In years gone by one of the highlights of any small town fair was not so much bowling for a pig, but rather the tug-of-war. For months beforehand largish members of the community would go into training with the primary aim of increasing their weight, if not their athletic prowess. Much of this training would of course occur “down the pub” and their would have been few hotels that didn’t “offer up a team” for the local championship; hotel owners and barkeepers were full of friendly advice as to just what the techniques and skills of winning actually might be – of course they did not themselves participate in the activity but they were fountains of well-meaning experience on tactics.
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Now that the academic year has begun in earnest, papers are full of educational psychologists making wise and wondrous comments on the mental health of school children and how parents and teachers can help their young ones gain the necessary advantages out of the education system.
It never ceases to amaze me that such words of wisdom are usually directed towards the needs of the young person when, as far as I can see, the needs of the parents are equally as important, particularly after those incredibly long summer holidays.
In the old days, of course, it was known as truancy, i.e. those young people who simply didn’t make the distance to their centre of learning and when the roll was called, there was no apple for the teacher, in fact no pupil at all.
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As school winds up to end-of-year examinations and then winds down to Christmas the psychological lot of your average 17-year-old scholar is not a happy one.
It is probably the same around the world.
Mary lived on a small South Pacific island, and had been brought up in the customary way, her life being ordered by the rituals of a society, which traces its origins back hundreds of years.
Her father was a pig farmer, a man of considerable influence within his own tribe, and her mother – well, like many people in similar circumstances she was an extremely hard worker but something of a second-class citizen.
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Doctor Jay has rarely during the time he has been writing this column meandered into the dangerous world of psychiatry as it relates to what I hope I can be forgiven for calling “the fair sex”. It should go on record that I am by nature an ardent feminist, and if at any time I am in danger of steering from the straight and narrow pathway, both my daughter and my wife make sure that I wake up and duly see the error of my ways, which of course I am only too pleased to admit to.
Which brings me specifically to the issues of surgery, hysterectomy, and mastectomy, that is those operations, normally performed by men, on women with some of the most frightening pathologies that can exist, and which cause the most enormous amount of suffering.
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