I have some theories to share with you today, they are not new theories but theories whose supporting evidence has been refreshed.
To start let me recount that at the grand age of 41 I am still capable of hard labour, this witnessed by a recent plumbing task. I merrily spent twelve hours hanging off 2′ pipe wrenches and clambering around like a monkey that had been painted in pipe compound, just like a 20 year old. That’s the thing with those of us that are manual workers, forget all those cucumber eye patches and retinoid D face packs girls, a bit of grease and sweat knocks 20 years off us every time.
It would be wrong of me not to acknowledge that I am not quite the 20 year old anymore, indeed I have a significantly higher surgical steel percentage than I did then. I am so used to not having the full use of my wrists that it barely slows me down and the effect is less noticeable when I am in my natural environment, who knows maybe those people that swear WD40 soothes their arthritis are onto something*. When I awoke at 3 am the following morning I will acknowledge however that Ms Nature was making herself busy and I was in some pain as a result of my earlier exertions.
Now I could wax lyrical in order to describe the level of pain in this particular interaction with the nefarious witch but I prefer a simple example. At 3 am I considered that Ibuprofen would be a reasonable concession and set about taking some, the first challenge was to get them out of the packet. It transpired that I was physically incapable of pressing tablets from those irritating blister packs, just couldn’t do it, so I resorted to slashing at the packs with a handy knife. Having removed the tablets and corralled the larger pieces into my hand I proceeded to throw them at the kitchen worktop. Why would I throw them at the worktop you may ask, indeed I asked the same question of myself and at 3am it took some figuring out I can tell you! In order to scoop something and throw it into your mouth you need to rotate your wrist** an ability that I had apparently lost hence the empty, but expectant, mouth. If a picture paints a thousand words then picture me, having swept the various pieces of tablet into a pile, sucking them off the kitchen worktop at 3am I think that explains it.
I cite this as a piece of evidence that the mind is certainly stronger than the body and secondly that I am still better than Ms Nature.
Next up I would like to recount a conversation that I had recently with a friend, its an oddly common conversation for single guys well at least for me. My position on relationships is well recorded, like rap music they are just not for me. When I debate this with female friends they invariably hit the point that ‘not all women are bad/wicked/like that’ which is odd because I have never claimed that, indeed some of my best friends are female. The truth is that I could make Mother Theresa into a venom spitting dragon, hell I don’t even get on with Ms Nature! For me this is all simple logic, if you put me in a room with a broken machine and a set of spanners then I will get dirty and it will get fixed, if you put me in a relationship with a woman she will turn into something out of the predator and try and kill me it is just what happens.
As always the debate rounded on the point that “the right one is out there” a statement that I have always taken to be rather more threatening than comforting. I can’t help that this statement is akin to shining a torch under your 6 year olds bed and saying “look no monsters, but there will be one day” keep your threats to yourself thank you very much. So the debate follows the standard form of bad experiences and determination ‘not to be beaten’ and ‘not to give up’ which all sounds very admirable but is it? Surely when faced with repeated disaster a wise person gives up, this is not failure this is education.
I got to thinking about this blind faith that my female friends exhibit in the certainty of love. At first I though that generations of reading Mills and Boon had somehow leached into the X chromosome so that women came preloaded with a cache of romantic fiction but that was too easy an answer, after all there must have been a time before romantic novels surely? I wondered if it was something that governments were doping Rosé wine with, after all if there is a more accurate female deployment system I have yet to hear of it, but hey the world has enough conspiracy theories. That’s when it struck me, it unique to women’s DNA because otherwise the human race wouldn’t be here! Before you start mailing me burning bras stick with me, I have a theory.
If both sexes had the blind faith gene we wouldn’t have survived past the first generation or, maybe if we were lucky, the second. Think back to our early days as a species when your man was out hunter gathering, his Mrs had to have blind faith that he would return and not leave her to starve. There were no cell phones, no Facebook to keep a watchful eye, having somebody check your phone is nowhere near as detrimental to gossip as having to ask them to light the fire for your smoke signals. But the world was a lovely place and your man would go about his hunting and gathering and your woman would wait, supported by her blind faith gene, for his return it all worked you see. Now you may be wondering how I am so certain that man doesn’t possess the blind faith gene, well perhaps another example is in order.
Man 1 meets man 2,3 &4 to head off and hunt for their families but its a bad day and, as they often did, they have to go for the veggie option and rely on the gatherers gene. They come across a large bush laden with red berries and man 1 steps up for the taste test after having lost the toss, he wolfs down a brightly coloured berry and they all wait. After man 1 dies a hideously painful death and his corpse lays at the foot of the tree what does man 2 do? of course he rallies the troops and they return to tell Mavis that Bob died a hero. But what if the male of the species carried the blind faith gene? well of course man 2 would presume that this was just bad luck and have at another berry, eventually man 4 would be standing at the top of a convenient pile of corpses thinking “what were the odds, still the right one for me must be here I won’t give up”. Disaster, nobody to tell Mavis and the girls that the men aren’t returning, they will simply be left trying to eat blind faith sandwiches until the end.
So there you have it, don’t ask us if we believe in love or that everyone is part of some couple sealed in fate. It isn’t our fault that we look at you like you are talking Martian, its simple genetics.
The author would like to point out that this is a scientific article and that he has nothing against the fairer sex, indeed he is quite fond of a fair number of them.
