Men's things - XXIV - A presentation

Sharing my prostate cancer story

Within the last fortnight, I attended a gathering of black men in Manchester and Liverpool, where I was invited to tell my story about my experience with prostate cancer.

The story on its own could be compelling, as I do have friends and acquaintances, even strangers asking for advice and direction about how to navigate these issues, that I term, "Men’s things".

However, in such a semi-formal setting under the auspices of a registered charity, I felt it should not be a typical story-telling setting, but one where whoever listened learnt something and could act on it.

What the prostate gland does

To that end, I created slides with some images, because in all previous presentations I have attended on the topic of prostate cancer, the issue of the function of the prostate gland as a muscular switch between urination and ejaculation was not clear. For instance, I learnt this long after I had commenced radiotherapy treatment for prostate cancer.

Secondly, I had only found one image that gave a close-up view of how an enlarged prostate gland can present symptoms of difficulty or discomfort with the ease of urination. That visual image alone seemed to get men thinking about having checks on their prostate health.

Courtesy of NHS Overview of Benign Prostate Enlargement

Your active participation in your health, matters

On this perspective, I wove a story around my curiosity about some unusual blood test results outside normal ranges, through insistence to my GP for tests, the referral for further investigation, leading to a cancer diagnosis, then the treatment of prostate cancer, and the post-treatment side effects.

Beyond that is the need for black men to participate in surveys, especially when invited for bowel cancer screening, why men’s things should be more widely and openly discussed, and how early detection saves lives.

What I hoped men would take away from my presentation was that, “All prostate issues are not indicative of cancer, but every prostate enlargement should be investigated for cause and possible treatment.”

My presentation slides

Blog - Men's things - Prostate Cancer blogs

Blog - Photons on the Prostate - XII

References

MedScape: International Prostate Symptom Score (IPSS) Calculator

Prostate Cancer UK: Risk Checker

Home as you left it

Strewn yet hewn

When I returned home late in the night a week ago, it never occurred to me how if anyone had seen a dog in the window of my apartment over the weekend, they could come back on my return, point to the dog and ask how much it was.

In fact, I could have left my bathroom scales in my wine rack (I did not do that, someone else did) and expected to still find it there or carelessly left the fridge door open and met it undefeated by gravity or the rotational forces of the earth in the same position I had in my forgetfulness abandoned things.

That lack of trepidation as to the condition of my home that always seemed to leave me a total stranger in my own home after any sojourn away, was bliss. None of the disorderliness which to the mind of another was their order, or apparent disarray was due to poltergeist activity, I simply had a trusted house sitter.

Behold an earthquake

Trusted is being generous to a fault, because except for the entirely immovable things, everything moved, changed places, or just disappeared. The lack of care for the very basic things even though to his thinking he was keeping the place tidy, robbed me too many times of the enjoyment of home, yet overwhelmed to a masochist trait, I submitted myself to more abuse.

However, after a 16-hour journey back from Cape Town, still barely at 60% of my strength, I stepped into my home and though he was present, I found myself running the vacuum cleaner through my apartment before I even took my jacket off. When I opened the fridge, a hurricane had swept through it with pieces anywhere but where they should be.

That I was still finding things out of place five months later is testament to his genius that has a madness to its method, but the day after I returned, I asked him to give me back the keys to my apartment and I bought myself the unimaginable treasure of space, independence, and wallowing in the mess of my own making. I could live with that.

Peace with my pieces

The next time we saw each other, it was at a waving distance attending a funeral, I bear no animosity toward him, I consider him a friend, even if he thinks otherwise. It was a necessary intervention, rescuing myself from the throes of the unmentionable trying to articulate the indescribable.

Just to have your home unspoiled and be able to suggest the best price for the dog in the window the stranger saw the other day and get a good exchange without rummaging through the depths of Hades for the upper set of your false teeth and the missing tail of the dog. You do not want to know what I still cannot find in my own home.

A mandolin, I traverse

My kitchen lessons

While we are estranged for reasons, she quite easily forgets in impactfully unguarded expression that cannot be misconstrued by the listener, there are benefits to that unsteady relationship that have served me well. I guess the biological relationship has met too many issues of ego and standing to develop into a friendship of any significance, and I am fine with that.

From an early age, I was invited into the kitchen, whether by my personal interest or her coercion, what I have learnt therein has meant when I am as inclined and disposed, I can fend for myself and attend to the cravings I need to satisfy, if alternatives would not suffice.

Doing it myself

A case in point was when at one time in Cape Town, I could not find anything like Agege bread, even in the shops purveying Nigerian fare. I was soon out looking for a baking tin with a lid, that I could not find anywhere in the shops, that I ordered one for delivery to home in the UK.

I made do with what I could find and started baking, it was when I returned home that I got the Agege bread recipe to a level of satisfactory achievement and was later able to give Brian the true experience of what that kind of loaf was all about.

It is probably laziness and lethargy that gets the better of me when there are things I could do at home that I end up spending money on at the local supermarket. For instance, I hate chopping onions, I can do that with a mandolin, and I have had one about the house for about three decades.

The mandolin in this context is not the musical instrument, but a kitchen utensil used for slicing, there is a difference in spelling between English and American English which takes an ‘e’ on the end.

Cost-saving benefit

On one supermarket shelf, I saw a bag of chopped onions going for a song and I bought them, the price looked reasonable enough until it went up by 50%, how I can tell prices have changed, I cannot explain, but in my subconscious, I notice how prices fluctuate on the everyday goods that I get. There is a threshold beyond which I would whisper to myself, almost spitting out in disgust and disdain, that I am not paying that much for that.

I returned home to my red onions, prepared them for the mandolin and apportioned quantities to zip lock freezer bags, then wondered why I had never done that in the first place. That is the case with a few other things that I have learnt from domestication encouraged by my mother from childhood. It is one of those things to celebrate, despite the other things.

In praise of loyalty schemes

Asserting Customer Loyalty

I consider myself an advocate for loyalty schemes, as I have participated in a few, some of which offered benefits I never utilised when I was unable to take full advantage of them.

However, I have found the best perks in the hospitality industry. The benefits and rights you receive as a loyal customer can greatly surpass those of a casual, unregistered user of a service.

One case in point was when I had the Accor Favourite Guest Card, which I lost almost 15 years ago. While visiting Berlin and checking into a hotel I had used many times before, a Mercure brand hotel, the check-in clerk informed me that the hotel was fully booked.

That was not what the Accor Favourite Guest Card guaranteed; I had a room in the hotel of my choice secured, no questions asked, and I asserted that fact. Their suggestion was to put me up in another hotel for one night and return to my chosen hotel for the last three nights.

I refused, stating to the clerk that I didn’t want to be moving around Berlin like a prostitute. I gave them twenty minutes to come up with a better proposal: a booking in another hotel of the same standard or better for the four nights, which they did, even paying for the taxi to transport me to a hotel suite in an even more exclusive part of Berlin.

The Tangible Value of Loyalty

Without my loyalty program, I would not have been able to negotiate that outcome. After leaving the Accor Favourite Guest Card scheme, I joined the Hotels.com rewards program, which gives you a monetary average of every accumulated 10-night stay as a reward night to help offset the costs of staying at hotels booked through that app.

Since 2013, I have saved over £4,500 using my loyalty reward nights, but they have changed the scheme. Aside from not understanding how the new system works, I feel it is not as beneficial. Additionally, I have secured some good deals through Booking.com.

Having once lived in the Netherlands, I became a frequent flyer with KLM, which later merged with Air France as part of the SkyTeam alliance. Over the years, I have earned statuses and miles that covered my return flights to India in 2011 and to South Africa in June 2024.

With this loyalty scheme comes priority boarding, extra baggage allowance, a choice of seating, an air mile multiplier for each Euro spent, depending on status, along with complimentary access to the lounge if you hold a gold status. For years, I had platinum status until the aftermath of the pandemic reduced it to just Silver.

Choose and Stick with It

In my view, everything must be done to maintain at least a minimal loyalty allegiance, rather than starting from scratch again. My frequent flyer miles and hotel reward benefits have been invaluable in saving upfront costs. Choose a brand carefully, study what they offer, and how it compares to the competition, then make a commitment.

It might be pricier, but your patronage amounts to something significant; there is value in storing loyalty rather than endlessly chasing the most affordable price from anyone offering a service. Being a creature of habit by adopting a loyalty scheme is not such a bad thing.

With loyalty store cards, you occasionally receive discounts from the retail price, which can be up to 50% or more. As one supermarket suggests, “Every little helps.” 

Desert Island Discs: To Be Young, Gifted and Black

Young, Gifted and Black - Aretha Franklin (1972)

Stories and selections

Listening through the back catalogue of Desert Island Discs on the BBC Sounds app has been a journey into enlightenment and recognition. Whether the stories told or the selections of music chosen by the guests, not only do you learn something about them, but you might also come away with insight and inspiration.

It was not until I was listening to the episode where Yvonne Brewster was a guest in 2005 that I began taking notes. I felt I should do a once-over of everything else I had listened to, but I did not have the presence of mind to do so.

This was before I went back to the beginning of the existing recordings, of which many have been lost or barely rescued in the first 25 years of broadcasting the programme.

It is a shame that no one at the BBC of that time thought this cachet of guests and interviews, many speaking with a received pronunciation accent harking back to a bygone age, should be recorded and preserved.

Pioneering, gifted and black

Yvonne Brewster was a pioneer as the UK’s first Black woman drama student; born to an upper-middle-class Jamaican family, she came to England to attend drama school at the Rose Bruford College where the proprietress thought she would unlikely find dramatic work in Britain, only for her to go on to achieve a distinction in drama and mime at the Royal Academy of Music.

Her achievement is exemplified in the third track she chose, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, which was recorded by Nina Simone in 1969. I was more familiar with the cover version by the Jamaican duo Bob and Marcia, however, the version recorded by Aretha Franklin won her a Grammy. [Wikipedia: Young, Gifted and Black]

While I knew of the music, I was not as familiar with the lyrics until I heard it clearly, a few weeks ago. From the 1950s onwards, we began to see such amazing talent and achievements from the global Black community, even as the civil rights movement took hold, and many African nations pursued the goal of independence from colonial rule.

We must remind ourselves

Blacks became known beyond the field of entertainment to academia, science, engineering, business, and politics. This was both a shock and a surprise to many Caucasians who thought otherwise.

I recall that my father’s white colleagues in the late 1960s sought to be derisive of his becoming a chartered accountant, having excellently passed his exams and had come third overall in England and Wales, along with winning the Foulks Lynch Prize. They sneeringly said they didn’t think he was that brilliant.

Yet, against all odds, we have striven, risen and shone, but that fact still needs to be instilled in us and our children, at every turn, it needs to get well beyond James Brown’s Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud, to the point that we know without a doubt from within ourselves, what it is To Be Young, Gifted and Black.

That is who we are, and too many times, we forget that we each have to be reminded, “Your soul's intact, And that's a fact!” No matter what age in life, this is our truth, one to live by and live out.

To Be Young, Gifted and Black

Young, gifted and black
Oh what a lovely precious dream
To be young, gifted and black
Open your heart to what I mean

In the whole world you know
There's a million boys and girls
Who are young, gifted and black
And that's a fact!

You are young, gifted and black
We must begin to tell our young
There's a world waiting for you
Yours is the quest that's just begun

When you feel really low
Yeah, there's a great truth that you should know
When you're young, gifted and black
Your soul's intact

To be young, gifted and black
Oh, how I've longed to know the truth
There are times when I look back
And I am haunted by my youth

Oh but my joy of today
Is that we can all be proud to say
To be young, gifted and black
Is where it's at

Is where it's at
Is where it's at

Songwriters: Nina Simone / Weldon Irvine – Source: Musixmatch

YouTube: Nina Simone - To Be Young, Gifted and Black (Audio)

YouTube: Bob & Marcia Young, Gifted & Black (Official Audio)

The Supreme Court judgement on WOMAN

An impassable terrain

The issue of access to women’s intimate spaces and the participation of natal males who have identified as female by gender reassignment in sport has been a controversial and sometimes impossible issue to discuss.

There are activists in what had become gender wars who had taken such implacably entrenched positions on either side of the debate, making those who even had the simplest, most innocent, or possibly naive questions feel silenced, for fear of being labelled phobic, exclusionary, bigoted or even worse.

Any opinion that appeared to go against the grain of the most liberal view of inclusion was an invitation to censure, ostracism, punishment, loss of status or livelihood, persecution, prosecution, and even death threats. I dare say, to the silent and quite likely reasonable majority, it was like the world had gone mad.

What is sex?

I awaited with anticipation and trepidation the judgement of The Supreme Court in the UK, framed in the context of what the protected characteristic of sex in the Equality Act 2010 explicitly referred to, was it biological sex alone or did it include certificated sex?

The section, as per what the Act refers to as sex, is Chapter 1, Section 11 shown below:

Sex

In relation to the protected characteristic of sex—

(a) a reference to a person who has a particular protected characteristic is a reference to a man or to a woman;

(b) a reference to persons who share a protected characteristic is a reference to persons of the same sex.

The Supreme Court in its 88-page judgement with 268 paragraphs exhaustively reviewed historical and superseded acts and laws that fed into the Equality Act 2010 and concluded that the definition of man and woman given in the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 had not been changed in either the Gender Recognition Act 2004 or the succeeding Equality Act 2010. [The Supreme Court – Judgement - For Women Scotland Ltd (Appellant) v The Scottish Ministers (Respondent)] PDF

In Part 1, Section 5, Subsection 2, the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 declares.

(2) In this Act—

" woman " includes a female of any age, and

" man " includes a male of any age.

There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that in 1975, woman and man referred to biological sex. Every assertion and consequent interpretation derives full context from here.

An appeal to predictability

The Supreme Court was at pains to stress a particular point in Paragraph 12:

Lord Nicholls’ important constitutional insight in Spath Holme, that citizens with the help of their advisers should be able to understand statutes, points towards an interpretation that is clear and predictable.

In other words, there is a need for consistent, clear, and predictable interpretation of words, contexts, meanings, and intention, when citizens read statutes as promulgated by parliament.

That means, if a woman or a man had not been explicitly redefined in a subsequent Act, the precedent definition remains.

Another crucial point made is that the protected characteristic of Gender Reassignment remains valid by force of law in the Equality Act 2010, none of the rights of those persons who have undergone, are undergoing, or are in the process to undergo gender reassignment are impugned, they are protected against discrimination, victimisation, or harassment, as a matter of course.

The difficult question

However, the practical consequences of this situation and judgement will definitely leave people with certain protected characteristics who have had access to spaces of their acquired gender identity in a kind of limbo, possibly requiring a third space.

I would think, this is a matter for The Equality and Human Rights Commission to address, in terms of the changes to rules, regulations, notices, texts, and policies, along with the kinds of accommodations and exceptions that will continue to safeguard the protected characteristics of those whose biological sex has by gender reassignment acquired a certificated sex.

Knowledge is power

It is incumbent on every activist and advocate to study The Supreme Court judgement to appreciate the rationale behind their summation and conclusion.

At the very least, read Section 22, Summary of our reasoning, which contains Paragraph 265 on Pages 84 to 86; the attendant paragraphs informing their reasoning are suffixes to the respective subsections.

While I am not a lawyer and obviously not as emotionally invested in this situation, my reading of the judgement is that it is sound, based on unimpeachable legal precedent, and argued with due consideration of all parties involved, that they have stated, it is not a victory for either side.

It provides clarity that would roll back some unfortunate and extrapolated interpretations of the law that have both advantaged and disadvantaged certain groups with common characteristics; that would always be the result of a petition for interpretation made to the highest court of the land.

The fight for exclusive and/or inclusive places for protected characteristics as per the Equality Act 2010 must advance beyond protest to provision. I also do not believe the slippery slope argument is relevant to this case.

References

The Supreme Court – Judgement - For Women Scotland Ltd (Appellant) v The Scottish Ministers (Respondent) [PDF]

BBC News: Five key takeaways from Supreme Court ruling

Observer Editorial: The Observer view on Equality Act ruling: A dignified compromise that respects the rights of everyone

Desert Island Discs: Connecting stories

Their Interesting Stories 

I began this blog days ago after weeks of wondering how to approach the subject. Over time, it dawned on me that what I had to say might not fit into just one blog; there were simply too many interesting things to discuss before the blog began to resemble a soporific treatise. 

How people have lived their lives and how they have impacted others or humanity always fascinates me. Friday evenings represent a time to reflect on the lives of the recently departed when, on BBC Radio 4, I play back the latest episode of Last Word. 

This is a weekly obituary programme that highlights the life stories of four people, along with notable mentions of two or three others. After an introduction, people shed light on the lives of these personalities, eliciting interesting facts about who they were, what they did, and the significance of their existence among us. 

Music for Solitude 

A couple of months ago, during one broadcast, a rather unfamiliar but interesting name came up. I cannot remember which name it was, but upon searching for it, the first result was their appearance on another BBC Radio 4 programme, Desert Island Discs. 

Desert Island Discs was first broadcast in January 1942. A guest is invited to imagine being a castaway on a desert island like Robinson Crusoe but with the provision of eight chosen audio recordings, the complete works of Shakespeare, and a religious book of their choice. 

This programme follows an interview format interspersed with the guest's chosen music or audio recordings. It can be quite intrusive, and the light banter allows for probing and interesting questions. Even the choices may hold intriguing stories about the person’s life. At the end, guests are asked to choose just one of the eight audio recordings to take with them, along with a luxury item, a tradition that has been in place since the late 1950s. 

Over 3,400 episodes have been recorded, but some are lost. Others can be recovered or contain fragments from episodes previously thought to be lost, sometimes as brief as two minutes, while typical episodes run around 40 minutes. 

An Event of Propinquity 

I recently started playing back the episodes from the very beginning of those that could be found, and what an experience it has been; it is like a history of popular culture told from the perspective of individuals, many of whom, including some of the earlier hosts of the show, have passed on. 

I plan to cover this in subsequent blogs, but I was inspired to complete this blog because I am now in the middle of 1971. Earlier this morning, I heard the Desert Island Discs episode featuring Clodagh Rodgers, only to log on to the BBC News website to learn that she had just passed on. [BBC News: Eurovision singer Clodagh Rodgers dies aged 78] 

It is quite remarkable how the various ideas, events, and individuals that shape history can have a significant impact, create memorable moments, or become notorious. These elements weave together to form a fabric of the human narrative that deserves greater appreciation for its instructional value or as cautionary tales. 

I have begun to take detailed notes and establish connections between different observations, sounds, and memories. These reflections may be incorporated into future blog posts.