The Norm Chronicles (26 page)

If diving through the air doesn’t appeal, there’s always diving underwater. Jacques Cousteau’s development of the ‘Aqua-Lung’ in 1943 turned scuba into a leisure activity, and the British Sub-Aqua Club (BSAC) now has more than 35,000 members. The BSAC keeps a careful tally of diving fatalities and recorded 197 deaths in the 12 years from 1998 to 2009, an average of around 16 a year.
⁹
It estimated about 30 million dives over this period, so the average lethal risk was around 8 MicroMorts per dive. But this is an average – for BSAC members it was 5 per dive, for non-members 10.

Diving, like modern mountaineering and parachuting, relies on technical developments to reduce the risk of an inherently dangerous pastime. By comparison, running seems natural and moderate, one for
the more cautious. But long-distance running, as Pheidippides found 2,500 years ago, after collapsing and dying from his run of 26 miles to announce victory at the Battle of Marathon, can end in more than sore feet. In 3.3 million marathon attempts in the US between 1975 and 2004 there were 26 sudden deaths.
¹⁰
That’s around 7 MicroMorts a marathon on average, roughly like a scuba dive or a sky-dive. Recent attention has focused on the risks of drinking too much water, from which one participant in the London Marathon died in 2007.
¹¹

Most weekend sports aren’t likely to kill you, but injuries are common.

Data used to be collected on a sample of people treated in hospital for accidents from leisure activities, and the resulting Leisure Accident Surveillance System (LASS) statistics record, for example, 620 people injured in riding schools in 2002.
¹²

But this was based on only around 17 of the hospital accident departments in the UK. Scaled up to the whole country, the estimate is of about 12,700 accidents at riding schools. Similarly LASS estimates 6,500 accidents at golf clubs, and nearly 700,000 injuries from all sports, of which the majority – 450,000 – were from ball games, enough to make you want to stay home and watch the football on television. LASS even identifies the specific object associated with each injury: 200 from javelins (best not to ask), 1,600 from skipping ropes, 17,000 from cricket balls, 260,000 from footballs, 34,000 from skateboards and roller-blades, 3,200 from fish hooks and 5,800 from bouncy castles. And 164 cricket stump injuries.

MB asked a budding
traceur
– a practitioner of parkour, or free-running – about the injury risks of rolling, jumping and vaulting up, down and over urban obstacles at speed, and was ticked off for not knowing that parkour was a technique for avoiding risk by learning to move swiftly but safely. To which you can’t help replying, if safety is the point, why not take the stairs? (Though stairs have their hazards too: see
Chapter 18
, on health and safety.)

Clearly there’s more to it than being careful. Equally, most of them don’t want to die. Taking sky-diving, scuba-diving, marathon-running and other moderately extreme sports, there seems to be some natural level of risk – up to around 10 MicroMorts – that most participants are
prepared to accept while remaining reasonably sensible. This does not include base-jumping or climbing to high altitudes.

So it is not illogical for people to talk of safety even as they flirt with danger. Dangerous sports do not equal recklessness, for the risk seems to be carefully, if not always consciously, calibrated. The acute risks of these activities are certainly higher than those of an ordinary day at the desk, but for most participants of most extreme-ish sports, the risk of ten times the average daily dose seems to be about where their risk thermostat is set at weekends.

One study by Stephen Lyng of what he calls ‘edgework’, a phrase coined by Hunter S. Thompson in
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
(see also
Chapter 9
, on illegal drug-taking), describes edgework in the bracing language of social theory as ‘acquiring and using finely honed skills and experiencing intense sensations of self-determination and control, thus providing an escape from the structural conditions supporting alienation and oversocialization’.
¹³

Hate the job, feel like a cog in the machine, tired of the daily MicroMort? Want to feel spontaneous and forget your everyday self? Then squeeze about 10 days normal risk into one – and jump.

As with drugs, risk perception is capable of turning every threat into an attraction. But it usually stops short of making death desirable. Some speak of a lack of control, others of the fine judgement that enables them, just, to keep control. Either way, they think they will survive to tell the tale, and they always have the option of leaving the danger behind to do something else. So the big element of control that they all retain is the freedom to choose whether or not to do it. To take that point to absurdity, Kelvin would find no thrill in extreme proximity to death in old age. Hardened arteries somehow don’t count as edgework. So choice is a big factor in attitudes to danger. The fright factor
¹⁴
of involuntary risk, or risk that people can’t escape – exposure to pollution is another good example of a risk we can’t avoid – often feels far worse than risks we choose, such as adventurous sports. Surfers Against Sewage is a real organisation, with a fair point about which risks are tolerable. Base-Jumpers Against Climate Change – if it existed – wouldn’t be altogether daft either.

If parachuting were as safe as a day at the office, would it have the same thrill? For many, yes. The allure – for those who feel it – is not solely the risk as it appears in the statistics, but the risk as it feels in the moment. Instinctive fear of being high up is probably an evolutionary plus. But evolution hasn’t caught up with parachutes yet. In other words, danger isn’t measured only in the head, it’s measured in the skin. As with flying or roller-coasters, we can feel afraid, even enjoy the fear, with only a little more than usual to worry about.

Objective measures of harm are not irrelevant to this subjective thrill. If you knew the fairground ride was a death trap, you wouldn’t get on. So we say to ourselves, ‘I know I’ll be all right, but I don’t feel it’, and with that careful balance enjoy the ride. For many others an old saying has to be taken seriously: risk is its own reward. Just don’t be surprised when people choose different levels of risk for different aspects of their lives. Attitudes to danger vary even within individuals, for any of whom risk is strangely, but not necessarily foolishly, compartmentalised.

17
LIFESTYLE

N
ORM LAY IN BED
, eyes shut, listening to his body. He was middle-aged and felt it. His body told him that it hurt.

He had recently taken up exercise after studying the data on chronic illness over lunch with Kelvin: a burger for Kelv, a salad for Norm. Running was his attempt to slow the raindrop as it trickled down the window. Although there were other consolations too. For example, beer tasted better afterwards, bitter with the sweet taste of righteousness.

So for twenty minutes each day on 200mg of flecainide acetate to control his cardiac arrhythmia, paunch creeping over the band of his shorts, he forced his feet down lanes lined with brambles or through damp leaves by the canal, blowing hard at the lid of his closing coffin, then sucked the air back like a glutton. He heaved his carcass all the way up to jog speed, nearly, until the aches were washed out by adrenaline. This was what it was all about. This was striving.

‘Commit, Norm, commit!’

He pushed again until his body screamed that it was alive and feeling too much, all to counter the long hours when it seemed to feel nothing but fed up. He drove his thin legs and squeezed wheezing lungs to prove his frame could raise one more militant shout against age and wouldn’t be dried and silenced. When he was running, he was living; it was transcendent and for ever, for 22 minutes. And Norm knew precisely how much extra life 22 minutes of exercise was worth, on average.

He finished. He slumped, while every muscle said it was spent and he wondered if he could have sustained his Mo-Farah finishing burst from the gate into the allotment instead of waiting for the lane. And he looked at his watch and he saw – and sighed – that he was, after all, at 22 minutes and 18 seconds, slower. Now he could go to the pub.

LIFESTYLE IS A
new kind of danger to Norm. The hazards he’s lived with so far have been instant, like violence or accidents, the kind that hit us over the head with a swift goodnight. But Norm is now running from a more sinister threat, another type of mortal hazard with slower effects that go stealthily into the blood one cancerous bacon butty or poisonous pint at a time, potential killers by degrees that might catch up with us later in life, as something surely will.

The first mortal hazard – the quick one – is known as acute risk; the second is chronic. Murder with a chainsaw is an acute risk, obesity a chronic one that takes time to do its worst. Of course, the same hazard might be both: too much booze can do you in quickly when you fall under a bus, or slowly stew your liver. But in general it helps to separate them.

So far, we’ve used the MicroMort to describe acute risks. For chronic risks like obesity or Norm’s current long-term lifestyle anxieties, we introduce a little device we have called the Micro
Life
. Here’s how it works.

Imagine the duration of your adult life divided into 1 million equal parts. A MicroLife is one of these parts and lasts 30 minutes. It is based on the idea that as young adults we typically have about 1 million half-hours left to live, on average.
*

Sounds unimpressive. But we like the MicroLife. It is a revelatory little thing. Like the MicroMort, it brings life down to a micro level that’s easy to think about and compare: half-hour chunks, of which we have 48 a day. Think of it as your stock of life to use up any way you choose,
1 million micro bits of a whole adult life, each worth half an hour, yours to spend. Watching the Eurovision song contest? Bang, 6 MicroLives gone, just like that, never to have again.

So the simple passing of time uses up MicroLives. Every day we get up, move around, stuff tasty things into our bodies, discharge smelly things out of our bodies and go to bed – perhaps with the thought, if we’re gloomy, that there go another 48 MicroLives from our allotted span.

But extra MicroLives can also be used up by taking chronic risks. So although time passes to its own beat, our bodies can age faster or slower according to how we treat them. If we jump around more, and stuff less or better, how much can we slow the steady tick-tock towards disease, decrepitude and death? And if we indulge and slob, how fast might our own clocks run?

In other words, MicroLives can measure how fast you are using up your stock of life, faster or slower depending on the chronic risks to which you’re exposed. If your lifestyle is chronically unhealthy, you’ll probably burn up your allotted MicroLives that much quicker, and die sooner, on average.

For example, lung cancer or heart disease often follows a lifetime’s smoking, and subsequently reduces life-expectancy – again not for everyone, but overall. Some people seem indestructible, smoke like a chimney and drink like a fish and never look the worse for it. But, on average, even if chronic risks don’t kill you straight away, they tend to kill you sooner than if you had avoided them. Again, if we count the bodies, we can estimate how many years are lost overall, whether to obesity, smoking or sausages, and we can convert this loss of life into the number of MicroLives burned up by unhealthy living. Thus, exposure to a chronic risk equal to 1 MicroLife shortens life on average by just one of the million half-hours that people have left as they enter adulthood.

It turns out that one cigarette reduces life-expectancy by around 15 minutes on average, and so two cigarettes costs half an hour, or 1 Micro-Life. Four cigarettes are equal to 2 MicroLives.

About two pints of strongish beer is also 1 MicroLife. Each extra inch on your waistline costs you around 1 MicroLife every day, seven a week, about 30 a month and so on. According to recent research, so
does watching two hours of TV. An extra burger a day is also about 1 MicroLife. We’ll reveal the calculations behind these risks in a moment.

We could simply add up all these MicroLives, half-hour by half-hour, to see roughly how much time on average you lose in total from whatever your lifespan might have been. But the end of life is often far away, like the end of the story, and a lost half-hour deferred until you are in your dotage hardly seems to count. As a media doctor said: ‘I would rather have the occasional bacon sarnie than be 110 and dribbling into my all-bran.’ But by thinking of exposure to chronic risks like an acceleration of the speed at which you use up your daily allotment of MicroLives, we can do something more vivid and immediate. We can show how much your body ages each day according to the chronic or lifestyle risks that you take.

Ordinarily, remember, we use up 48 MicroLives (MLs) a day. But remember, too, that smoking four cigarettes burns an extra 2 ML. So if you smoke four cigarettes in a day, you’ve used not 48, but 50 ML that day. In other words, after a 24-hour, four-fag day, we could say that you are 25 hours older.

And that’s not a bad representation of what can happen biologically. Bodies do often age faster when we do bad stuff to them. Twenty cigarettes daily means you burn an extra 10 ML a day on average, or become 29 hours older with every 24 that pass, or move towards death five hours faster, every day.

Suddenly, chronic risk feels a lot more here and now than the faraway payback that we typically put off thinking about until we’re spent anyway. It counters what is sometimes known as temporal discounting. By bringing chronic risk down to the small scale of what happens today, rather than thinking of it only as a life-size problem deferred, the Micro-Life makes chronic risk a good deal more real and immediate.