2 Wednesday January 26 2022 | the timestimes2
S
cotland Yard is
investigating eight parties
that (allegedly!) broke
lockdown laws at Downing
Street. Good. Perhaps they
could widen their brief and
ask the prime minister why
a grown man of 56 needs a
birthday party anyway?
Especially with a cake and a room
of people singing “Happy birthday to
you” like they do at Tumble Tots and
at a time when ordinary mortals
weren’t allowed to sing hymns or
partake in choirs because the experts
said respiratory particles pass on the
virus. I’m sure our science editor
Tom Whipple will
be fascinated to
know how Covid
mutates to become
harmless while
at SW1A.
I mean, 56 isn’t
even a significant
birthday FFS. Some
of us haven’t had a
birthday cake since
we were about ten,
but Boris Johnson
reportedly had a
Union Jack sponge
cake that a lackey
cut into slices and
wrapped in Fireman Sam napkins for
everyone to take home with their
party bags containing a bouncy ball
and a balloon.
There was a face-painting lady there
who did the prime minister up as
“Mr Bullingdon Bull” because earlier
in 2020, bless him, he had ignored his
cough and banged his chest, claiming
he was “as strong as a bull” shortly
before being admitted to intensive
care. OK, I may have lied about a few
minor details there, but why not?
Fibbing seems to be all the rage
among the 24-hour party people.
Loyal ministers argue that the
parties happened in “a workplace”
and therefore were within the rules.
Yeah, but the thing is hospitals,
schools and supermarkets are
workplaces but if nurses, teachers and
Tesco workers had cracked open the
bring your own booze bottles and
swayed their booties to Dancing Queen
they would have felt Mr Plod’s hand
on their collar faster than you could
say “£10,000 fine”.
The transport secretary Grant
Shapps said on the radio thatF
lorence Williams was
taking a trip: a month-
long, mostly solo kayak
down a remote and
wild river in Colorado,
weighed down by an
ill-advised portable toilet
and a broken heart.
She easily got rid of the portable
toilet; losing her attachment to her
ex-husband — the aim of this
expedition — was far harder. She was
50, had been in love with him since
they met at 18, and when he wheeled
his small blue suitcase out of their
family home and 25-year marriage she
thought the suffering inflicted on her
was extreme but purely emotional.
She’d be sad, she’d drink too much
wine, cry with her best friend, and
that, she hoped, would be enough for
her to “get over” the divorce. But the
reality, Williams started to learn, was
very different. The next two years of
her life would take on the form of a
medically supported experiment that
would involve testing heartbreak cures
including meditation, therapy, casual
sex, psychoactive drugs and an epic
river adventure. Not just for herself
but for science and the public good,
she tells me, and even her bad choice
of fling with a man who brought his
own nipple clamps was research.
Williams was wounded emotionally
by the divorce, but her body reacted as
if the wound was an open sore that, if
untreated, would destroy her health.
When you put heartbroken people in
brain scanners, the parts of the brain
that light up are the same that do
when experiencing physical pain from
a severe burn. Experts in the latest
research advised her that she must
address “heartbreak” like the medical
emergency it seems to describe.If Williams, an award-winning
science writer, wasn’t already
persuaded, her body convinced her.
Speaking via video from her home in
Washington DC, she looks to me like
a striking folk singer with a long swish
of dark hair, but that first year she lost
20lb, making her the lowest weight
she has been since she was 12, which
“might have been a good look for a
supermodel” but her skin seemed to
have withered on her bones. “I felt
power-washed by sadness and anxiety.
I looked like a stray animal trying to
paw its way out of a kill shelter,” she
writes in her book, Heartbreak.
She developed palpitations,
insomnia and an eye twitch. Steve
Cole, a professor of medicine at
UCLA and a leader in a field called
“psychoneuroimmunology”, which
looks at how your mental state affects
your ability to fight off disease, gave
her a stark message. He ran a gamut
of tests on Williams shortly after her
separation and said she was in the
danger zone. Silently, her body was
pumping out chronically high levels
of stress hormones, her immunity was
out of kilter and her inflammation,
a probable risk factor for a host of
serious illnesses from Alzheimer’s
to heart disease, was sky high.
She wasn’t unusual. Cole has studied
the effect of loneliness and grief time
and again in large experiments. It is,
he said, not taken seriously enough
by the public or their doctors. It was
“a molecular recipe for early death”,
Cole said, “one of the hidden
landmines of human existence”.
Almost at exactly the same time as
Cole gave his warning, Williams was
shocked to find that her pancreas was
packing up, attacked by her haywire
immune system. Just a few monthsMacca’s
way with
words
Have you hired your
“offence adviser” yet?
Come on, chop chop —
it’s pretty obvious that,
just like Jamie Oliver,
we’ll all have to have
one soon to ensure
we don’t cook a
disrespectful enchilada
or misgender someone’s
labrador.
Now that the BBC is
busily pruning all the
potentially icky and
fruity material from
old radio comedies
such as Steptoe and
Son, writers will have
to be as cunning as
the Beatles were if
they want to slip one
in, so to speak. Paul
McCartney has
admitted that in the
song Lovely Rita, for
instance, the line
“give us a wink” was
a euphemism to
circumvent the censors.
Just as “fish and finger
pies” in Penny Lane did
not refer to breaded
cod sticks.
Yet writers should
beware of being too
clever for their own
good. Max Miller got
banned from the BBC
for five years when he
tried to outfox the taste
police. Describing
meeting a woman on a
narrow mountainside,
he famously said he
didn’t know “whether
to block her passage
or toss myself off ”.
Happily I’m too pure-
minded to know what
any of this means.The Lynx
effect: it’s
too cool
Spare a thought for
Lynx deodorant, which
has just had its worst
PR moment since Alan
Partridge boasted that
he wore Lynx Africa. A
student has revealed
that he froze off his
nipples with two cans of
Lynx after accepting adare from a “friend”.
An entire can was
sprayed over each
nipple until his friend
simply “flicked them
off ”, and they have
not returned.
The 19-year-old, who
is studying maths at the
University of Liverpool,said. “It’s stupid, it
happened. Now I’ve got
no nipples.”
But he said he would
do it again, “because I
accepted the dare”.
Which just shows you
can be intelligent and
also, if you’ll pardon
the pun, an utter tit.Lulu Lytle, who was renovating the
Downing Street flat — and is
responsible for that stripy couch,
which looks like our second best dog
towel — just “happened to come by”.
Her spokeswoman said she was not
invited to the party but “entered the
cabinet room briefly as requested
while waiting to speak with the prime
minister”. Eh?
Does this mean that during a
working day in a pandemic the prime
minister was breaking off to look
through wallpaper books and fabric
swatches saying: “Hmm, yes, I think
we’ll go for damask”? Another fun
party fact is that Rishi Sunak was said
to have attended briefly but
“had not been invited”.
(Heartbreaking — and only
next door!) This conjures
an image of the chancellor
as a vol-au-vent loiterer,
trousering a few nibbles from
the Marks & Spencer spread
before sidling off to his office
to eat it in secret. Yes, much
for the police to investigate.
And here’s another party
puzzler. Remember those
studies that found that
drinking alcohol narrows
the distance between
strangers so that even when lockdown
lifted pubs were restricted to table
service and closing at 10pm? Maybe,
again, the wine, like Jesus’s, was magic
at No 10.
I didn’t mean to be rude about
Tumble Tots, by the way. Children
have shown more maturity than the
prime minister throughout all this,
specifically a little girl called Josephine
who wrote to him in March 2020
saying she had cancelled her seventh
birthday party to help to keep people
safe. He wrote back saying: “Well
done! You are setting a great example,”
before having a good old knees-up
(allegedly!) for his own birthday.
Just one more question before
we wrap up: if Sunak can write off
£4 billion lost to fraudulent loans on
the Covid emergency loans scheme,
then surely, given all the shameless
hypocrisy, he might now reimburse,
say, the pensioner who was fined £100
for going to his allotment during
lockdown for vegetables, or the
woman fined £250 for dropping off a
friend’s birthday card? Don’t hold your
breath, though. Unless it’s for blowing
out the prime minister’s candles.Carol Midgley
Why does a 56-year-old
man need a birthday
cake, let alone a party?
My husband
walked out
after 25 years.
This is what
heartbreak did
to my body
Florence Williams was left physically
ill by her divorce. To cure herself, she
tried everything from hallucinogens
to casual sex. By Helen Rumbelow
to
“h
(H
n
an
as
tr
th
b
to
fopu
st
d
th
strangersso