Off sick

I had an amazingly good attendance record at my various workplaces. I never needed to take any time off sick, except for a week's sick leave after my prostate operation.

I simply was never ill enough to go off sick. And I never feigned illness to avoid going to work. It helped that I always enjoyed my work and had no impulse to "throw a sickie" as most people do from time to time.

Which probably made me a tiresome goody-goody who embarrassed the genuinely sick and made them look as if they were faking it.

There are people out there who take pride in turning up at work even if they're at death's door, but I wouldn't have gone that far myself. Why flog yourself for the sake of appearances?

My lack of sick leave doesn't mean I'm in favour of tight restrictions on sick leave. People can't help falling ill. Allowance should obviously be made for major illness, especially serious female illnesses like endometriosis and fibromyalgia, or for severe period pain. Too often women are expected to just "put up with a bit of pain".

And of course companies should provide for sick leave. The increasing tendency for some firms to deny holiday leave or sick pay is outrageous.

Immensely grateful

How immensely grateful I am for being in a (more or less) secure, civilised, democratic, peaceful country. How immensely grateful I am for having a warm, comfortable, safe home.

How immensely grateful I am for not

• Starving to death
• Being relentlessly bombed
• Fleeing a despotic regime
• Being trafficked
• Being tortured
• Being jailed for insulting the King
• Being conscripted
• Being a slave

How immensely sad it is that all these horrific things are going on around the world and so little is being done to stop them. How immensely sad it is that those with enormous power are not using their power more wisely.

How immensely shocking it is that a dubious embrace at a Coldplay concert gets as much attention as the destruction of Gaza. How immensely shocking it is that a film star's revealing dress gets as much attention as the bombing of Ukraine.

How immensely envious I am of those young children who know nothing of all this and still believe the world to be a kind and altruistic place.

Memory lapses

Along with my poor memory I have a tendency to remember the good things that have happened to me and forget the bad things. Which is a great advantage.

While some people remember the bad things very clearly and nurse extreme grudges for years on end, I seldom remember the bad things for long enough for a grudge to take root.

I'm sure there are many occasions on which people have insulted me or rejected me or belittled me or done me out of something, but they rapidly vanish from my memory and are mere water under the bridge.

I'll remember the enjoyable parts of a holiday, but the negative things - the disappointing hotel rooms or the flight delays or the dreadful weather - just fade away as if they never happened.

I only remember the bad things if they're especially bad and especially memorable, like the mattress in our San Francisco hotel that was the creakiest mattress we've ever encountered, or the food poisoning I had on a flight to Australia.

It means I can look back on my life and think it has generally gone well, because I forget all the things that would make me think otherwise.

The flaming row I had with my boss in 2015? What flaming row? I thought we got on rather well....

Language barrier

There are many dual language (English and Irish) road signs in Northern Ireland, but they never cease to be controversial. Some of them go up only after angry protests from the locals.

I must say I don't see the point of Irish signs in a country where the everyday language is English and only a minority of the population speak Irish fluently. But if that's what some people want, it doesn't really bother me one way or the other.

People justify dual language signs on the basis that they promote linguistic diversity, they encourage people to learn Irish and they recognise our close ties to the Republic of Ireland.

But there are only 72,000 Irish speakers in Northern Ireland out of a population of two million, so I wouldn't have thought dual language signs were a high priority.

And why only road signs? What about all the other signs on public buildings? Shouldn't they also be dual language?

There's a big lobby to have dual language signs on the new Grand Central Station, and an equally big lobby not to. I await the outcome with interest.

Personally I have no desire to learn Irish, especially as it's a famously hard language to learn. Jenny has been learning Irish for some time despite all its oddities and its fiendish pronunciation. But fluency is still a long way off.

Left handed

My father was left handed. How that happened I have no idea, he never explained. Was he copying a parent? Or copying a teacher? Who knows? But he never encouraged me to be left handed, so I became right handed like most people.

I never had any urge to be left handed. I was taught to be right handed and that was fine by me. I don't remember any left handed pupils at my two schools, but maybe I was very unobservant!

Jenny's mother was left handed, but again Jenny never had any urge to be the same. Though Jenny does do some things with her left hand, like brushing her teeth.

Roughly 10 per cent of the population are left handed. I didn't realise it was that many (that's 7 million in the UK). I don't really notice if someone is right or left handed.

Luckily we live in an enlightened age in which (on the whole) left handedness is an unremarkable personal trait. But throughout history it has been given negative associations. Into the 20th and even the 21st century, left handed children in Uganda were beaten by teachers or parents for writing with their left hand, or had their left hands tied behind their backs to force them to write with their right hand. In the Soviet school system, all left handed children were compelled to write with their right hand.

International Left Handers Day is held annually on August 13. Right handers are encouraged to try out left handed objects to see how awkward it can feel doing things the "wrong way round".

Sick as dogs

I'm lucky to have been hit by food poisoning very few times in my life. I can remember three instances very vividly. No doubt there were some other occasions but they escape my memory.

An old girlfriend Patricia and I were living in a shared flat with a bunch of other people. One night someone volunteered to cook a meal for everyone. Soon after the meal both Patricia and I were violently ill. Clearly the cook had not been sufficiently hygienic. We just shrugged it off as a typical shared-flat situation.

Another time Jenny and I were at a friend's wedding, and we gorged ourselves at the wedding reception afterwards. When we got home later we were both sick as dogs. Of course we didn't tell our friend about the food poisoning, she would have felt very guilty and it would have spoilt the day for her. I imagine some of the other guests must have had food poisoning as well, but when we saw the friend later she never mentioned it.

Then I got food poisoning on a flight to Australia. By a weird coincidence, the woman sitting next to me also had food poisoning, so we were able to deduce the cause - the egg sandwiches we had at Costa Heathrow. Boy, was I glad when that flight was over!

I love peanut butter and eat loads of it, but I read that peanut butter can easily be contaminated by salmonella, either during the growing period or during later processing. There are regular recalls of peanut butter in the States. Well, I've never heard of a peanut butter recall in the UK, so I guess it's safe for me to go on eating the stuff.

Being beautiful

One thing I'm grateful for is that as a boy I didn't grow up amid a torrent of "beautiful boy" images and given the message that if I didn't look like one of these beautiful boys, I was therefore unattractive or even ugly, and I needed to make myself more like them.

We boys never even discussed our bodies or whether we were attractive or not (not even comparing willies!). We just took our bodies for granted whatever they looked like and that was that.

Young girls on the other hand are having a terrible time of it, bombarded on all sides by "beautiful woman" images and by men's endless criticism of female bodies.

Many succumb to the pressure and do their best to make themselves more "attractive", changing their appearance in any way possible, from different make-up to cosmetic surgery. Only those with very strong wills can ignore all this pressure and accept themselves just as they are.

As far as I remember my sister was never influenced by all the focus on beautiful women (which when she was growing up was nothing like as rampant as it is now). She accepted herself as she was and never got hung-up on what she looked like.

I've never had the slightest desire to remodel myself as some beautiful man. I'm very positive about my body and have no urge to change any part of it. I am what I am.