FROM VERNON COLEMAN

Question

Some time ago I met a divorced man whom I honestly thought was genuine, decent and caring. We started sleeping together but he didn't seem very interested. When I tried to talk about it he told me he was tired and not to nag. He did say he found it difficult to relax in bed because he was worried that he might let me down. After a year together I discovered that he had been secretly visiting sleazy massage parlours. When I confronted him he said he was ashamed but he refused to accept that he had emotional or sexual problems. He finished our relationship. I still love him. He says I deserve better.

Answer

Your lover clearly needs to talk about his fears. Perhaps he feels inadequate because a previous lover left him. Perhaps he feels fearful because an unkind lover belittled his performance in bed. Who knows. I think he does have emotional problems. But I also think they could probably be sorted. Try to persuade him to get help. His first task is to accept that he has hangups. The second task is to identify them and pin them on a board so that they can be examined. Only then can his problems be solved.

Question

My husband always calls me 'mother' and treats me more like a mother than a wife. We have two young children and I'm only 32 but I already feel old. I can't remember when we last had sex.

Answer

Your husband has established a faulty image of you in his head. This often happens after a woman has a baby. And its particularly likely to happen when the man is present at the birth. Men sometimes have difficulty in accepting that the woman they love can be both a wife and a mother.

You need to re-establish yourself as a wife and a sexy woman. But you need to do it carefully. Open the door dressed in a red basque, black stockings and six inch high heels and you may shock him horribly. Be subtle. Find a babysitter and suggest that the two of you have a weekend away. And then seduce him slowly.

Question

I hate your column. Why do you waste so much space on animals? Your readers want more advice on day to day health matters. I loathe your silly jokes and I think you must be the ugliest man in Britain.

Answer

Thank you for the photograph of myself with a moustache drawn on it. I did have a huge droopy moustache during the Napoleonic era. But I think I've gone through that phase. You seem rather sad and lonely. May you have health, love and money and the time to enjoy them all.

Question

I have difficulty making decisions.

Answer

When faced with a difficult decision make a list of all the choices and summarise the positive and negative points for each.

You will often find that the decision then becomes obvious.

Question

Why do councils want to get rid of pigeons? Are the birds really bad for our health? They say we shouldn't feed them.

Answer

Pigeons are no real threat to human health. Feed the birds. They add colour and movement to our increasingly drab lives. I would rather have a sparrow or a pigeon than a bus full of self obsessed and mean spirited councillors any day of the week.

Question

Why do people pay small bills with credit cards? Haven't they heard of cash?

Answer

The other day the Welsh Princess and I stood in a queue behind a woman who bought a book of stamps with a credit card. A transaction which should have taken ten seconds took three minutes. (I know, I timed it.) Only the truly thoughtless and inconsiderate behave this way.

Question

How do you define luxury? My wife says its champagne, first class travel and posh meals. I'm not so sure.

Answer

Real luxury is having the freedom to be what you want to be, where and when you want to be it, and to do what you want to do with your life. That's real freedom and that's real luxury.

Question

What qualifications do nurses need?

Answer

The only qualifications you really need to become a nurse are a loving nature and the ability to care about other people. Sadly, those are the only qualifications hospitals don't look for when recruiting new nurses. The consequences of this error are clear to see.

Question

How can you tell if someone is a psychopath?

Answer

People who are callous, egotistical and unable to empathise with the suffering of others are usually described as psychopaths. In a normal population 1 in 200 people will be psychopaths. It is, perhaps, just unfortunate the percentage of psychopaths seems to be considerably higher in the House of Commons.

Question

My wife and I had a threesome with a male friend of ours. From a physical point of view it went well but I am now having problems in dealing with having seen her doing it with another man. The whole thing was originally my idea and beforehand I didn't think I would have any problems with it but I now think of my wife as a slut. I think the worst thing is the fact that she so clearly enjoyed it all.

Answer

It is always hard to predict what will happen when you turn a fantasy into reality. Many men do get aroused when they imagine the woman they love being with another man. And many men get aroused when they watch it actually happen. It's commoner than most people think. But you clearly went one step too far and you should have stuck to the fantasy. The important thing is that it isn't fair to blame your wife. Tell her you love her too much to do it again. And try to reassure yourself with the thought that she wasn't being unfaithful in the traditional sense. You were there. You were part of the action.

Question

How can we be expected to pay allegiance to a royal family which hunts and kills?

Answer

These are barbaric people who deserve neither our respect nor our affection, but rather our contempt.

Question

My husband recently lost his driving licence for speeding. As a result he has now lost his job as a double glazing salesman. Why did Jack Straw and his driver get off scot free? They were going much faster than my husband. I feel very bitter.

Answer

I cannot think of any excuse. I can't think of anything Straw could have been doing that would have been more important than an ordinary day in the life of a double glazing salesman (a plumber, a gardener or, even, an estate agent). The Labour government is composed of a greedy, self serving bunch of hypocrites who make Major's dismal Tories look positively angelic in comparison.

Question

My boyfriend has a rather small willy. I was a bit disappointed at first but these days I really don't mind at all. He's a good lover and I enjoy sex with him more than I ever enjoyed sex with better endowed men. The trouble is that my boyfriend is constantly worrying about what he's got (or, rather, what he's not got). I wrote to a magazine agony aunt about it and she says that I'll never be able to stop him worrying. Do you think she's right?

Answer

Your friend is totally wrong and very defeatist. Most men have never seen another erect penis. They have no real idea whether what they've got is family, economy, medium or pocket sized. Tell him that what he's got is more than enough. Do a little lilly gilding. Tell him that if it was any bigger it would hurt. Tell him that he's the best lover you've ever had. Then tell him again. And again. I

Question

You were clearly right (yet again) to warn about the dangers associated with mobile telephones. Do you think any other electrical appliances might be dangerous?

Answer

All electrical appliances are potentially dangerous but the one item which should, in my view, be banned is the microwave oven. The Welsh Princess and I don't have one and whenever I can I refuse to eat food cooked in one.

I have been warning about microwave ovens for even longer than I have been warning about mobile telephones. My warnings about phones have been taken up by just about every newspaper in the nation. But those same newspapers still turn a blind eye to microwave ovens. Why? Dunno. I suspect that microwave ovens may do more harm.

Question

Why do lorry drivers drive so recklessly?

Answer

Probably because they know they're going to be pretty safe if there is a crash.

Question

Why do I always seem to end up with friends who don't really care about anything but themselves? I won a prize on the lottery recently (just a few hundred pounds) and everyone I know was catty and nasty about it. Several of them just wanted to know how much of it I was going to give them.

Answer

The generous and kindly always seem to attract the selfish and self centred. Only when you discover self respect, pride and the realisation that you deserve better from your friends will you realise that you do not need these people. A real friend will rejoice with you when you are happy, as well as comforting you when you are sad. Someone who isn't pleased for you when something good happens isn't going to care when something bad happens. A grasping, faithful, disloyal friend is no friend at all and you are better off with no friends at all than with such hollow, worthless friends.

Question

Why don't you appear on TV any more? I used to watch you a lot years ago.

Answer

I retired from TV when producers stopped being prepared to show programmes that asked questions or risked offending the rich and the powerful. Whenever I turn it on I am astonished at the number of disposable and interchangeable celebrities who seem to get work these days. Why they are employed I cannot imagine.

Question

My doctor refuses to give me any contraceptive advice. She is catholic and claims to do so would be against her religion. But isn't her responsibility as a doctor more important than her own religious principles?

Answer

I think so. But, sadly, the treatment patients get when they visit a doctor often does depend upon the religion of the doctor they consult.

There are many catholic doctors who do not approve of contraception and who will not, therefore, provide contraception or contraceptive advice to their patients.
And many catholic doctors won't help patients who are in great pain if it means that as a consequence of the treatment the patients may die.

Catholic teaching is that if a patient is in unbearable agony then he or she should be 'helped to appreciate the Christian understanding of redemptive suffering'.

Great.

Personally, if I was in unbearable agony I would rather have a syringe full of morphine, thank you very much.

Question

I would like to have a penis enlargement operation. I am not small in that area and have never had any complaints but I would like to have something longer. Does the operation work? What are the side effects. There seems to be very little information available.

Answer

One man who had a penis enlargement operation never had an erection again. A second guy ended up with a suppurating penis with open, weeping sores. A third had to have what was left of his penis removed. Have you abandoned the idea yet? Incidentally, why do you want a longer penis? It's girth that makes the difference, not length. Think thicker.

Question

When I saw two men climbing into a neighbour's house I rang the police. They eventually turned up an hour and a half later. By that time the burglars had finished, gone home and probably sold the loot.

Answer

You should have told the police that there was an animal rights demonstration going on. They would have been there in seconds. There would have been a riot squad, policemen on horses and a couple of helicopters too. There are always plenty of police around to crush demonstrations. Every time I've spoken at an animal rights rally the whole area has been awash with policemen. Alternatively, if you need a policeman in a hurry I suggest that you either park your car in the wrong place or drive at 2 mph above the speed limit.

Question

One of the big problems with our society is that lots of people simply aren't prepared to work. If more people were prepared to do their share then the world would be a much happier place.

Answer

Working hard doesn't necessarily make anyone happy or rich. If it did then most of the people leaving factory gates would do so with a big smile, driving a Rolls Royce. The key to material success is to work hard and smart. But the key to happiness is to enjoy the work you do so much that it stops being work.

Question

My niece could really do something with her life if only she would get her act together. She constantly lives in a dream world and believes that her future is going to come to her on a silver platter. She's convinced herself that she's going to inherit or win some money. She is just vegetating and is slowly wasting her life on idle dreams. How can I get it through to her that she's got to go out into the big wide world and make her own life?

Answer

Your niece is by no means alone. Approximately 104% of Britons now follow the philosophy she favours. And, inevitably, the vast majority of these truly pathetic individuals will live out their lives becomingly increasingly bitter and frustrated. Sadly, your niece has to learn this lesson herself. Even more sadly, by the time she realises the truth it may be too late.

COMMENT

You will probably be as astonished (and as horrified) as I am to discover that the RSPCA still believes some animal experiments are necessary.

When I wrote to protest about the fact that the RSPCA refuses to condemn all barbaric torture of animals in laboratories I explained that evidence shows that animal experimentation are of no value.

I pointed out that I could give the RSPCA the names of fifty drugs on the UK market known to cause cancer (or other serious disorders) in animals. Doctors prescribe these drugs because animal experiments are misleading and irrelevant.
The RSPCA wrote back claiming that `the weight of scientific opinion would appear to be against this.'

I replied asking for the source of the `weight of scientific opinion'.

Curiously, I received no reply.

Those who support animal experiments can never back up their opinion with evidence because there isn't any.

Even the most optimistic and aggressive vivisectionist will not claim that more than 10-20% of animal experiments are of value.

Even if it were true that some experiments were of value there is a flaw: how do they know which experiments are of value? The answer is that no one does know. And if you don't know which experiments are of value then all experiments done on anmals are worthless.

To draw attention to the fact that animal experiments are worthless I'm offering £100,000 to the first person who can produce indisputable clinical evidence to convince me that all animal experiments are relevant, reliable, effective and essential for human health. *

This isn't Sunday People money. It's my money. And I'm deadly serious. If I lose the Welsh Princess won't be able to buy the new frock I know she's got her eye on.
But the Welsh Princess will get her new frock.

Vivisectionists won't write in and claim the money because they don't have and can't produce any such evidence.

Vivisection is a cruel, barbaric, money making confidence trick.

Meanwhile, don't give any money to the RSPCA until they oppose all animal experiments.

For more information see www.antivivisection.co.uk

*This Challenge has now been withdrawn and replaced by a new challenge - see Vernon Coleman's Summer 2001 Challenge To Vivisectors (15.5.01)

HEALTH MEMO

Doctors are terrible at dealing with stress. Most can't even deal effectively with the stress in their own lives - let alone advise their patients on how to survive!

And yet stress is now such a major threat to our health - and our lives - that it is more difficult to think of a disease which isn't stress related than it is to think of one which is.
Allergies, anxiety, asthma, backache, cancer, depression, eczema, headache, heart disease, high blood pressure, indigestion, insomnia, irritable bowel syndrome, panic attacks, psoriasis, sexual problems and ulcers are just a few of the many diseases now known to be caused or made worse by stress.

Stress surrounds us all. Get into your car and there is stress on the roads. There is stress at work and there is stress waiting for you when you get home. Stress is, without a doubt, the big killer of the twenty first century.

But stress can be conquered.

I have published a 278 page book called `How To Relax And Overcome Stress' which explains exactly how you can stressproof your mind and your body!

My book includes questionnaires designed to help you measure your exposure to stress and to find out if you are suffering from stress burn-out.

There are sections explaining how you can deal with guilt and how you can cope without tranquillisers. I have described alternative therapies that work and included step by step details explaining how you can relax your body and your mind. I have also dealt with many specific diseases (including the ones listed above).

`How To Relax And Overcome Stress' is published at £9.95. But readers of this column can buy a copy now for £5.95. Postage and packing is free.

Just send your cheque/PO for £5.95 (made payable to Publishing House) to: Dr Vernon Coleman's Stress Book Offer, PO Box 30, Barnstaple, Devon EX32 9YU. You have to send in by post for this offer - I'm afraid you can't order on line.

THE THINGS THEY SAY

`Don't get annoyed if your neighbour has his TV on loudly at two in the morning. Call him at four and tell him how much you enjoyed it.'

Anon

STRANGE BUT TRUE