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Such Sweet Sorrow

I kind of figured sugar would sneak back. It always does! Just when you think it should be terminally ashamed of the stuff it’s done, it shows up as somebody else and fools everybody. I mean, forget trying to pretend that you don’t recognize it in a crowd, that you can’t see under its mask. Sugar is, well, sugar, eh? No matter how it tries to sweet-talk its way around you, it is what it does. Period.

But what is that? Apart from fuelling our atavistic requirements for easily assimilable energy, and therefore surviving early Darwinian whittling, I’ve often wondered if there’s more to sugar than meets the tongue. It has too large a presence in our world to be confined to pleasure alone. Almost every organism seems drawn to it. Should this be telling us something?

Every once in a while my overweening, but naïve hunches are rewarded with information that addresses much the same issues but in ways I hadn’t considered: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180328-how-sugar-could-help-heal-wounds?

Moses Murandu is a man who grew up in the rural Easter Highlands of Zimbabwe, and later moved to England to work in its National Health System. ‘A senior lecturer in adult nursing at the University of Wolverhampton, Murandu completed an initial pilot study focussed on sugar’s applications in wound healing and won an award from the Journal of Wound Care in March 2018 for his work. […] To treat a wound with sugar, all you do, Murandu says, is pour the sugar on the wound and apply a bandage on top. The granules soak up any moisture that allows bacteria to thrive. Without the bacteria, the wound heals more quickly.

‘In some parts of the world, this procedure could be key because people cannot afford antibiotics. But there is interest in the UK, too, since once a wound is infected, it sometimes won’t respond to antibiotics. […] And a growing collection of case studies from around the world has supported Murandu’s findings, including examples of successful sugar treatments on wounds containing bacteria resistant to antibiotics.’

Well, it’s safe to say that I don’t know how much sugars will contribute to our health and well-being, but they do serve as a reminder that western science is not the sole guardian of knowledge. Or wisdom. Answers are not rare -they are lying around everywhere just waiting for the right questions to discover them. The right curiosity. And we run a risk dismissing traditional enlightenment -folk wisdom- out of hand.

The problem, as I see it, is one of attribution. The credibility we assign each source should be determined by the results of testing its hypothesis, finding the appropriate question to interrogate whatever is proposed as an answer. Finding the key that fits the lock… And the thesis investigated does not have to be of mind-bending importance; science is not the exclusive purview of people in white coats. Nor those of a certain age…

I recently happened upon a Tim Horton’s café in close approximation to a message from my stomach that it needed both a coffee and a bagel. Not being in the mood to argue, I decided to accede, although my loyalties normally lie with Starbucks. I had been wrestling with the question of habit on my walk –my strange unwillingness to explore new ground, consider new sources. Tim’s could be the answer waiting for the question.

Science, if it be considered from the inductive perspective, I reasoned, required the inference of laws from particular instances -answers from the right questions. In other words, Propose, Test, and then validate or refute. It isn’t enough to simply assume…

I had chosen a busy time unfortunately, and I was lucky to find a single table in a corner by the window. It was squeezed between a group of elderly women crowded around a larger table busy consuming their donuts and politely slurping their coffees, and a small table like mine occupied by a harried looking mother trying to bottle-feed a squirming, unhappy baby in her arms and a young boy busily kicking the legs of his chair.

The elders were surprisingly quiet, but not the little boy, so my ears naturally focussed on him.

“Why can’t we go, Mommy?” he kept asking.

I could tell his mother had almost reached the end of her tether, and she stared at him crossly, determined not to interrupt the feeding. “Because I’m still feeding Janny, Tim,” she replied, tensely. “She’s really hungry.”

The boy tilted his head curiously. “She’s squiggling around; she’s not even sucking…”

At that point the baby began to cry even louder-scream, actually- so the mother put the bottle on the table and positioned the baby on her shoulder to burp it.

But Tim still looked puzzled. “But she doesn’t like the bottle, Mommy,” he said, as if his mother should have noticed by now.

His mother shrugged, almost in tears. “I know, Timmy, but you were hungry too, remember? That’s why we came in here instead of going back to the car.”

Tim sat back in his chair for a moment to process the problem. “Well, why don’t you let Janny suck your breasts?” he said, in the rather loud voice of a four year old.

I could see his mother blush as soon as he said it, but Timmy had merely proposed a tentative hypothesis that could easily by tested to see if he had asked the right question, and his face was as innocent as a new nappy.

His mother leaned over the table with Janny so she could show Tim that they could talk quietly about it. “I would if we were sitting in the car…” she said, but he continued to stare at her, still puzzled. “And the car is still a long way away, Timmy.”

Tim leaned over the table like his mother. “Why can’t you breast her here?” he asked innocently.

She smiled and glanced around the room, embarrassed. “Some people don’t like to see mothers breast feed their babies in public.” She tried to whisper but Janny was really screaming now. She glanced at the washroom, no doubt wondering if she could feed her baby in there, but it must have been a small room, because there was already a line of needy hopefuls that had formed at the door

Tim smiled as if he knew how to solve the problem with his initial hypothesis, and he leaned towards me on his chair. “Hey mister,” he said in his best, grown-up voice, “Do you mind if Mommy breasts Janny in here?”

His mother was now beet red, and she glared at her little son and then attempted to smile at me. “I… I’m sorry…I…” But she was too embarrassed to continue.

“I don’t mind at all,” I said, trying to reassure her with a reciprocal smile. “You can use my jacket to cover yourself, if that would help…” I said, beginning to take off my jacket.

One of the elderly women at the next table leaned over and gave a thumbs-up to the frazzled mother. “We’ve all been there, dear,” she said and winked before she turned back to inspect her plate for donut remnants.

I handed the mother my jacket and the baby settled into the welcoming breast somewhere underneath. Propose, test, validate…

I added some extra sugar to my coffee, and settled back in my chair to celebrate the triumph of citizen science that even a child could perform. It’s just a matter of finding the right question, after all…

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The Grey Dog

I was once a moody child; I’m still a moody child… sorry, adult. Anyway, I’m also a bit sensitive about the topic. It’s as if being moody means being naughty, or maybe contrary. Not quite right in the head, or something -not well adjusted, at any rate. I take exception to that. I mean, just because I often have trouble mixing with people at parties who only want to make small talk -usually about other people- and then walk away shouldn’t disqualify me from church or anything… Okay, I don’t go to church, but you see what I’m driving at, I hope. Moods are kind of baroque frames around my happiness. They make even run-of-the-mill joy look like ecstasy.

I’m not advocating ignoring the more severe and persistent forms of mood -they may in fact herald something very important. I am saying that not all of us who are occasionally disgruntled, frustrated, or unhappy have some underlying pathology. And to label those occasions as bouts of depression is to dilute the word, mistake the condition, assume everything is the black dog.

I was therefore relieved to find someone who relates to that view:  https://theconversation.com/is-my-child-depressed-being-moody-isnt-a-mental-illness-92789

The author, Dr. Stanley Kutcher, Sun Life Financial Chair in Adolescent Mental Health, at Dalhousie University, Begins by noting that, ‘[…] if the media coverage is to be believed, we are drowning in a sea of mental illness that threatens to overwhelm post-secondary Institutions. […] The prevalence of mental illnesses (defined using clear diagnostic criteria) is not rising in this cohort.

‘Youth self-reports of negative emotions are increasing. But the self-report scales used in studies documenting this have not been calibrated for generational changes in language use. Nor have the results been validated using clear, clinically valid, diagnostic criteria applied by expert clinicians.

‘[…] The above noted self-reports do identify the ups and downs of everyday emotions, but these are not criteria for diagnosis of mental illness. So we can say that youth on campus may report feeling more negative emotions than previously, but this is not the same thing as saying that young people have more mental disorders than previously.’

He cites an interesting example of the lack of application of basic critical thinking and analysis: ‘In late 2017, the study “Mental ill-health among children of the new century: Trends across childhood with the focus on age 14” was published by the National Children’s Bureau in the United Kingdom.

‘This showed that self-reported negative emotions were present in about one quarter of this surveyed group, but this was interpreted as 25 percent of 14-year-old girls in the UK suffer from depression! The fact that parental reports identified about five per cent of this cohort as having significant mood problems was ignored by almost all commentators. This latter number is much more in keeping with known rates of depression in the population.’

I wonder if our expectations of normalcy are to blame. As Dr. Kutcher explains, ‘These concerns are not the result of substantial epidemic increases in the rates of mental illness. They arise, in some part, from poor mental health literacy and unrealistic expectations of the normal emotional states that life challenges elicit.’

He makes some interesting and important points, I think. ‘[…] First, the increased public perception that being well means only having positive feelings is taking over the social discourse on mental health. When the measure of health is simply feeling good, negative emotions become a marker of being unwell. […] Without addressing the life challenges and opportunities that negative emotions signal to us, we can’t develop resilience. Mental health is not a static concept wearing a big smile. There are good days and bad days, good weeks and bad weeks. We still have mental health even if we are having negative emotions.’

‘Second, the use of words originally developed to identify mental illnesses to describe normal negative emotional states has burgeoned. […] Further, the use of terms denoting illness, such as depression, to mean all negative emotions is even more confusing. Now, words like sadness, disappointment, disgruntlement, demoralization and unhappiness are all lumped together as depression.’

He feels that the continued and almost obsessive use of technologies like smart phones for communication-especially by the young- may limit their ability to express complex messages and ideas and hence increase the sense of isolation, of being misunderstood -or perhaps, of even being mislabelled. And since it is adults, by and large, in charge of the classifications, it’s almost a case of two solitudes, two Magisteria, staring at each other -neither the wiser. Neither the winner…

Interestingly, I think I caught a whiff of this while waiting for a bus the other day. Two quite young teenage girls were sitting on the only bench in the little shelter, both clutching their mobile phones like purses. Because the rest of the bench was filled with their back-packs and some school binders, I merely stood outside and leaned against the wooden frame.

“But what did he say, Kitty? Is he, like, mad at you or something?” This from a petite little girl with long, straight dark hair and a big red coat with only a pair of blue boots sticking out from the bottom.

Kitty shook her head and leaned back on the wall of advertising behind her. She also had dark hair, but short and messy. It fit rather well with a large, thick and ragged blue sweater, torn on at least one sleeve to show a thin arm underneath. Her jeans were also fashionably torn, but looking as new as her pink running shoes. “No… Not mad… Just, like, upset. He says I’m moody -and all because I don’t want to, like, talk with him and Mom at the dinner table. I mean, nobody, talks anyway.” She shrugged theatrically and leaned forward on the bench again.

Her friend sighed sympathetically. “Yeah, my mom keeps wanting me to… you know, like communicate with her, too. But I mean, ever since dad left, she’s always either on her phone, or has the TV on.”

Kitty, nodded. “Yeah well, like, my parents think I should see a counsellor at school… They think I’m depressed, eh?” Her friend’s expression tightened, but she stayed silent. “But my dad always has his phone on the table and, like, keeps glancing at the news on his apps or, like, he’s waiting for an important Email, or whatever. And my mom’s a realtor, remember, so she does the same.” Kitty glanced around the wall and saw a bus was coming. “That’s all they talk about, anyway, Jen.”

Jen was staring intently at the ground in front of her. “Well, I think my mom’s depressed, you know, but she won’t go see anybody about it.” She took a little stertorous breath. “She thinks she’s coping… But I think, like, she’s just escaping online and stuff…”

The bus pulled up, and Jen seemed on the verge of tears, so Kitty reached over and hugged her. “We have to be strong for them, you know, Jen…”

That’s all I heard before they quickly gathered their things and walked over to the bus, arm in arm. Kitty must have whispered something else to her, because they both started to giggle before they got on.

I don’t know if it’s the technology, but it did make me wonder whether we really have a handle on mental health yet.

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Time

Days, half awake, immobile as old men leaning,

Hours stacked in untidy piles around the room,

Minutes stretched along the walls like arms, unlinked-

All immune to the pale blue infection on the window’s breath-

Lounge, cow-eyed

In the tedious drag of shadows across the floor.

And me?

Forced to spend what seem like years

Making patterns in ceiling tiles,

Watching the leisurely dance of dust settle on the slowly tasting tongue of sun drying on the carpet,

With each blink a novelty -an unexpected marker-

I feel time physically now.

It is an object,

Not as the soundless tick of something on my wrist,

Or the arbitrary sweep of points around a circle.

It is real-

As real as the skin that stretches with each breath

Or the weight I carry with me in the chair;

It pushes at my thoughts,

Separates and softens them.

It sits like an anchor inside my chest

Defying me to move,

Settling all the while, like gravity, further in.

At times it burns, swallowed half-chewed,

Force-fed in each breath:

A worm eating patiently deeper.

And yet it is a soft-grey porridge boiling over,

Coating word-bright seeds,

Planted in a darker bowl behind.

It is a body-bag, this Time-

Not at all the process I had thought.

Not a measure, not another way of pointing north,

It is the monkey on my back,

The sentence never finished

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Places that we’ve come to trust

 

When I was a child, the world was an even stranger place than it is now. I knew so much less then, and the boundaries of almost every experience were unexplored and mysterious. I suppose that’s to be expected when the menu is large, and the stomach limited. So, with no internet to answer each question, and teachers who, despite their qualifications and zeal, were unable to fill in more than a decidedly modest number of the blanks, children my age migrated to the Delphic Oracle of the era: the library.

Although sometimes an imposing stone-and-pillared structure in the middle of a large city, in more modest towns it was often only a converted cottage, or a tiny building that housed the books. But however it was dressed, it was the library with all those answers on the shelves, all that magic in the musty perfume of the books. And yes, there was the reigning priestess, the keeper of the tomes, who seemed to know just how to organize our questions and then lead us directly to the shelf where the answers lay.

It was an enchanted place, the library, and one we children got to know even years before we started school. A place where we would gather each Saturday morning in a little circle on the floor to hear someone read stories to us of faeries that danced on little flowers, of kings and queens who disguised themselves as people just like us, of bears who spoke, and fawns that cavorted through the woods all day then slept in beds of moss each night.

Later, of course, we began to read things for ourselves, and to decide what made sense and what to believe. We would read a book the librarian recommended, and then another that she hadn’t -just to check. I sometimes thought I’d wandered alone and secretly through the new ideas, but then she’d smile and congratulate me on my journey when I saw her at her desk.

I suppose we’re never really on our own when we have a book, though. It is the world, or at least its a door that opens inwards. The book is the sacred space, not the shelf on which it is forced to sleep. And I have long suspected that many things are similar to that -a school, for example, or a yoga class, a police officer, or a program on the radio -they each represent an expertise we cannot all possess. A knowledge so extensive we must partition it out in little bits to make it work. It is what a civilization does; it is what constitutes a society.

I found an incredibly insightful article entitled Truth is also a place in the online magazine Aeon on the subject that helped me to set things in context: https://aeon.co/essays/labs-courts-and-altars-are-also-traveling-truth-spots  It was written by Thomas Gieryn, a sociologist at Indiana University Bloomington, who suggests that ‘Some places make people believe.’ He describes the aura of wisdom ascribed to the ancient Oracle at Delphi. It was in a place so remote that even getting there was a struggle, and hence no doubt augmented the reliability of whatever advice was proffered. Other places, he argues, are similarly sacred: law courts, churches, laboratories, and so forth. The very stability of their location, and their often unique and recognizable architectures, lends an almost sacred air to their functions. ‘Ordinarily, truth-spots stay put over time, and those who seek believable knowledge must travel to them – not the other way around.’

But he wonders if the reliability and permanence of the location is still really necessary to perpetuate the authority. ‘[…] is longevity in a particular location always needed in order for a place to make people believe? Some truth-spots travel: they inhabit a place only temporarily. Sometimes a portable assemblage of material objects might be enough to consecrate an otherwise mundane place as a source for legitimate understandings – but only for the time that the stuff is there, before it moves on. But if a church or lab or courtroom can be folded up like a tent and pitched someplace else, can it really sustain its persuasive powers as a source for truth?’

In the abstract, that seems like an unlikely possibility. After all, part of the solace of religion, say, is in the majesty of the venue -the comfort of the pew, the quiet place that is a refuge from the busy street outside. Or, at other times it may lie in the reverberations of the organ, or the echo of a choir singing somewhere hidden in a large cathedral.

But Gieryn illustrates his thesis with examples of how the authority, if not the venue is transportable. Travelling justices can set up a court in the most unlikely of locations -a small village in China, for example, with ducks and geese waddling past. Justice can be fairly meted out to the satisfaction of villagers who might otherwise never be able to travel to a big city courtroom. Religion, too, could be promulgated outside of the boundaries of a church so long as those ceremonial symbols seen as sacred and important, accompany the duly recognized religious official.

But I suppose these things are so common nowadays, with our internet connections and social media flurries, that the very idea of immutability has become a myth. With the possible exception of religious structures, buildings permanently dedicated to a particular purpose, seem anachronistic. Atavistic. Time itself is out of joint.

Surely we are not so shallow that we think that it is the edifice that contains the authority, so naïve that we confuse the vehicle with the driver. It’s not the library that contains the book, nor even the book itself we need -it’s the ideas, the perspectives, and the wisdom travelling in an ever-expanding ripple that we should attempt to grasp…

And yet… I’d miss the smile of that wonderful lady with the dirty glasses, who sat behind the library desk and watched with motherly pride as I carried out an armful of books for another week. Call me sentimental, or just an old man trapped in reverie, but I think there is still something sacred in a place where a person like her could sit and watch -and smile encouragingly- as we struggle past.

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A Childless Motherhood

Well of course! Did we think there would be no consequences? Did we actually think we could get away with it? That there weren’t two sides to the story that we all needed to hear?

Sometimes I think we are so focused on our journey to right a wrong, that we wander off the path to those we hope to save. Things are too partitioned -a modern day rendition of the biblical Matthew 6:3 where the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing… Or, perhaps, is not doing.

If one side of a page seems to contain all the information I seek, I may miss what’s written on the back. I feel no need to turn it over. An article in the Conversation turned the page for me:

https://theconversation.com/losing-children-to-foster-care-endangers-mothers-lives-93618

The author, Elizabeth Wall-Wieler, a PhD student in Community Health Sciences at the University of Manitoba, writes that ‘Mothers whose children are placed in foster care are at much higher risk of dying young, particularly due to avoidable causes like suicide. When a child is placed in foster care, most of the resources are focused on the child, with little to no support for the mothers who are left behind.’

In retrospect, of  course, it seems obvious -the mother-child bond is not something easily missed, and whether or not we attribute it to physiological changes such as oxytocin levels in her blood, or less reductionist, atavistic mechanisms, it is a powerful thing, dismissed only at her -and our– peril.

The author was involved in two large studies, one of them published in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, which ‘[…] looked at suicide attempts and suicide completions among mothers whose children were placed in care.

‘In this study, we compared rates of suicide attempts and suicides between 1,872 mothers who had a child placed in care with sisters whose children were not placed in care. We found that the rate of suicide attempts was 2.82 times higher, and the rate of death by suicide was more than four times higher for mothers whose children were not in their custody. […] Mothers whose children are taken into care often have underlying health conditions, such as mental illness and substance use. In both studies, we took pre-existing health conditions into account, so that was not the reason for the higher mortality rates we found.’

And, the author feels, ‘Most legislation pertaining to child protection services indicates that families should be supported, but the guidelines around what is expected of the child welfare system when it comes to the biological mothers are not clear. The main role of social workers is to ensure that the child is doing well. Social workers are already so busy, so it is often hard for them to justify spending their limited time to help mothers resolve challenges and work with them to address their mental and physical health needs.’

Other studies have also addressed the issue of sending children to foster care: ‘A study in Sweden found that by age 18, more than 16 per cent of children who had been in foster care had lost at least one parent (compared to three per cent of children who had not been in foster care). By age 25, one in four former foster children had lost at least one parent (compared to one in 14 in the general population). This means that many children in foster care don’t get the chance to be reunited with their families.’

I thought that the whole idea of fostering a child was care and sustenance until a more permanent placement was achieved or, ideally, the birthparent was able to reassume custody. This is perhaps more likely if the child can be placed with members of the same family -grandmothers, aunts, etc.- but even then, if the mother does not receive adequate support and treatment for the condition that led to the apprehension of her child, the results are apt to be the same.

In Canada, it seems, the mothers most affected are those from the indigenous community -our First Nations. The Canadian Minister of Indigenous Services, Jane Philpott, addressed indigenous leaders about this issue at a two-day emergency meeting on Indigenous Child and Family Services in Ottawa in January, 2018. http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/a-special-edition-of-the-current-for-january-25-2018-1.4503172/we-must-disrupt-the-foster-care-system-and-remove-perverse-incentives-says-minister-jane-philpott-1.4503253 ‘The care system is riddled with “perverse incentives”. Children are being apprehended for reasons ranging from poverty to the health and addiction issues faced by their parents. In some provinces, rules around housing mean that your children can be taken away if you don’t have enough windows. “Right now dollars flow into the child welfare system according to the number of kids that are apprehended.” […] If financial incentives were based on “how many children we were able to keep in homes, how well we were able to support families — then in fact there would be no financial reason why the numbers would escalate.”’

But it’s not too difficult to read something else into all of this, of course. Uncondoned behaviour -behaviour frequently associated with poverty or marginalization- is often penalized isn’t it? Sometimes it is as simple as avoiding the transgressing community, further marginalizing it, but increasingly it is intolerance. Refusal to address the underlying issues. Not even trying to understand.

I admit that it is a difficult journey, and the road that winds between the abused child and its troubled parent is fraught. To empathize with the mother when her conduct may have been so clearly unacceptable, is seen as anathema. And yet, an attempt to understand is not a plea for condonation, merely a search for a solution. Nobody should get away with family neglect -but nothing happens in a vacuum. And there are always unintended consequences, aren’t there? Even our best intentions miss something in retrospect -solve one problem, create another. Our focus is often far too narrow -helping one person misses the one standing beside her.

Perhaps it’s time for us to stand back. As Ms Wall-Wieler puts it, ‘Specific guidelines need to be put in place to make sure that mothers are supported when their child is taken into care. This would improve the chances of reunification. And, by virtue of being a human worthy of treatment with dignity, mothers deserve support, even if it does not directly relate to how she interacts with her child(ren).’

‘Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil.
For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?’ Kahlil Gibran

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Beggaring All Description

Beauty is many things, I suppose, and attempts to define it are fraught. It seems to vary between societies and eras, with some cultures deciding it is appearance, and some opting for demeanour. One such view, influenced by the Greek diaspora following the conquests of Alexander the Great, Koine Greek, used an adjective for beautiful: horaios, which derives from the word hora -or hour. There was a delightful description of this in (sorry) Wikipedia: ‘In Koine Greek, beauty was thus associated with “being of one’s hour”. Thus, a ripe fruit (of its time) was considered beautiful, whereas a young woman trying to appear older or an older woman trying to appear younger would not be considered beautiful.’

I find this useful, because it suggests that beauty -at least in a person- resides in being recognized for what one actually is -not what artifice may try to disguise. Admiration, in other words lies in more than appearance. I am reminded of Shakespeare’s Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind.’

And yet, whose eyes -one’s own, or that of others? How we see ourselves is almost as important as how we are seen. Think of the agony than can be inflicted by acne in the teenage years -a time when self-identity is often linked to group identity, and self-esteem is dependent on the approbation of one’s peers. It is a time when we are defined by others, because we have not yet defined ourselves.

Memories of my own speckled past were awakened, Phoenix-like, by a short article in the Conversation on the beauty -or not- of skin: https://theconversation.com/beauty-is-skin-deep-why-our-complexion-is-so-important-to-us-91415?

As the author, Rodney Sinclair, Professor of Dermatology, University of Melbourne observes, ‘We’re all attracted to a beautiful face. We like to look at them, we feel drawn to them and we aspire to have one. Many researchers and others have investigated what we humans identify as “beautiful”: symmetry, large evenly spaced eyes, white teeth, a well-proportioned nose and of course, a flawless complexion. The skin is of utmost importance when people judge someone as beautiful.’ There may be an unintended bias on his part, of course. A dermatologist would see the world through a lens of pores and complexions, but I suspect he is merely tapping into the current ethos -one that seems characteristic of an era of Snapchat, and Facebook posts where ‘Even the best facial structure can be unbalanced by skin that is flawed.’

I’m not certain I agree with some of his views about how much we value complexion. For example: ‘When choosing a mate, men rank female beauty more highly than women rate male appearance. Female beauty is thought to signal youth, fertility and health. Beauty can also signal high status. People with “plain looks” earn about 10% less than people who are average-looking, who in turn earn around 5% less than people who are good-looking.’ I suspect there has been a bit of cherry-picking of studies that bolster his opinions, although I suppose we all do that.

But his point about the importance of the cosmetic industry nowadays certainly seems spot on: ‘People spend a lot of money in attempts to regain their youthful appearance. The global cosmetics industry is worth about US$500 billion. Sales of skin and sun care products, make-up and colour cosmetics generate over 36% of the worldwide cosmetic market. We use foundation makeup to conceal freckles and blemishes, moisturisers and fillers to hide dryness, concealers to disguise broken capillaries and pimples.’

And yet, I find myself inexorably drawn to that Greek idea of beauty residing more in ‘being of one’s hour’, than in forcing one’s time. Accepting the ineffable allure of the moment in which each of us lives.

Many years ago, I met Dora, a woman with quite visible facial scarring from long-ago acne. She was probably in her early thirties, and was employed as a receptionist in a doctor’s office. But she was so gregarious and friendly, I had ceased to see her face whenever I had occasion to visit. A warm smile would emerge like a puppy bounding from the woods and greet me from across the room. Her eyes were alive, and sparkled even under the unremitting glare of the overhead fluorescent lights. But she would have lit a path to her desk even in a power failure.

So overwhelming was her presence that I would never have remembered what she was wearing, had I been asked. Everything was subordinate; she ruled the room like a queen and the radiance lingered even when she was on vacation, or had taken a sick day. It was as if the empty the space was holding its breath. Or so I thought.

One day, when I arrived for my appointment, the office seemed smaller. Duller. It had been more than a year since I had been there, and so I couldn’t immediately decide what had changed. Dora was not there, unfortunately -I had been looking forward to seeing her again, but I assumed she had taken a few days off.

As I approached the desk –her desk- I was tracked by a set of razored eyes as if I had inadvertently chosen the wrong door. The wrong office. There was a smile, of course, but it was cool, and applied like the makeup on the rest of the obviously impeccable face. Long blond hair fell in ringlets to her shoulders onto a dark blue silk blouse -a very attractive person to greet the entrant, I suppose. But it was not Dora.

I forced a smile onto my lips and introduced myself. The woman immediately checked her computer screen and her face marginally softened at what she found. I took this as an opportunity to ask about Dora.

I could see her pupils momentarily contract and something tensed in her cheek.

“Dora no longer works here,” she said with a forced affability, and as if she were tired of having to explain.

I couldn’t hide my disappointment, I’m afraid, and the woman noticed.

“The doctor thought she was a bad advertisement for his practice,” she said with an obviously rehearsed face.

“Oh…” was all I could think of to respond.

The face perked up briefly. “He did offer to help…” she stared across the empty room for a moment. “But she said she was happy with who she was –‘with who she’d always been’, was how she put it…”

And then, although she tried to disguise it, she rolled her eyes and sighed. “Anyway,” she said, unrolling her eyes and resting them on my cheeks, “she decided to resign.”

But when I continued to stare at her, she shrugged, as if everybody was better off with Dora gone. “He gave her a good reference, though,” she added at the persistence of my disappointed expression, and shifted her attention back to the screen in front of her with a little smile.