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Overheard on a bus recently: Small girl: 'Mummy can I have my ears pierced?' Mummy: 'Certainly not! If God had intended us to put rings through our ears, we'd have been born with the holes.' The child seemed to accept this pearl of wisdom without question, but it made me wonder just what earlobes ARE for, if not to dangle baubles from? What did God (if there is such a being - personally I'm sceptical but it pays to keep an open mind, just in case) intend us to do with those soft, flabby bits of flesh?. |
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It's understandable for an elephant to have huge floppy ears - if I remember my biology lessons correctly they use them as portable fans - but with the sort of summers we've been having that doesn't really apply to the average Londoner. And if it did, our earlobes would make rather a poor job of it. Earlobes are not the only part of the body I find strange. If you ask me, there are quite a number of design flaws. Redundant parts like appendices, which serve no useful function whatsoever but frequently go wrong and have to be removed in a hurry; parts which never seem to operate quite as they should, like the heart or the backbone; and the general fragility of the whole system. It really doesn't take much to mess the body up - bones break with startling ease, blood vessels get clogged with cholesterol (and unlike de-furring a kettle this cannot be removed). Vital parts wear out far too easily and replacing them is a chancy business. Not to mention the major diseases which ravage the body - cancer, diphtheria, cholera, typhoid... and the not-quite-so-fatal but still bloody unpleasant measles, chicken pox and mumps. And of course upset stomachs and the common cold, to which we all succumb with monotonous regularity. The human body even has trouble coping with its natural habitat. Not only is there hypothermia or, at the other extreme, heat exhaustion, but even sitting in the sun for too long can cause skin cancer. If an engineer was asked to build a machine and his initial design was such that it could not cope with the environment in which it would have to function, the blueprints would be thrown straight back marked 'could do better' in large red letters. If there is a God, He doesn't deserve a Blue Peter badge for this shoddy work. Obviously He was up against a tight deadline (only six days to complete the Earth and all its inhabitants) so He probably sub-contracted bits of it to other companies. Unfortunately, the organisation who got the contract to design and implement what should have been His supreme achievement - us - were not only inept, but also had a warped sense of humour. Wouldn't it be fun, they thought, if we play a few little practical jokes on The Boss - throw in a few teeny bugs and see if He spots them. Unfortunately, He didn't, and we have to live with the result of their childish pranks. Allergies - now there's a barrel of laughs. I can just imagine them having a really good time when they dreamed up hay fever... 'OK, God has decreed that there will be no British Summer, how about if on the odd occasion the sun does shine everyone starts to sneeze?' Nice one! And tooth decay. Why on Earth (or Heaven, or wherever they had their offices) did they build in the agony of toothache and the humiliation of false teeth, when they needn't have given us a sugar-craving in the first place? Or they might have made our teeth out of something that wasn't going to rot every time you actually used them for the purpose they were intended - stainless steel would have been a little more durable, or perhaps a hard plastic. And my own particular problem - obesity. Yes, I know the theory; store up the excess energy in the form of fatty tissue so when there isn't enough to eat you have something to fall back on. But personally I find it easier to nip down to MacDonalds when my larder is looking a bit bare. Or if I really do have to store what I can't burn up immediately, do I have to cart it around with me in great unsightly bulges? Can't I just shove it into the back of the wardrobe until I need it? There are, of course, particular problems which only women have to suffer. The most obvious is periods. Now I know men tend to a bit squeamish at the thought of menstruation, but you try living through it. For one week out of every four, between the ages of about 13 to 55, women endure the inconvenience of losing up to half a pint of blood (and believe me, half a pint might not look much in a beer glass but it goes an awful long way when there are no Tampax in the bathroom.) and if this mess isn't enough, it is accompanied by pain, nausea and depression. Given that this happens approximately 400 times in the life of an average woman, that adds up to 8 years of suffering. And 26 gallons of blood! Not for nothing is it known as 'The Curse'. Another thing men don't have to go through is childbirth. 9 months of carrying it around while it gets heavier and heavier. Morning sickness, backache, swollen ankles, piles, then the severe pain of the actual birth which can last several days. I think fish have a much better method - she lays the eggs, he fertilises them, and that's it. It's more practical, less painful and no-one has to take maternity leave. Breasts are a real nuisance. Large ones, like mine, just get in the way. They ruin the line of clothes, they wobble when I run, they are heavy and when I lie on my stomach I don't quite know where to put them. They're a total waste of space. I guess the male genitalia is just as much of an encumbrance in its own way, flopping and dangling, causing unsightly (and embarrassing) bulges. This is one area where women definitely have the advantage - all the necessary bits are neatly tucked out of the way. Of course this does make diagnosing faulty equipment slightly more tricky; in the case of what used to be coyly called a 'Social Disease' (I always considered them to be rather anti-social) men can identify problems straight away when strange spots start to appear; while women have to wait till it starts to hurt. Having fun always seems to have its penalties. Smoking is a killer, cream cakes are a no-no, and the body's response to alcohol leaves a lot to be desired. Drinking is fun. Getting pissed is great. Getting absolutely legless is wonderful. But hangovers - groan! They should have built in a mechanism whereby the body could eliminate the poisonous alcoholic residues with just a few hours of sleep; then we wouldn't have to suffer the blinding headaches, nausea, double vision, dizziness and all the other sensations that characterise the morning-after feeling. Just why are all the pleasurable things so bad? Obviously the Designers were such spoilsports that they couldn't stand the idea of anyone having a good time. And unfortunately they obviously still have the Maintenance Contract for the human body. They are so puritanical (which must stem from the fear that we enjoy ourselves more than they do) and so jealous of the gradual easing of sexual restrictions, the breakdown of taboos, that they unleashed AIDS on the world in order to put a stop to sex completely. It is possible that, with recent advances in Genetic Engineering, we will soon be in a position to tell the bastards where to stick their Maintenance Contract. We will soon be able to make all kinds of improvements to future generations. But until that is possible, we will just have to put up with the faulty equipment we have got, secure in the knowledge that if we were really made in God's image, at least he must be having a really miserable time too! |
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