If it wasn’t for the state of modern medicine then I would be dead by now. And so would my wife. So, probably, would quite a number of people I know who still enjoy a fairly healthy time of it. We are all thankful that we live in an era where surgeons no longer amputate with a rusty saw and a bottle of strong alcohol or cover us in leeches. And while we still almost certainly know a small fraction of what is yet to be discovered we also know these are better times.

When it comes to our health we seem to wander into a twilight zone where we are willing to accept all kinds of humiliation and indignities that we would not dream of allowing at any other time. We will stand before men and women we have never before met, stripped naked, and let them probe our bodies in the most intimate of ways that in other circumstances could land people in a lot of trouble. We freely give our consent to such assaults without argument or rancour.

But somewhere in this zone between normality and surrender there are other aspects that have little to do with what is to be done to us yet we accept them all the same and like any uniform they reduce us to a common level. And in normal circumstances we would surely not comply. Take, for example, hospital garb.

A couple of days ago I found myself in hospital for a slice of bodily assault known as a ‘procedure’ which I am not going to elaborate on. Well… OK. It involved a small camera being inserted into an orifice all right? Yes – a delicate orifice. This involved a trip to a theatre – I know not why it has this name – for which I had to be suitably dressed.

First up the gown which ties at the back. Women, so adept at connecting hook and eye on their bra can probably tie a neat bow behind the middle of their back but men are just not used to it. If you are without help then the only recourse is to try and tie the knot before getting into the gown which generally results in not being able to get your arms through the holes. You end up with the gown tied in the one place – at the neck – letting your bum see daylight for all to see.

Then come the knickers (shown in the picture). These are one size fits all and are made of a sort of stretchy tissue paper and for something so seemingly fragile they grip the bits men have got with a fierce determination. But they cover the bum which was previously available for public scrutiny although the view is hardly an improvement.

The feet go into a slipper made of light foam. These slippers are not really foot shaped and have no conception of left and right but here’s the tricky bit – they stick to the floor. To be able to walk in them you need to develop a special hospital waddle where you pick each foot up as if wading through six inches of custard.

And the final indignity? Suitably attired with the waddle mastered, you have to walk through the hospital corridors to get to the theatre!

Oh no – sorry. I forgot the hat. It looked like a hat but of course I had it upside down. It was, in fact, a bowl and you know what that’s for. And where else but a hospital would you urinate into a cardboard bowl and, flushed with pride, hand it over to an attractive young lady with all the delicacy of offering her a bunch of flowers and asking her out on a date?

Back in February 2007 I mentioned in a post that I had had some recent hallucinations involving bats. At the time there was one living in my video cabinet that flew out one night and vanished near the ceiling when we put on a DVD to watch and there was another that flew between the bedroom and the bathroom. Eventually the bats went away but the odd visionary experience remained. There was the big yellow snake I tussled with in the kitchen and, perhaps the weirdest, the beetle that crawled – or oozed – out from behind the glass in my watch when all I wanted was to determine the time.

On the whole I have not really been troubled by these hallucinations; in fact I have found them quite humorous. My kids have got mileage from them convinced they are nothing but LSD flashbacks and clear evidence of their old man’s supposedly drug-addled past and only my dear wife has shown the proper level of concern, been doing her homework and stumbled upon their cause. And it is all in the small print.

The small print in question is contained on those leaflets you get in prescription medicines – the ones you perhaps browse through the first time around, probably never read to the bottom of and discard with every repeat because they are in the way and stop you getting the foil strip of pills properly back into the box. But therein lies the answer to my bats and in my case a few other problems as well.

I have been taking three daily prescription drugs for several years and am, I have been told casually by my doctor, on them for life. In my case, none of them are a matter of life or death but are, shall we say, aids to comfort, freedom from specific pain and help to bits of me that don’t work as well as they used to. And you can stop sniggering now. All three actually do a good job. And all three have a possible side effect list that explains a lot.

For a kick off, one of them contains Aspartame. Why on earth a pill you swallow whole that has nothing to do with sweetening my tea should have an ingredient as noxious as bloody Aspartame is beyond me but it’s a black mark. What really bothers me however, is that some of these side effects are common to all three pills I take and are things that I have, over the years, talked to my doctor about without them once suggesting it might just be the medication. These include blurred vision, low blood pressure and corresponding dizziness, constant dry throat and mouth, inflammation of the lining of the nose, dry skin and itching and swelling of the ankles. All three can also lead to headaches, fatigue and weakness, pins and needles, ‘disturbance’ of the gut, insomnia and confusion! So the next time I am out driving locally and have to ask my wife where we are it might well be drug induced lack of sleep but just as easily might be drug induced confusion.

Singly these drugs can cause changes to my blood cell count, photosensitivity, hair thinning (which explains that one!), liver disorders (and it did say disorders plural), impotence, abnormal ejaculation (whatever that means) and abnormal enlargement of breasts in men – and mine are most definitely growing. Oh yes – and depression – which, with all this lot waiting to descend upon you is perfectly understandable.

And – finally of course – hallucinations.

With a list like that what do you think your chances are of escaping? I know I haven’t. And that’s why I’ve stopped talking the lot.

Some time back in the early ’80s, I remember seeing, on the much missed science and technology programme Tomorrow’s World, a quite remarkable demonstration of a method for cleaning up oil spills at sea. It came in the form of a powder and was, I believe, developed in Japan. You just sprinkled some of this powder on the floating oil and within seconds it had turned into a sheet, described as being like soft chewing gum, that could literally be lifted off the ocean surface.

Did we ever see this technology used on subsequent and environmentally damaging oil spills? Of course we didn’t. For sure, there may have been all sorts of flaws and problems associated with the stuff – maybe it had other knock-on effects that made it unviable. Who knows. But it had many, many technological siblings as so much that was showcased on this excellent programme seemed to disappear just as quickly into obscurity.

In a comment left by fractiverse on a recent item, I was given a link to what is, to me, a technology that sounds just as revolutionary and necessary as the Japanese magic powder. This is a machine that, using microwaves, converts waste plastics back into diesel oil and other useful stuff from which it was made. As I have said quite recently, the science behind all this sort of thing just evaporates in my brain a minute or two after I have read it but I still said ‘Wow’!

OK – so there may be 101 reasons why this is not a good idea. But I would have thought there were equally 101 reasons why it is – many of which are covered by the article in the New Scientist link above. Seems to me the more of this sort of technology we embrace, the closer we can get to reversing the harm we are doing to our planet – and it’s still the only one we’ve got.

This is a photo of the surface of Mars, somewhere near the polar region, taken just a few, short hours ago by Phoenix, which successfully negotiated the vast distance between us and its new home and landed softly on the surface of another world which, to us here on earth, is just a speck of light in the night sky. It’s mission – to boldly dig where no robot arm has dug before – looking for ice and other ingredients of life.

I want to thank Neutron News for not only bringing this landing to my attention but for also pointing out that I could watch the mission controllers live on NASA TV as this momentous event took place.

Anyone old enough to remember the heady days of the Friendship, Gemini and Apollo missions will also remember – here in the UK at least – the amazing coverage it all received on television. Patrick Moore, James Burke, Richard Strauss. How could anyone forget those first, faint, ghostly images from the surface of the Moon as Neil Armstrong jumped down from the last rung of the ladder and man took one more step in the endless exploration that started so long ago in the depths of Africa. It was exciting, compelling stuff and it spoke of a destiny to be fulfilled.

These days, a mission like Phoenix is but a footnote on the news. Turn away for a second and you’ve missed it. Yet unless we cause our own extinction in the near future, space is our destiny. It is as inevitable as the fact that one day – maybe millions of years, maybe not – our home planet will become unable to sustain life.

The exploration of our own solar system and then beyond requires rekindling in the public imagination. It requires more finance. More political will. And it requires more smart people with a vision. Our media should be splashing the success of missions like Phoenix over the front page of newspapers and special TV programming to keep the hope of those pioneers alive because this is our future and the next generation need to have their imagination and vision stirred into life.

I made some Royal Icing last night and, as with every time in my life that I have made Royal Icing, I’m still nursing the strained muscles in my forearm. I don’t know what it is really called but I always refer to it as ‘telephone arm’ – the pain you get when you have been on hold for twenty five minutes waiting to talk to someone in India with a strong accent that you can’t quite understand. It’s that pain that suddenly comes over you like a wave when you finally put the telephone back down again. But I digress.

What has always amazed me about making Royal Icing – and let’s face it, it’s not exactly difficult to make – is the fact that the instructions are never right. Wherever you get them from they always say put this, this and that in a bowl and beat for five minutes. Sometimes it might say something like, beat vigourously for five minutes. If anyone on this planet has actually managed to make a good icing with five minutes beating, vigourously or not, then I take my hat off to them. It took me an hour of frantic and extreme beating with an electric hand mixer running on the fastest setting, which is the one where it states that if you let go the bloody thing will take off and not land until it reaches the next village.

I assume that Silver Spoon and Tate & Lyle got together years ago and agreed on the 5 minute claim because if they said on the packet that you needed to beat this thing for a day and a half no bugger would buy it.

What I don’t understand is what on earth is actually going on in the bowl. I mean it’s all just atoms right? Isn’t it just a matter of rearranging atoms? You throw them into the bowl in several different states, perform a ’shock and awe’ attack for half an hour and then they are supposed to surrender and all turn into nice Royal Icing atoms. Instead, just as you think you’re getting those little ‘peaks’ you are aiming for, the insurgency starts and the bloody things fight back.

In the end, of course, I won. But it was touch and go there for a while.