Month: December 2016

It’s that time of year again when we have to put on our lumberjack gear and head into the woods to cut down a tree so we can bring it home and stand it in a bucket and put it in the corner of a room. There is a bit of huffing and puffing involved in trying to get the tree through the front door, some scraping of knuckles on the door frame and some cursing when it won’t stand up properly in the bucket. Then there is some trimming involved to stop it from making a hole in the ceiling and to ensure that the family can actually fit into the same room with it.

Then we put lots of small lights on it and hang funny looking ornaments from the branches and we sit back and wait for a large fat man to come down the chimney and leave presents for us all underneath it. Just to put the tin hat on it we leave some milk and biscuits out for the fat man in case he’s hungry.

If you were to look at this logically, you would probably determine that this behaviour is a little bit odd and who could blame you. Try bringing a tree home to your beloved at any other time of the year and telling her that it would look lovely in the sitting room beside the telly and you would probably hear phrases you didn’t think she even knew.

The Paradise Tree

But it is perfectly acceptable at Christmas time and to find out how this came about we have to go back in time a bit. The exact origin of the Christmas tree in unclear but the most likely theory is that it started with medieval plays. Dramas depicting biblical themes began as part of the religious worship and they took place in the outdoors and the Garden of Eden was represented by a “Paradise tree”. The plays were banned in many places when revelers started becoming too drunk and boisterous. By that time some people had taken a liking to the idea of the “paradise tree” so they began to set them up in their homes to compensate for the public celebration they could no longer enjoy outside.

The “Paradise tree” was hung with fruit. Wooden “pyramids” lined with shelves would be placed next to the tree and candles would be placed on the shelves, one for each member of the family. It is quite probable that these candles ended up on the tree itself and then went on to become our present day Christmas tree lights and ornaments.

There is another theory about the introduction of the Christmas tree and it concerns an event that occurred on a cold Christmas Eve night. A forester and his family were in their cottage and were gathered round the fire to keep warm when there was a knock on the door. When the forester opened the door, he found a poor little boy standing on the door step, lost and alone. The forester welcomed him into his house and the family fed and washed him and put him to bed. The next morning, Christmas morning, the family was woken up by a choir of angels, and the little boy had turned into Jesus.

Jesus went into the front garden of the cottage and broke a branch off a Fir tree and gave it to the family as a present to say thank you. I’m not sure how he thought that this was going to impress the family but he obviously believed in “It’s the thought that counts” motto. In any event, it is said that people have remembered that event by bringing a Christmas tree into their homes.

Wassailing

Wassailing is another tradition that was popular at the time. It’s often described in innocuous and sometimes nostalgic terms and it is still practiced in some parts of Scotland and Northern England on New Year’s Day. It’s also known as “first footing“. Wassailing was associated with rowdy groups of young lads who would call to the homes of wealthy neighbours and demand free food and drink. If the householder refused, he was usually cursed, and occasionally his house would be vandalised.

I can remember being in Edinburgh in Scotland one Christmas and an elderly neighbour of the brother-in-law that I was staying with insisted that I had to call to see her and I had to bring a lump of coal with me. In return she would give me a glass of whiskey which seemed like a pretty good deal to me. It had to do with this “First foot” tradition which was supposed to bring good luck to a householder if a stranger called to the house with a knob of coal. So that tradition is still surviving in some parts.

Bah humbug

The exact origin of these customs is open to interpretation but the fact remains that someone came up with the notion that bringing a tree indoors and decorating it would be good fun. Obviously drink had to be involved in that decision and it seems that they could do very little in those days when they were sober. There was lots of drunkenness and fighting and it was common to abuse your neighbours if they didn’t give you food or drink. This crowd just couldn’t behave themselves and it’s because of them that we have to turn our sitting rooms into gardens at Christmas time. It’s thanks to them that I have to risk my life going up to the attic every year to rescue a few thousand Christmas tree lights that will invariably be tangled up and broken. If they had stayed off the drink and copped themselves on a bit then my life would be less stressful. Bah humbug.

I was watching television with my daughter a few nights ago. I can’t remember the name of the programme we were looking at but it was one of those period dramas, set in the 1940’s or thereabouts. At one point in the story a guy went and sat at the edge of the bed and took off his watch to wind it. I remarked how I hadn’t seen anyone doing that for a long time, winding a watch. My daughter looked at me strangely and asked me why anybody would have to do that. It never occurred to me that she has only ever known battery operated watches.

So I started thinking about what else she didn’t know about and what life will be like for her two year old son in thirty years’ time. How much will change by the time he reaches adulthood and when he looks back on his life with us, will he consider 2016 to be a primitive time in his existence? For that to happen there will have to be a lot of major changes over the next few years but, for me, it’s difficult to see how things can improve that drastically. It seems to me that we have it pretty good as it is.

I can remember my parents telling me about their childhood and how little they had. They had no electricity when they were young, or phones, or cars or sometimes even shoes. Clothes were passed down the line from the oldest child to the next and sizes didn’t matter. Food was basic and by no means plentiful. A coal fire heated the room that the fire was in but the rest of the house was cold. And that was in the good times when coal was available. Cars were few and far between, roads were poor and there was no street lighting.

My childhood was spent in the lap of luxury compared to what they had to put up with. I can remember the introduction of the television and staring in amazement at the test card. For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, the test card was an image that was displayed on the screen when there were no programmes on. I think it was designed to give the technicians something to look at when they were trying to tune in the telly.

I can remember the excitement when a terrace got street lighting. I can remember getting the phone for the first time and the luxury of central heating when it was first installed. So while I have seen huge advancements in my time, I had imagined that we had gone as far as we could and that this was pretty much as good as it was going to get. But then I began to wonder if there are more changes in store for us. Will my grandson look back in thirty years’ time and recall that my house was caught in a time warp? Will he think that I lived in a cave and will he wonder how he managed to survive in such primitive conditions?

Already, at two years of age, he will ask me to get my electronic tablet. He will then park himself on my lap and choose the programmes that he wants to watch. I just have to start up the thing and then he takes over. Some mornings he climbs into my bed and asks me for my phone and he watches his cartoons on it. It’s second nature to him at this stage. He has his own iPad and he is well able to navigate his way around it to find games for himself.

He has an endless supply of clothes that fit, he is used to having heat in every room in the house and there is no shortage of food or drink for him. He has his entertainment at the push of a button and he has a variety of toys. So how much better can it get for him?

There are some who would say that life will change more in the next 20 years than it has done in all of human history so far. By 2030 we could have goods delivered to us by drones and we could be using 3D printers to produce our meals. We could be driving hovercraft type machines instead of cars and we might all have robots at home doing the cooking and the cleaning. There could be a microchip implanted in our wrists to monitor our vital signs and give us advice on what treatment to use when we fall ill.

It looks as if more of us are going to live longer and the population of aged people is expected to go through the roof by 2050. As people live longer, they will get more age-related diseases like dementia, cancer and diabetes. On the other hand, thankfully, medicine will also advance by 2050 so there should be more cures.

However there is more bad news ahead. We are continuing to damage our planet with climate engineering, which could result in the extinction of humanity. There are those who predict that the luminosity of the sun will steadily increase and the long-term trend is for plant life to die off altogether. The extinction of plants will be the end of almost all animal life, since plants are the base of the food chain on Earth. The increase in the Earth’s surface temperature will cause the surface to heat enough to melt. By that point, all life on the Earth will be extinct.

So don’t worry what the world is going to look like in a few years’ time because the future is grim. The planet is set to melt…. in about four billion years.

Travelling can either be torturous or a very pleasant experience depending on your mind-set at the time. Some people see the travelling as part of the holiday experience and they take no notice of flight delays, waiting in airports, security checks etc. Others grind their teeth and mumble away to themselves until they reach their destination, cursing their decision to leave their home in the first place.

There are many factors that can determine how pleasant or otherwise the journey is likely to be. Things like your travelling companion, your fellow passengers, mode of transport and the purpose of the trip. The chances are that you will be much more tolerant if you are heading off on a holiday than you will be if you are going to some event that you have little or no interest in.

I recently travelled back home from a visit to Cyprus with a friend of mine, John O’Connor. We have made this trip previously without too much inconvenience or hardship but this time was a little different. While we were waiting in the departure lounge in Larnaca, there was a guy using his mobile phone and it sounded like he was talking to his wife. He was using face time so he had the phone out in front of him and he was staring intently at the screen. He was shouting into the phone for half an hour, oblivious to the fact that everyone could hear the entire conversation. Normally that drives me nuts but this guy was so bad that everybody was just laughing at him.

We were due to leave Larnaka at about 8pm on an Easyjet flight and we were expected to arrive in Gatwick at about 1am. There was a delay of about an hour that pushed our predicted arrival time back to 2am. Not a great start but we just got on with it.

We got to our seats and there were people already sitting in them so that had to be resolved. Then there were three people seated behind us and I suspect that a certain amount of alcohol had been consumed by them. One of them was a female with a very loud voice and an even louder laugh. She also had a lot of stamina because she never stopped yapping. That is the kind of thing that can make your journey longer and more uncomfortable than it needs to be and in this case if it had been possible to open a window I would happily have sent her on her way.

When we arrived at Gatwick Airport the plane seemed to land very heavily and suddenly the landing was aborted and we found ourselves back up amongst the clouds again. While I am not normally a nervous passenger I must admit that I was a little unnerved at this turn of events. The atmosphere on the aircraft changed after that and you could feel the tension in the air. Arm rests were being gripped a bit tighter. I’m not sure how long we were circling around before we made a second attempt at landing and this time, while again it seemed like a heavy contact with the runway, we stayed on the ground.

Our next leg of the journey was with Ryanair from Gatwick to Cork which was scheduled to leave at 12.15pm the following day. The queueing in Gatwick at the gate for the Ryanair flight was a little chaotic and there was confusion among the passengers heading for Istanbul, Malaga and Cork as to who was to queue where. When we eventually reached the departure gate it was obvious that this particular flight had very little chance of leaving on time. We also realised that all hand luggage that had wheels was being tagged to go in the hold which didn’t make a lot of sense to us.

The whole advantage of travelling with hand luggage only is that you get to avoid the business of going to the carousel and waiting there to collect bags. This saves a lot of time if you can manage with hand luggage only. There was no explanation offered for this decision and we were sent on our merry way to take our seats on the plane. At 12.45pm it looked as if we were about to take off but we were in for another little surprise.

We sat on the plane for a further 80 miniutes while the cabin crew scurried up and down the aisle doing lots of counting and pointing. It’s no exaggeration to say that we must have been counted at least a dozen times but nobody thought it was worth their while to advise us as to why we were sitting there like sheep being counted by a demented shepherd. From what we could gather they either had one passenger too many or they had lost one but in any event the paperwork and the number of passengers on board the aircraft were not tallying to the satisfaction of the counters. You would imagine that if you know the amount of seats on a plane, then by simply deducting the number of empty seats from the total should give you the number of passengers on the aircraft. But maybe that’s too simple.

It wasn’t the end of the world, but you don’t really want to be sitting on an aeroplane for any longer than you have to. Space in modern aircraft is at a premium and the seating doesn’t allow for much room. The seats, particularly in the low budget airlines, are not designed to be as comfortable as your recliner at home, so if you sit in them for long enough your bum goes numb. And then they tell you to have a nice flight, who are they kidding?

 

 

 

Around 500 people with cystic fibrosis have been told that, while there is a drug available to help them with their disease, it’s too expensive to give it to them. The drug Orkambi would cost around €160,000 per patient and according to the Government, it’s too expensive at this price.

Sufferers who have been taking the drug for three years as part of a trial have said that there is no doubt that the drug is life saving for some people, and without it they may not be here.

Vertex, the company that produces the drug, is a global biotechnology company. According to its website, it aims to discover, develop and commercialize innovative medicines so people with serious diseases can lead better lives. Founded in 1989 in Cambridge, Mass. and headquartered in Boston’s Innovation District, Vertex today has research and development sites and commercial offices in the United States, Europe, Canada and Australia.

In addition to their clinical development programs focused on cystic fibrosis, Vertex has more than a dozen ongoing research programs aimed at other serious and life-threatening diseases.

They collaborate with some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, leading non-profit disease foundations and many of the world’s best-known academic institutions.

In 2014 they had total revenues of $580 million, including net product revenues of $464 million for KALYDECO in cystic fibrosis, cash equivalents and marketable securities of approximately $1.4 billion as of December 31, 2014.

Their work with not-for-profit foundations and their desire to create life- saving medicine is admirable but it’s not worth a crap if the people that need it can’t afford it. Vertex is in business to make money and that’s fair enough. But does it really cost €160,000 per patient per year to produce this stuff?