sin of being human, or giving up their aspirations for an unwanted child, regardless of whether the child is severely disabled or the product of rape.

Why does the pro-life cause entail such tunnel-vision? Artificial termination is not without a natural precedent: Miscarriages occur when the body makes its own brutal decision that a foetus isn’t viable. Is that life more or less sacred for the lack of human choice? Should it be seen as God’s will and therefore beyond question? If human life is so sacred, what of pro-lifers who serve in the armed forces, own guns or drive cars? They are after all gambling with their own lives and the lives of others.

Shouldn’t pro-lifers spend a bit more time protesting outside army bases, munitions factories or the Vatican? It is telling that their supposed concern for human life doesn’t extend beyond spitting biblical venom at desperate young women and the medical practitioners who brave harassment and violence to help them.

US foreign policy has been defined by its schizoid nature. A nation forged in revolution against an imperial colossus has for two centuries struggled to accept that it has taken the mantle of its historical nemesis. Yet even a teenage superhero can understand that with great power comes great responsibility. For a superpower, foreign policy requires constant investment in far more than kevlar and jet-fuel.

On 11th September 2001, I watched events in the US with the same slack-jawed horror as much of the rest of the world. I also found myself fervently hoping that such a brazen expression of hatred for the US would make the Bush administration pause for thought. Had reckless foreign policy adventures created dangerous new enemies? Should those policies be jettisoned or re-thought? How in the aftermath of Cold War victory had the US managed to lose the battle for hearts and minds so completely? This iconic outrage would after all come to define the early 21st century and should be made a cause for securing peace, not a new excuse for blundering and bloody foreign adventures.

The Bush response was distinguished only by its cynicism. The Afghan intervention was predictable and justifiable; the Taliban were one of the world’s most egregiously cruel regimes and there was an audit trail between Al-Qaeda and Kandahar. The Iraqi intervention however was based on a lie so monstrous that even Hitler would have blushed. Attempts to shore up this lie in the US and the UK were derisory, but almost as shocking as the dishonesty of statesmen was their public’s willing credulity.

To justify an aggressive and wholly imperial intervention in Iraq, Bush insinuated a link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. Blair reinforced the Bush policy line, possibly in defiance of his own sensibilities, because acting as trusty sidekick to the US is the UK’s only remaining route to great power status. As if to prove that ignorance and hatred are good bedfellows, ordinary Americans not only approved of the intervention, they indulged in vociferous loathing for anyone at home or abroad who dissented. Seemingly without irony, those who didn’t tow the Bush line were castigated as enemies of freedom and democracy.

The 9/11 attack caused in the region of 3,000 civilian deaths. So far, the invasion of Iraq has caused in excess of 80,000 civilian deaths. Plainly, the Iraqi death toll was always going to be inconsequential; the deaths were less dramatic and more mundane than those searing images of New York, and in any case US politicians weren’t losing voters. Yet even for those who only consider coalition deaths noteworthy, nearly 4,000 US military personnel have died in Iraq since 2003. The nightmarish unravelling of Iraq was foreseeable but so intent was the Bush administration on staking its claim that it brushed aside any intelligence that didn’t fit its case and had no glimmer of a long-term plan for the reconstruction. It is telling that Bush’s great act of bathos, declaring ‘Mission Accomplished’ from the deck of USS Abraham Lincoln, happened almost five years ago.

This isn’t to say that Saddam Hussein wasn’t an ugly despot, but there are many despots in the world inflicting all manner of ills on their people without ever falling foul of the US. Indeed, the US, never squeamish about Realpolitik, was happy to support Saddam when he was a secular bulwark against Iranian clericalism. As FDR supposedly said of an earlier wicked ally, he “may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”

When Russian conscripts were the victims of militant Islamists in the shape of the Mujahideen, the US was happy to nurture them. Decades later, their heirs and torch-bearers have come down from the Hindu Kush with vengeful eyes fixed on their one-time benefactor. Ever generous, the US has given them a powerful recruiting sergeant: an illegal Western occupation of Iraq.

Like Wilson and FDR before them, the next White House incumbent will have to face the fact that however insular their public is, the US is a global power and its actions, omissions and outlook will have consequences at home and abroad for generations to come. As if their job weren’t difficult enough, Mr Bush has left them a great deal of repair work to do and should forfeit his deposit.

I don’t believe in miracles, but my disbelief comes from a position of authority: I’ve experienced a few. As I don’t believe in any kind of divinity, I can’t believe in the kind of miracle agonised over by Vatican conclaves, whereby some divine power suspends the workaday rules of nature to make a point to his or her followers. I do however believe in the less ostentatious, secular variety of miracle, which is really nothing more than a remarkable happenstance. The two meanings are poles apart; yet one denies wonder while the other affirms it.

We live in a complicated universe which is only intelligible at a subjective level. We understand events in the ways that serve us best. If I were to walk away unscathed from a spectacular plane crash leaving every one of my fellow passengers dead, newspapers would call my survival miraculous. Various strands of supernatural belief might colour this response: Perhaps God had reached out to shield me from the impact; my guardian angel might have persuaded me to sit in Row Z behind the bulkhead; good karma could have paid me a dividend.

But would it then follow that my fellow passengers somehow deserved their fate, having all been less obedient to their deity, less respectful to their ancestors or less willing to hold doors open for strangers? Would it not have been simpler for the divinity to just prevent the mid-air collision, rather than orchestrating a complex sequence of flukes to save my very average self? If I were so favoured, what on earth did the divinity have against the others? The lazy, deus-ex-machina plot device makes us groan in the cinema but is less critically received in reality.

I had a real and nasty cycling accident last year: I was hit by a car at speed and I broke my back. I was improbably lucky in many ways. I wasn’t wearing a helmet but nothing hit my head. I was hit by a small car and I’m a big guy. I bounced onto the verge and not into oncoming traffic. Unusually for the road, the verge was wide, grassy and free of concrete, barbed wire and thorny plant-life. One of my vertebrae disintegrated but I retained full use of all my limbs. I feel enormously lucky, but that luck is dumb and non-judgemental. For every accident like mine, many more end in death or paralysis. Conversely, others result in nothing more than bruised pride and road rage. I feel I should be grateful, but grateful to what? I don’t believe in any supernatural force capable of being thanked.

When I let my eyes drink in the night sky, I find the appalling immensity of creation miraculous. The fact that my eyes are here to see it at this precise point in an incomprehensible span of space and time is miraculous. When my sister gleams with joy at the sight of her firstborn, a ruddy, kicking and bright-eyed affirmation of life, she's looking at a miraculous end to a long struggle, both personal and evolutionary. When I read about the torments that have defined human life for most of recorded history, I find it miraculous that I live in centrally-heated comfort without fear of hunger, disease or war. The miracle is that all of these wonders are within the scope of nature, not in the gift of something outside it.

We need thank no supernatural entity, but if we have known any joy or wonder, and have been spared the worst that human history has to offer, we should acknowledge our debt to pure dumb luck and human endeavour. After all, if you flip a coin enough times, you’ll eventually get heads ten times in a row.

It is a perverse truth of our technological age that growing up with instant access to knowledge has made teenagers steadfast in their ignorance of anything outside their virtual communities.

A recent poll in the UK uncovered some disturbing facts. A worrying 53% of British teenagers believe Richard the Lionheart was real. Is this because Sean Connery’s deus-ex-machina appearance in ‘Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves’ was so authentic a portrayal of armorial masculinity that it demanded belief? Is any part of his story credible? The warrior king, having been handed England on a plate, spends his best years fighting legendary battles with Saladin, building castles, and being the hostage of exotic princelings, without seeing the need to learn English; England bleeds itself dry to pay the ingrate’s ransom and he promptly gets himself killed by an arrow of poetic justice while taunting the defenders of a besieged castle. This is patently a fairy tale.

An almost sacrilegious 35% believe King Arthur never existed. He is the founding father of Albion, the Once and Future King, the hero who wielded Excalibur and preserved some vestige of Roman civilisation from the depredations of Saxon marauders. The fact that the Dark Ages took a hefty toll on documentary records doesn’t mean we should so lightly forget our saint, founder and protector. Perhaps this is the hour of our great need and his return is imminent. Maybe the movie industry is again partly to blame for the confusion. They always feel compelled to put the Knights of the Round Table in the kind of plate armour that wasn’t seen until the 12th century.

A perhaps forgivable 42% believe Sherlock Holmes only existed in print. The cause for confusion is that Holmes’ life and case histories were dramatised by Arthur Conan Doyle, a man known for his imaginative if overwrought novels. Holmes shied away from publicity, even leaving 221B Baker Street when his chronicles became popular and maintaining he’d never lived there. Consequently, the world’s greatest detective, and the inspiration for the revolutionary police training manual, ‘Lestrade’s Guide To Crime Scene Integrity & The Trusty Route To The Gallows’, lives only in fiction and cliché.

A massive 80% of those questioned think Winston Churchill was a flesh and blood historical figure. They seriously believe that a portly, cigar-chewing eccentric in a bowler hat with a penchant for vulgar hand gestures led our nation through the greatest crisis in its long history. Don’t they realise he was a post-war creation of The Goons? The gorgeous rhetoric written by that comic quartet for Harry Secombe’s slurring and usually blotto alter ego, ‘Winnie’, no doubt helped make the character seem too familiar to be fictional.

A generation of fuzzy thinking has forced teachers to abandon the mere teaching of facts. Instead, they must gently invite their snarling charges to imagine how hot and sweaty it was below decks at Trafalgar, or how difficult it must have been for Flemish tallow-dippers to cool their wax with the Inquisition in town. Even if those gentle scholars choose to forego texting Jezza about Tezza who might be a Lezza for more than five minutes and actually want to learn, they have no framework of facts and chronology onto which they can graft these insipid insights. History is about distinctions and explaining those distinctions, not about pretending we’re all the same and everything can be understood without too much effort.

The truth has made me free of inconvenient facts and this counterfactual conceit would fool too many people. Knowledge may be powerful, but ignorance is far more popular. To paraphrase Hitler, if you’re going to tell a lie, make it a big one and you’ll find a willing audience.

It's a stark and unpalatable truth that gender selection has been going on for millennia, often in the most brutal fashion and for barely rational reasons. It still occurs regardless of rarefied debates on ethics.

I subscribe to the secular, Western take on this issue. One gender or another should not be regarded as a disease, nor in a right-thinking society be regarded as a social or economic millstone for parents. Advances in genetic science should not be used to indulge the vanity of parents who want to pre-order linebackers or ballerinas; nor should they be a pretext for certain religious communities to air their ancient prejudices.

The raw science isn’t at fault, it’s just that the application is problematic. If we’re given the means to eradicate genetic diseases that cause suffering and impair quality of life, we should use them. Perhaps if technology and resources one day permit it, the hit-list of diseases should include eczema and myopia as well as cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy. But does it then follow that poor hand-eye coordination or a probable lifespan below 90 are genetic defects to be repaired? What if functional immortality is one day possible? Would we be tempted to accept sterility and cultural atrophy to dodge the reaper? Should governments try to engineer equal numbers of men and women in the interests of contentment?

It is far too easy for this debate to drift into the lofty terrain where genetic science mutates into science fiction. Germline gene therapy, whereby DNA is repaired before replication, remains theoretical. Somatic gene therapy, the repair of genetic disease in isolation with no prospect of propagating a corrected version, is still an experimental area. The crude truth is that genetic science can typically only cure a disease by identifying its probable occurrence, thereby allowing parents to avoid or terminate a conception.

In this way, a clinical argument can arise for certain parents to choose a gender. For example, Haemophilia is a recessive disorder linked to the X-chromosome. Women carry the disorder but have another X-chromosome to mask it. The Y-chromosome however cannot mask the defect so even though a male child can’t propagate the disease, they are likely to manifest it. If the means were available, a medical practitioner would have to advise a female carrier against having a male child if at all possible.

Yet even here, there is danger. Widely available genetic screening and awareness of its potential might see us stumbling into a new culture of eugenics. A combination of free parental choice and the preferences of employers and insurers would not only make genotypes of the wrong profile or gender less desirable than ever, it might prevent many of them being born at all.

We might come full circle and share a dilemma familiar to the peasant farmer in the Yangtze Basin. The cultural pressures acting on him and his forebears have created a warped demographic in South-East Asia whereby men outnumber women by tens of millions. The disproportion is large enough to mirror the excess of females in the countries most damaged by the two world wars.

While Bangalore leads a regional technological revolution, elsewhere in India ‘dowry deaths’ still occur. In China, it is illegal for doctors to disclose a child’s gender before birth. Where male children are culturally and economically useful and their sisters deemed a burden or a liability, parents will too often follow an old pattern. The ability to determine gender in utero is a relatively recent development, so historically infanticide has been far more common than any other form of choosing a baby’s gender.

This debate can’t be led by science, as technology only changes the means by which old prejudices are enacted. Unless positive cultural change is pursued, gender selection in all its time-honoured horror will keep happening regardless of how people in white coats, pin-stripe suits or GAP t-shirts feel about it.

Our aircraft’s wingtips traced endless, snow-laden pine trees. It was early afternoon in February and the sun was dwindling. Unlike the carefully man-managed forests of Western Europe, there were no boundaries to hem in the vast spaces below. The trees stood jaggedly uneven in size and widely spaced: so fleeting is the summer that a pine can take a century to mature and must fight for every ray of light.

We landed at Kittila in Finnish Lapland, several hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. The coldness was raw and instant, the wind chill breathtaking; yet the pilot had reported an unseasonably warm daytime high of -9°C. The airport was one short runway and a spartan arrivals hall on a rink of compacted ice. As I trudged across the apron, I imagined myself a defecting spy and half-expected to find George Smiley waiting at passport control.

I’d embarked on a seven-day ski trip in the Finnish resort of Yllas. Like its sister resort Levi, Yllas has a truly arctic winter. In October some lakes freeze thickly enough to be navigable by truck and maps show seasonal roads crossing their waters. In December, the shortest day yields 46 minutes of light. The ambient temperature can drop to -50°C.

In Manchester, I’d foolishly decided to get Euros from a Finnish cash machine to avoid commission. Finland was after all a keen new member of the EU. I then discovered that neither Kittila nor Yllas possessed such novel technology and I boarded the airport bus with €4 to my name. With two large beers costing a truly Scandinavian €15, this was a problem. As my hundred-item Visa statement would demonstrate, so common was this dilemma for locals and tourists alike that packets of chewing gum and bus tickets could be paid for by credit card without fuss. The armchair explorer really could survive an arctic winter with two skis and one piece of plastic.

I hadn’t come to Yllas as a ski aficionado. I’d skied once before in the popular Swiss resort of Crans-Montana. I fancied myself an intermediate skier because I’d survived my own inept enthusiasm. Better skiers than I told me that Yllas, whose slopes rise from 200 to 700 metres, didn’t offer enough diversity or challenge to engage the advanced skier for long.

It did however offer a friendly learning environment, largely free of the competent but intolerant central Europeans cramming Alpine slopes. When my black runs ended in farcical calamity with limbs and paraphernalia spread across the hillside, I generally found an affable Finn had picked up most of the pieces while I was still eating snow. I improved my parallel turns and learned to spot studious pity from 50 paces.

Practically and culturally, cross-country skiing is of far greater importance to the Finns than the frivolous downhill variety. Walking uphill or downhill, through crystalline woods or across frozen lakes, the five to eighty-five year old locals sliced through the landscape with speed, grace and irritating ease.

How hard could it be? I hired cross-country skis for a day and neglected to have lessons. I spent ten minutes moon-walking and a further hour teetering like a new-born foal might if it had electrified planks strapped to its hooves. I tainted the pure air with a blue fug of obscenity. In true British style, I politely declined local help, insisting I’d get used to it. The locals believed me as only a Martian could find cross-country skiing tricky. I fell badly and hobbled to my hotel, muttering and occasionally slapping myself to keep warm.

My hotel in Akaslompolo was a quick ski or a very long limp from the slopes. My room offered triple glazing and a sauna in the bathroom to help melt away the daily aches. The cafeteria served reindeer stew or sushi, depending on whether Western or Japanese guests prevailed. While the hotel and other bars were friendly if uninspiring, the frightening cost of drinks steered me towards debatably healthier extra-curricular activities.

For true refreshment, find a Finn prepared to take you to their lakeside cabin. While the sauna warms to stellar core temperatures, your host will chainsaw a person-sized hole in the metre thick lake ice. You will be encouraged to strip to your smalls, sit in the sauna until your fingerprints dissolve and then skip outside and into the freezing water. Do this slowly and you won’t do it at all. I felt like a red-hot poker in a bucket of ice. My gulping lungs and lump-hammer heart tried to leave through my mouth. My male pride would have fitted in a pixie’s matchbox. The shock was exhilarating and deeply cleansing. Awakening to the joys of masochism, I eagerly rinsed and repeated.

That evening I felt overdressed in two layers of underclothes and one-piece thermal bodysuit. I’d joined a nocturnal skidoo safari and had been briefed to expect a balmy –20°C with wind-chill and chafing for overzealous ice-plungers. Our guide Reiner was native to Akaslompolo and revelled in its remoteness. He said the village had escaped being razed by the Germans during the war because they hadn’t known it was here. He and his compatriots spent the winter running the ski resort, keeping huskies sleek and reindeer fat, making Santa Claus real and ensuring that skidooing and ice-fishing are rarely lethal. He would spend the brief and humid summer in the fathomless forest, hunting, fishing, getting drunk and stargazing.

With a sharp eye for the incompetent, Reiner linked me to the machine’s ignition by a dead-man’s cord and told me how to start and stop. Hand signals were exchanged and six snarling half-tracks volleyed into the pellucid night. Skidoos accelerate smartly and steer less so. Reiner set a hair-raising pace and showed that speed, noise and whip-cracking wind-chill are best experienced on twisting and pitted tracks lined by trees that positively will not get out of your way.

We halted deep in the forest. A hexagonal Lappish shelter found form in the shadows, darkly solid and stocked with firewood and reindeer pelts. Reiner lit a fire with sleight of hand and made coffee. Cleaving to firelight in a landscape transfixed by frozen distance, he told tales of bears, wolves and hard liquor. I’ll be sorely disappointed if the mundane business of skiing is the highlight of my next winter holiday.

Played well, football (or soccer for our American cousins) is simply gorgeous. From an unseemly fracas over the movement of a pig’s bladder from one end of a patch of dirt to another, it has evolved into something sublime. Athletes as honed, pampered and highly strung as race horses use all their grace and grit to transport that elusive ball into the goal and their fans into a state of rapture.

For good or ill, all of a player’s strengths and weaknesses are on show. He has no body armour to hide his blushes and cushion the blows. The contest doesn’t grind to a halt every 30 seconds for him to gather his thoughts while the audience endures another word from the sponsors. However he performs, he knows that the football fan has an endless appetite for glory when things go well, and a bottomless reservoir of vitriol when things don’t. As legendary Liverpool manager Bill Shankly famously quipped, “Some people believe football is a matter of life and death......I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”

I can’t maintain this tone. I’ve tried to see the best in the sport but I can’t get past the fact that football is a great game tarnished by greed, cynicism and violence. Speaking as an Englishman, I believe football showcases some of the worst my society has to offer.

The rot starts early. Children play in junior leagues where they learn teamwork and coordination and improve their fitness. This is all very laudable until match day, when they are taught the rudiments of football culture by their spectating parents. First, the decision of the referee or any other authority figure is never final, and attempts should be made to overturn that decision by phlegm, threats, intimidation and, if you can get away with it, violence. Second, you should never foul an opponent unless you can get away with it. Third, you should take any opportunity to collapse in screaming agony if it might appear to a distracted referee that an opponent might have fouled you, assuming of course that you can get away with it.

This behaviour is legitimised from on high. Gamesmanship of the most brazen order is an accepted feature of the professional game at all levels. It is not just accepted, it is expected and admired. Tackles that amount to criminal assault and feigned injuries good enough for the Oscars are common. For a fine tableau, refer to the Rooney groin stamp and Ronaldo wink from the 2006 World Cup, still available on YouTube.

Once upon a time, it would have been hard to prove intentional cheating after the fact; but given that we’ve had video recording for decades, it seems that nobody’s interested in cleaning up the game. It might be argued that such measures would disrupt the flow and timing of a complex event; yet in international rugby, the referee won’t hesitate to stop the clock to make sure any dubious call or thrown punch can be investigated by his counterpart in the video booth.

Many young, top-flight footballers were spotted early, tipped for greatness and raised in a rarefied environment where money was easy and winning was everything. It would therefore be surprising if testosterone-fuelled spats didn’t occur, both on and off the pitch. What does surprise is how little social responsibility the sport accepts.

In 2001, Leeds United players including Lee Bowyer and Jonathan Woodgate were tried for their involvement in a serious racist assault. Bowyer was acquitted and Woodgate given community sentence for a lesser offence. The jurors put their loyalty to their favourite team above their duty to justice and saw to it that the lads were looked after. The club itself neither punished nor disavowed their players, both of whom were able to resume their lucrative careers unimpeded. What would a premiership footballer have to do to harm his career? Would a policeman, teacher, children’s TV presenter or other role model have kept their job in similar circumstances?

The truth is that public or private morality doesn’t matter to the clubs because the money will keep rolling in. They will remain in clover as long as the unthinkingly loyal fans keep buying the product; the tribal brand, the pay-per-view channel, the £50 seat behind a pillar, yet another replica away-kit, a feeling of belonging, a righteous excuse for a punch-up.

I rarely join in with football conversations and was chastised by a former boss for this lack of an essential social skill. Everywhere, perfectly rational people treat a passion for football as a social lingua franca. Seemingly nowhere is that seen as ludicrous. It’s as if the sport is so intertwined with our culture it can do no wrong and, like a baby or an alcoholic uncle, must be embraced with all its blemishes and bad habits. Should I just accept that we get the sport we deserve?

I stepped off the dirty chrome Greyhound bus in Livingstone, Montana, several thousand metres above sea level, and wondered why the rain was so warm. Looking up, I saw a bone-dry, guano-caked bus shelter. Looking down, I saw that the change of altitude had made my body depressurise with an explosive nosebleed. A lurid delta flowed across the front of my one tolerably clean t-shirt. This being a frontier town, my grisly apparition attracted barely a glance. Perhaps they thought I’d just looked at someone’s new pick-up truck the wrong way. I did however get a sympathetic discount and a free roll of toilet paper when I bought another t-shirt at a nearby drug store.

I’d decided to spend my long summer break from university working abroad with the help of the BUNAC ‘Work America’ programme. The previous summer had seen me filing Social Security claims in Manchester. Oddly, this convinced me I was at heart a wilderness man. So it was that I found a job in Yellowstone National Park, that tangled knot of wild nature, ferocious geology and rapacious tourism high in the Rocky Mountains.

Two more slow bus-rides later, I arrived at my destination, groggy and with a familiar tang of copper in my nostrils. What I initially took for heat haze was in fact an endless, teeming cloud of mosquitoes. In the months to follow, revulsion for these whining fiends faded to irritation, occasionally relieved by maniacal laughter when one of the blighters found a vein, causing it to flood its own body and explode with a bubble-wrap pop.

At home, I’d wanted to tell anyone who’d listen that I’d be grappling with bears, moose, landslides, firestorms and the kind of danger you’d be pushed to find in the S to Z section of Social Fund claims to year ending 1990. The few who listened treated me to ‘Yogi Bear’ impressions and, with an eye to my undergraduate beer belly, urged me to keep off the ‘pickernick baskets’.

‘Ranger Smith’ I wasn’t. My job would involve cleaning cabins, mopping floors and counting the takings at the resort of Roosevelt Lodge for the then minimum wage of $4 per hour. The resort lay in a spectacular river valley in the north of the park. It was once used by President Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt for hunting grizzlies, hence the nickname for the stuffed variety of bear. Dispersed through the surrounding forest, with its 100-foot lodgepole pines, hunkered log cabins of varying quality, the best for the luxury travellers, the worst for the staff to share.

My first cabin was a crash-course in trailer-park life. I entered the cabin having ignored the strange knocking sounds coming from the inside of the door. I narrowly missed losing my heritage to a razor-edged throwing star being used for target practice by Pat. He’d just returned from a ‘Hell’s Angels’ bonanza in Texas where he’d acquired new and exciting edged weapons with which to while away the long evenings.

Pat wore a confederate headscarf, had gaps in his teeth and chewed matchsticks. They might have enrolled him in the Nazi Party, but he’d have had to tone down his views. He shared a bunk with Billy from Arkansas, a believer in the Old Testament, guns and his sweetheart, Peggy-Lou. My bunk groaned beneath Tom, a 20 stone aficionado of doughnuts, pornography and wrestle-mania. It took me a few days to believe that David Lynch hadn’t created a parade of poor white stereotypes just for my edification. But they were real enough and I got on with them surprisingly well when they weren’t complaining about how difficult my ‘English’ English was to understand. I could have made a living just repeating ‘Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’ for their amusement.

But I didn’t spend the whole summer with them. Everywhere I looked, there was wilderness aching to be explored, and little else by way of entertainment. Like any American school, the resort was very tribal. I never found much in common with the ‘jocks’, much less the genuine wranglers who staffed the resort’s corral. They were troubled by any music not featuring steel guitar and lavished their time on their horses, their trucks and their women, in that order. While the ‘rednecks’ were intriguing, I turned to the ‘stoners’ and the ‘geeks’ as trekking companions. They had a less insular line in conversation and shared my desire to plunge into the great outdoors with only a hazy regard for safety.

Jeff and Curtis, two textbook stoners from Sacramento, narrowly escaped oblivion when driving through a landslide area with the ‘Grateful Dead’ playing at dynamite-volume on the car stereo. The late Mr. Garcia dislodged enough rock to half crush their car. They both walked away, grateful and alive.

We launched an expedition into bear country every weekend. Typically, bears are shy of humans but can be lethally bad-tempered if surprised. It was therefore wise to move through the backcountry as noisily as possible. As for camping, ‘Arkansas Billy’ was indispensable for his ability to shimmy up sheer pines in order to store food out of reach of scavenging bears. Not only are they attracted to cooking smells, they are also drawn to strong human scent. ‘Trail sex’ might therefore develop into an ugly ménage-a-trois.

I was blessed with many jaw-dropping experiences. I crawled to the peak of an almost sheer mountain, its sides bristling with 65 million year old fossil trees, looked out over the vastness of the continent and, to mangle Walt Whitman, sounded “my barbaric yawp” across the rooftops of the world. I spent most of a day crossing a few miles of broken rock where a mountain had fallen on its side and shattered like china. I tiptoed around flat pools and upright cathedrals of boiling mud where the earth’s crust had split to afford a glimpse of primeval forces beneath. I saw hundreds of buffalo cross a road in front of me and swim a lake to find better grazing. I slept in a meadow to be awoken by the banshee wail of coyotes all around.

I saw bears too many times and too near for comfort. Most memorably, I found myself being stared down by a black bear with a cub from about 50 yards away. Mothers with young are about as aggressive as bears get but she placidly decided I was no threat at all and moved on. Perhaps the fact that I was wearing Marigolds swung it.

The daily work was ditchwater dull but a good means to an end. I changed linen, I restocked firewood and I mopped up vomit from overfed children. I baked by day, froze by night and was eaten alive by mosquitoes. I would wake in the small hours as mice and chipmunks ran over my face and hands. We took to leaving kitchen scraps on the floor so they’d leave our bunks alone. This was a gap-year gulag.

One of the delights of communal living was writing postcards in a bottom bunk by torchlight while a couple enjoyed frantic, bed-jolting congress above. I suppose the mosquitoes would have made things a bit bothersome outdoors. Drink and drugs were the alternative to sex. By season’s end, my cabin had something in the region of 400 beer cans to dispose of and a Union Jack bandana to stake my claim to that metal mountain.

The summer season closed and the snows appeared in September. Within a few weeks, most of the resorts would become inaccessible to all but snowmobiles and cross-country skiers. When the last guests left, the janitor covered the furniture, disconnected the mains and boarded up the windows. Once sealed, the resort was reminiscent of ‘The Shining’.

The evening of the inevitable farewell party was warm enough but the stars were pellucid and I could taste winter in the thin air. The wranglers found cause to have a good, old-fashioned fistfight, perhaps because one of them had been driving his new pick-up down a mountain pass when his passenger reached over and turned off the ignition as a joke. The steering lock had come on and the truck had slithered off the road and down a ravine. They’d lived to be stupid another day. Yet whenever I hear the country dirge, ‘Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?’, I imagine an overturned pick-up at the bottom of a ravine, reeking of gasoline, beer and horse-sweat.

Never happy to be a bystander, I scaled the roof, struck the Stars and Stripes from the flagpole and hoisted my Union Jack bandana in its place. The normally reserved and by now inebriated resort manager decided he was Paul Revere and spent the rest of the evening hunting me with a revolutionary glint in his eye. I hid on the roof with my equally sozzled date and watched the stars and satellites scudding through the fine, clean night.

The next summer, I worked in a bank, filing loan applications.

Rape is an appalling and gross violation and must be dealt with to the severest extent of the law. It is also to be hoped that we as a culture have dispensed with the notion that girls in short skirts are asking for it, that ambiguous signals may be taken as ‘yes’, and that the outlay for drinks and dinner entitles a chap to droit de seigneur. It is therefore reasonable to expect gasps of editorial outrage that only something like 5% of rape allegations result in convictions.

In my working life, I’ve had some experience of investigating and prosecuting rape cases. The perennial responses from press and government to this 5% issue therefore strike me as being uniformly craven. There is much talk of sloppy, old school investigators trying to downplay, downgrade and undermine complaints. There are unworkable notions about tinkering with standards of evidence for this criminal offence and no other, as if society’s sexual mores can be reverse-engineered from the Old Bailey.

Rarely are the issues of personal responsibility and sexual emancipation fully aired. There is never any mention of the staggering number of spurious allegations. Furthermore, as fear of masked sexual predators roaming the land adds spice, it is rarely made clear that stranger rape is not at issue here: the statistical spike is overwhelmingly the result of rape allegations where the suspect is a partner or a named acquaintance.

Perhaps it is to be expected that the criminal justice agencies should pay for the sins of their fathers. There are still serving officers who remember the days when all but the most ardent rape victims were bullied out of the station, and giving evidence in court has barely evolved from trial by ordeal. Yet it is my recent experience that most rape allegations now result in lengthy, thorough and expensive investigations, regardless of any misgivings the reporting officer might have.

As a young investigator with what I took to be thoroughly modern and enlightened views, I approached rape enquiries with an open mind. I became jaded very quickly. In two years, I dealt with one case that was both genuine and provable and resulted in a conviction. I was involved in a dozen others which followed a depressing pattern.

An inebriated young woman would meet an inebriated young man in a pub or club, they would return to one of their homes and there would be some haphazard activity ranging from fully-clothed fumbling to full penetration. In the cold, hung-over light of day, perhaps in conversation with friends, the young woman would decide that she couldn’t really have wanted the tawdry encounter and that it must therefore have happened without her consent. After a gruelling intimate examination, she would spend a day being interviewed by a specialist police officer.

In the meantime, the young man, generally without any kind of criminal record, would be arrested, subjected to an equally gruelling process and made a rape suspect. He would typically admit sexual contact, particularly if he had legal advice, and insist it was consensual. Provability would then become crucial. In circumstances like these, it becomes logically impossible to prove rape to the standard of criminal evidence without independent witnesses or clear evidence of force.

Within weeks, the young woman will generally withdraw the complaint for a variety of reasons. She might spontaneously decide she wants to put the episode behind her without the ordeal of a crown court trial. She may decide retraction is the right thing to do without feeling the need to explain. It might be pointed out to her that the prosecuting authority won’t run the case because it simply can’t be proved.

Such drunken, town-centre liaisons can and do result in rape; they are rightly investigated as fully as possible and, where there is good circumstantial and forensic evidence, there are convictions. Yet such clear and genuine cases are in the minority, and to tinker with the law so that evidentially ambiguous and arguably false cases result in jail-time would be to invite gross miscarriages of justice.

It has been suggested that the law should be amended so that only sober consent can be true consent; anything else would make intercourse rape. But how could this be enforceable? Wouldn’t this entail an equally tricky debate on a suspect’s ability to gauge a victim’s state of mind while drunk himself? Would the legislature be sending out the message that in the 21st century, adults shouldn’t be allowed to make their own decisions unless they’re demonstrably sober?

I am mystified and genuinely in need of enlightenment. I have dealt with decent, articulate, self-possessed young women who have made false rape allegations for the most banal reasons. Incredibly, some women would rather tell their partners, and then the police, that they were raped by an acquaintance rather than admit an infidelity. Some women would rather see a one-night stand arrested for rape simply because they were too drunk to remember what happened, much less whether they consented to anything. On one occasion, a two-day rape investigation ensued from two people having dosed off on the floor fully clothed and zipped and without so much as a goodnight kiss.

I should emphasise that I’m not basing my confusion on intuition alone. I’ve often believed the victim whole-heartedly, having seen no reason not to. All too often, I’ve then seen CCTV or forensic evidence which starkly contradicted their stories. The question I’ve never satisfactorily been able to answer is why any rational person would so deceive themselves that having someone arrested for rape would seem preferable to confession or introspection.

False allegations still register in the statistics. They waste time and resources that could be used on genuine crime of every kind. They make criminal justice practitioners sceptical to the detriment of future victims. It would be useful to prosecute those responsible but here’s the rub; by the same standards of criminal evidence, it can be every bit as hard to disprove as to prove rape.

Ours is a schizoid culture when it comes to sex; prurient and prudish in equal measure. Young people are sexualised at an earlier and earlier age, often without access to informed guidance outside their peer group. Young women appear to subscribe to the ladette culture by matching the boys drink for drunk and insisting on the right to be predators as well as prey. Yet come the morning after, they are once more their mother’s daughters, grappling with shame and regret.

Rather than lazily reducing the problem to a set of statistical imperatives held together by legal gaffer-tape, wouldn’t it be more beneficial to admit that confused sexual morality permeates our culture, and that personal responsibility is at least as important as enforcement of the law?

Portal calls it a departure lounge. I knew that once those seals hissed into place behind me, departure would fall far short of describing what happened next. I would either be precisely and wholly in that space, or so fully and completely removed from it that I might as well never have existed in this universe. With a nod to that old feline paradigm, I knew some tech-drone was aching to commission a plaque on the wall of Remembrance mourning the day I was reduced to an indeterminate probability.

Not only was the notion of departure moot, there was nowhere to lounge. I peered through the airlock at a bare, spherical chamber, suffused in white light of a pure and epiphanic intensity. I asked Portal if all this razzle-dazzle was really necessary; after all, movie-makers only used this effect when they needed to suggest a kind of other-worldly wonder that we’re not quite capable of depicting or imagining. It admitted that the walls of the sphere were a permeable construct of hard light and could be any colour it chose; it felt an effect from the Pure Truth range would put me in the right mood. I reminded it of its earlier errors of judgement in matters of messianic mania and persuaded it to give me something in Cinnamon Latte.

I asked how was the reciprocity issue was coming along as the whiteness gave way to delicate ochre with a calming swirl of dusty red. It suggested I not worry my pretty little head about such matters as ensuring each universe retained its correct quotient of matter. It was sure it would find an equivalent and hopefully inanimate lump to bring back in my place. I shouldn’t lose too many organs, and should a sentient be grabbed by accident, Portal’s euthanasia and hygiene protocols were top notch. Perhaps, it conceded, it was joking, but until I got past my Boy’s Bumper Book of Cosmology, I didn’t deserve a sensible answer.

The debate usefully distracted me from the fact that the sphere was the business end of a spiral accelerator the size of a small city-state. When Portal set into motion the incomprehensible sequence of sub-atomic events that would turn me into abstract concept, I would in effect be strapped across the muzzle of a cannon that does far more than disrupt matter. Perhaps that’s why Portal wouldn’t let me chew gum or play with my atomic displacement utilities while I waited.

Once again, I’m about to disappoint the cinematically literate among you. My preparations for insertion would barely fill out a 50 second montage, and certainly wouldn’t merit a strident power ballad. Not for me the manful stride to the crew bus, pressure suit gleaming like plate armour, while flash bulbs popped, the world looked on with hungry wonder and the endless heavens gaped above it all.

I would have settled for a free quart of squirt at Social, rather than the reverent distance which suggested everybody thought I’d agreed to donate my brain to science. When I stepped off the levtrain at Portal’s bunker, I gave a clipped salute and a manful wink to the receptionist but it just made a choked sound somewhere between hilarity and incomprehension.

Portal is at least as exo-culturally literate as I am, so did at least pretend to be amused when I showed it a mocked up, beautifully crude 2D image of Mary-Lou who was waiting for me back home. We were, I insisted, letting my eyes drift to dewy pastures far away, going to settle down and raise llamas after the war. Portal didn't correct me; perhaps it was obeying the rule that veteran pilots don’t get close to replacements, or else it was reassessing my psych profile.

Once it had tox-screened me and satisfied itself my system was clean of squirt, bliss or bolster, it invited me to check my inventory again. I knew I didn’t need to; had anything been amiss, Portal would have told me so in precise terms. I went through the motions anyway, but I was happy with my suit as I’d been wearing it and playing with all its functions for months. I’d even been allowed access to an island city scheduled for deluge to test some of its more exotic capabilities. My bodily enhancements had been embedded for years and their use had become as innate as thinking and blinking.

Portal insisted the journey would be instantaneous, or would certainly seem that way to my mammal brain. I asked if it would refrain from suspending my consciousness during the transition. I wanted to look upon the void with my own senses, to truly see the space between. How could it deny me a glimpse of the interstice at the edge of existence, where colossal energies coiled and uncoiled, and galaxies blossomed and died in fabulous densities? Or was it afraid my mind would recoil from the void and allow primitive race memory to paint a purgatory of gnawing demons, blood-quenched fires and engines of torture?

Portal chose to emit a sigh, eloquent and final. From this I understood that my grasp of physics had once again disappointed, that I should spend less time dabbling in medieval art and that my questions didn’t therefore deserve a serious answer. Like a chimpanzee in a capsule, I didn’t need to grasp the science to do my job. Portal chose this moment to show off the acuity of its thought-mapping by offering me a banana, then assuring me I needn’t reply as it already knew where to stick it.

TBC