In Act II of The Pirate of Penzance Major-General Stanley is tormented with the anguish dread of falsehood unatoned for telling his terrible story. He is no orphan…and never was one. But had he not in elegant diction indulged in an innocent fiction then the Men of Dark and Dismal Fate would have taken his daughters over the billowy waters. A Lesser of Two Evils Paradox if ever I saw one.
So he sings a ballad about the sad lot of poplar trees courted by a fickle breeze while they wave their leafy arms above and woo a rippling brook. But why Poplar Trees?
Most trees in Southern England do not shed their leaves until November. Around Rye there is still plenty of green foliage although Oaks have bright yellow patches on them, Beech trees have turned orange and yellow, Ash trees are dropping faintly yellow leaves and Sycamores are a law unto themselves producing an unexpected show of brilliant lemon-yellow leaves some years.. But Poplars?
The White Poplar drop its leaves early…like Horse Chestnuts whose branches are already bare. These were brought here from Holland in the 16th century and are often planted in parks. In spring they have silvery-white shoots and the emerging leaves are snowy-white both above and below. Later the top side of the leaves turns green as the white hairs rub off but the underside remains white. The bark of the tree is also silvery and is curiously pitted with holes. Just the tree for a man tossing and turning with an aching conscience.
Men create more than a thousand sperm a second…and each one contains three hundred and eighty one proteins. So after two hours at the movies…with my beloved by my side…I have ten million of the little critters rearing to go. No wonder I feel bad when she tells me she’s got a headache. Three billion proteins going to waste. No doubt they’ll be dead by morning. Perhaps I should feed them to the pigs. Here is a sneak preview of some of them inside a testicle. How quaint to think that we can manage Nature. A humble dose of Mystery and Wonder would not go amiss.
After a few days sperm production tails off...wet dreams as well. A good virile male of the Human Species can boast a normal sperm count of anywhere between 20 million and 200 million sperms per millilitre. However sheer weight of number is not enough for the job in hand. A sperm also needs to be the Right Shape, have Astonishing Mobility and display Mind-blowing Viability to stand any chance of being The Chosen One. Yes Albert, chance plays a big part in the Divine Plan…though the Metaphysics of the Individual…any individual including a Selfish Gene…is most odd.
15-years ago I devoted one of my weekly two-page Cinque Ports Letter to the worries of Poet Laureate Ted Hughes about the State of the National Sperm…in particular its sharp decline. A few weeks ago at an American Society for Reproductive Medicine meeting in New Orleans, Ashok Agarwal...from a clinic at the Lerner College of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland Ohio…sent shivers through the jeans of Swedish Directors when he reported that mobile phones cause a significant fall in sperm mobility and viability…thirty percent to be precise.
Agarwal divided his cohort of 361 into four groups. Average sperm count was 86 million for non-users, 69 million for those on their mobile phones for less than 2-hours a day, 59 million at 2-4 hours and 50 million at 4-hours. Agarwal’s theory was that mobile phone radiation may harm sperm by damaging the DNA…which might in turn disrupt the cells that produce Testerone in the testes or shrink the Tubules where the sperm is made.
The trouble with this sort of study is that it begs more questions than it answers. Heavy Witterers of the four hours a day variety probably spend all day in their Company Cars with a mobile phone in their trouser pocket. This was a Fertility Clinic too so the whole cohort had signed up for Infertility Treatment which would seem to skew the results. But perhaps there were control groups. And then sperm is temperature sensitive. One of the suggested response to Ted Hughes concerns was to get Englishmen out of underpants and into skirts…like the Scots…to cool their privates.
Worldwide there are a billion people with mobile phones. Annual growth rates are 20-30% so this will be two billion by 2011. 25-years ago when I produced a special issue of Marilyn Ferguson’s nBrain-Mind Bulletin on Bioelectricity, frequency was as much a worry as dosage. Living cells are sensitive within a fairly narrow frequency range. Nowadays studies never seem to mention frequency. Perhaps this is because 50-60 cycles per second is the critical range…which is the frequency of the Alternating Current in the Ring Main surrounding every room in your home.