“Necking in the kitchen!”

May 6th, 2010 by royston

“Let there be dancing in the streets, drinking in the saloons, and necking in the parlor!” So proclaimed Otis B. Driftwood (Groucho Marx) in A Night At The Opera in 1935. I don’t do my necking in the parlor, I use the kitchen. A quick quiz here, folks. What would you use this for?

Mystery device

A device for restraining skinny supermodels so you can feed them properly? A mediaeval torture device for questioning MPs about their expenses? No, it’s a jig I built to hold my old bass still with the neck in the right place while the glue set. As I have posted previously, my old bass was knackered. About fifteen years ago the neck had been broken at the heel and repaired badly (and expensively, I might add), and the repair had opened up again. The previous repair had involved taking the fingerboard off, drilling holes in the neck to put in three 3″ screws through into the heel, glueing the joint and screwing it up tight.

I don’t think the luthier used a jig to hold the neck in the right position, because the action (the gap between the string and the fingerboard) was completely different when I got the bass back: it was much lower than before, and didn’t give a good arco sound any more. A lower action means that the neck was tilted too far back. So not only did I not have the right angle on the neck, I didn’t know what the right angle was supposed to be. This is a problem, since it is almost impossible to work it out with a pencil and a slide rule, I needed to find another bass the same as mine and measure it.

So that’s what I did. I went to a shop that I knew had a Zeller in stock, took a protractor and an adjustable angle gauge that I made out of bits of wood I had lying around. The guys in the shop were sympathetic to my plight (thanks Norrie and Jim!), and let me examine the bass. They also asked me a lot of questions about the setup of the bass since they are guitarists and not viol players, so I was giving something back to them too. The angle between the neck and the top edge of the sides was just over 76°, and I banged a couple of nails into the angle gauge to make sure it held that angle through the journey home again.

So, the problem is to get the neck in the right position in all three dimensions, and to attach it very firmly to the body without it moving in the process. It had to create a perfectly straight line between the endpin, the neck repair, and the top of the scroll, so that the strings go straight down the middle of the instrument. So I made the jig pictured above. The cable ties at the bottom hold the endpin in the centre of backboard, the two wooden spars sticking out from the backboard hold the heel of the neck in the middle of the backboard, and there is a cradle (not in the picture) which holds the neck in a straight line with the centreline of the instrument body.

The two spars also make sure that the neck sits in the right place in relation to the heel and doesn’t slip sideways. When the bass was in the jig I put a big C-clamp across the spars to hold the joint securely against slipping sideways. The cradle was shaved down with a plane until it was the right height to hold the neck at exactly the right angle to the body, and when the joint was glued up, the wingnuts in the photo were tightened up to hold the joint securely shut, and also to stop it from twisting.

Rather than glueing and screwing in the one operation, I glued the joint first with epoxy resin, clamped it up overnight, and then checked the angle was accurate. Then I drilled the neck and put new and longer screws through the joint. The previous repair had broken when the head of one of the screws had been pulled through the wood of the neck. In order to avoid this happening again, I put a steel washer over the screw that was going in that position. Then I put three 4″ screws through the glued joint, screwed them in as tight as they would go, and glued the fingerboard back on. The fingerboard was glued back on with animal glue rather than epoxy resin as animal glue can be easily melted again.

It wasn’t quite that simple though. Animal glue is applied hot, and should be applied to a warmed surface so that it does not crystalise immediately. I must have warmed the neck too much, as when the fingerboard joint dried again, the neck had bowed. So I had to melt the glue again (with a hot air stripper), clean up the old glue and re-glue it, making sure that I had warmed both the neck and the fingerboard so that it didn’t bow. This time it worked, and the neck stayed straight.

The finished result is functional, but not pretty. The neck is in the right place, the height of the action is just about right (about 14mm under the E string, about 10mm under the G string), but you can feel where the joint is, and if you’re close up you can see it too. It sounds better than it has in years, though: it is louder, it stays in tune, the intonation is correct(ish), and it doesn’t rattle any more. I couldn’t help noticing, however, that the bridge is really badly fitted now that the neck is back in the right place, so I will have to sort that out next.

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More bass stuff…

April 3rd, 2010 by royston

My bass gear is getting O.L.D. I bought my bass in about 1994, about a year later I bought my pickup, preamp and amplifier, and it’s been gigged a lot since then. It’s not the age, it’s the mileage that does it; but when you’ve got both age and mileage? It’s all a bit old and knackered. So I started looking around for some new equipment.

My Old Gear.

I have a Hartke HS1200 Kickback combo, pushing out 120W RMS into a single 12″ 8Ω aluminium cone. The cabinet is shaped so that you can ‘kick it back’ to point upwards at 45° - very useful when you are playing double bass in a small venue and you need to hear yourself. It has a 3-band graphic equaliser with a notch filter (EXTREMELY useful in a live situation – if you have feedback, find the frequency that is feeding back, engage the notch filter to that frequency, it takes out that frequency in the playback (-12dB across 200Hz if you’re interested), and the feedback is gone. I can’t believe I want a new amp…). It also has a pre-fade balanced DI on the front panel, so you can control the volume on stage to suit the feedback characteristics without affecting the front-of-house sound.

Hartke HS1200 Kickback combo amp

The Hartke is a solid piece of kit, it has taken its knocks without complaining, the only damage it has sustained was a broken input jack after a soundman tried to force a right-angle jack plug into the socket. Half an hour with a soldering iron and it was all good. It is loud for a 120W amp, and it does not feed back too badly (feedback tip for double bassists – fill in your f-holes with neoprene or foam. No, I don’t know why it works either). I like the Hartke a lot, but it has become electrically noisy and thus unreliable. I have cleaned all the pots and replaced the inut jack, and it is still noisy. Shame, really.

I have a Fishman BP-100 pickup and a Fishman Model B preamp. The BP-100 pickup has two transducers that sit in between the G and D strings and the A and E strings on the top of the bridge, and pick up the vibrations of the bridge right next to the strings, so it does not get too much of the sound of the body, but it still sounds good. The socket clips in between the A and D strings just above the tailpiece. The only real problem with the BP-100 is that it needs to be installed with a virtually airtight fit against the surface of the bridge, otherwise you get bad feedback problems – not body reverberation feedback like an acoustic guitar, but direct feedback at a high frequency between the pickup and the amp. Now, as we all know, the bottom of the bridge tends to be the flat side, and the top edge is shaped to give the correct profile, so you usually need to file perfectly flat surfaces on the top of the bridge to accommodate the transducers.

Fishman BP-100 peizo pickup

You must remember the piezoelectric effect – the cigarette lighters that do not need flints, you squeeze the piezo crystals and they produce an electrical spark. The piezo pickup works on a similar principle: the vibration of the strings creates a voltage in the piezo crystals in the transducer paddles. It’s only a tiny voltage, because it’s only a tiny movement that is generating it. Another good reason to have a preamp on the other end of your pickup.

A guitar / bass amplifier is set up to handle an instrument with a copper coil pickup with an impedance of about 300kΩ. The BP-100 is a piezo pickup, which has an impedance of about 10MΩ (10,000kΩ), so as well as providing volume and tone controls the preamp adjusts the output impedance to a more useful value. This isn’t too important with a small amplifier, but with a big amplifier that draws a lot of power it is very important if you don’t want to blow it up. With a valve amplifier, impedance matching is even more important, as valves are very sensitive to voltage and current changes, and decent valves are not cheap to replace.

Fishman Model B bass preamp

That is why I use the Fishman Model B bass preamplifier. It has volume, treble and bass controls, and it boosts the signal and gives it a more conventional impedance to match up to an amplifier or DI box. I clip the preamp onto the bow quiver, so I can reach the controls while I am playing. I have had to replace innumerable batteries, which led to the screw heads that hold it together getting chewed up. It uses some funny American thread, but Joe E., Fishman’s technical guru, sent me a new set of screws FOC after I sent him an email asking what thread they were. It pays to be polite and complimentary somethimes… I had to replace the jack sockets as well, but I couldn’t find the right parts for that, so I needed to do a bit of drilling and soldering and riveting in order to get it back in action, but it is actually a really good piece of kit.

My New Gear.

Well, I thought with a new bass I should probably replace my electrics while I was at it. So I bought a new pickup, a new amplifier head, a new preamp, and I built myself a cabinet since I couldn’t find one that would do what I wanted for less than £700: I built one for less than £200. So let’s start with the pickup.

I bought a Shadow SH 965 NFX-B. It is a piezo pickup too, but instead of sitting between the strings on top of the bridge, it is squashed between the bridge and the table of the instrument, one transducer under each bridge foot. In theory, this gives you a bigger sound, since it picks up all the vibrations from both the bridge and the body. The Shadow has a built-in preamp with volume and tone controls which uses a big, flat button cell as a power source, and the preamp sits above the tailpiece between the A and D strings.

Shadow SH 965 NF-X pickup

I am tempted to drill the tailpiece and attach it that way, since it is impeding the vibration of the tail end of the strings, a difference which was never that noticeable on the Zeller, but much more noticeable on the Strunal. I also think that having the transducers between the bridge and the top of the instrument might have cost a little bit of volume, but I might be imagining it. Either way, it is an improvement on the Fishman: it has more volume and more ‘kick’ when playing pizzicato; and the difference when playing arco is just night and day. The Fishman’s arco sound was ‘play loud’ or ‘don’t play’, nothing in between; the Shadow gives me much more dynamic range, which is important in the sort of music I play.

The Shadow has a built-in preamp, so I don’t actually need another one for volume or impedance matching, but I was recommended to try this by another bassist I work with (I am a drummer as well, so I work with a few bassists). The Behringer Ultragain MIC-100 is a valve preamplifier intended for use with vocal microphones, but it pretty much improves the sound of anything you plug into it: acoustic guitar; bass guitar; double bass; microphone, it warms up the tone to give it that big valve sound at a fraction of the cost of a valve amplifier.

Behringer Ultragain MIC100 valve preamp

The pickup-preamp-preamp combination produces a warm, powerful signal from the bass, and that goes into a tiny amplifier head made by Ashdown, called the Little Giant 350. It claims to push out 350W into 4Ω, but as it is rated as consuming 350W of mains power, I don’t see how this is possible (the Hartke pushes out 120W and consumes 200W, the balance going in waste heat and a couple of lights).

Ashdown Little Giant 350

I must confess to being a little underwhelmed by the Ashdown amp – the power output isn’t all that it claims, the build quality is not brilliant (the buttons on the front fall off far too readily), and it’s a fairly garish colour. Still, it is small and portable, and doesn’t completely suck, and it is undeniably louder than my current Hartke (although not as much louder as I would have liked).

As I mentioned earlier, the Ashdown amp pushes out 350W RMS into 4Ω, but most speaker cabinets are 8Ω. If I plugged it into an 8Ω cabinet in theory (assuming no internal resistance in the amp) I would get 175W out of it, so I definitely wanted a 4Ω cabinet. The only problem was, a decent 2 x 10″, 400W, 4Ω cabinet was going to cost me between £500 and £700. So I decided to build my own. This is not as ambitious as you might think, I used to fit kitchens for a living, I have made bits of furniture to fit me in the past, I have the tools and I have the skills to do it. It will, however be the subject of an entirely different blog posting.

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Still unwell (but I’m getting better…).

March 10th, 2010 by royston

OK, so in my last blog posting I started explaining how I felt I had lost control of my health and my life, and how it was not the fault of my doctor, or any of the other health professionals I deal with. I understand what happened to me, but I was a bit short of ideas on how to deal with it. Now this is a bit embarrassing for me, because I work for a health charity, and I am supposed to promote the idea of people with long-term conditions taking control of their lives and their conditions. Of all the people who should be able to deal with this, I should.

So since I last posted, I have started getting better. I have taken my inhalers religiously (despite it giving me headaches and a really hoarse voice – a bit like a Scottish Orson Welles), and I have avoided triggers like sudden changes of temperature (again difficult to do when it is -5°C outside and you have to walk the dog three times a day), but my peak flow is up to where it should be according to my height, age and weight (although not back to where it was before I got ill), and my cough is an awful lot better.

I went back for a check-up with the asthma nurse, she checked my peak flow, she checked my inhaler technique, we talked about triggers and way to avoid them; and then she asked me how I was feeling. It’s such a glib question: “How are you feeling?” “How are you?”; who actually answers that question properly? No-one. In fact, if you ask that question and someone actually answers it honestly, you feel like they have in some way over-stepped the mark: “How are you feeling?” “Well, I am anxious about my lack of control of my asthma, and I feel great uncertainty about my future, because I don’t want to have a disability hanging around me, I really want to get better”. You would look at me like I was mad.

Nevertheless, I decided to break with the tradition of saying “Fine, fine, nothing wrong with me…” and I actually talked to her about how I felt. We had a conversation about how I felt I had lost control of my situation, I somehow felt that the doctor was maybe to blame, but rationally I knew that this was not the case, and basically we covered everything that I talked about in my previous post. And she was delighted to hear it. She excused herself for a moment, and went to pick up a couple of copies of the Nursing Times, one of which had an article on the pivotal role of communication as part of a therapeutic relationship, and another which had an article about the predictive validity of a good therapeutic relationship in the successful recovery and continued wellbeing of patients presenting for treatment (for any statisticians reading this, yes I did say ‘predictive validity’. I will try and find the article and post an abstract link or summat).

What she was trying to get at was this: doctors and nurses cannot make you better by remote control. They work together as a team to achieve the best outcome possible for the patient, but there is another member of the team who has an important part to play, and that is the patient. We (as patients) have all these preconceptions about medics: they are far more intelligent and important than we are; they understand things differently to us and we can’t talk to them on their terms; we shouldn’t bother them with our petty troubles because underneath it all we are fine. That is the wrong attitude. If you want to make good use of your doctor or nurse appointment, you need to talk to them properly.

If you’ve not been taking your medication as prescribed, you need to tell them the truth. If you’ve not been doing the exercise you said you would, you need to tell them the truth. If you can’t stop smoking because you find it too hard, you need to tell them the truth. Medics are trained to communicate clearly and effectively with patients and with each other, to describe conditions and treatment options comprehensively, but one of the biggest barriers they face is that people don’t want to tell them the truth, either because they are embarrassed by it, or because they don’t want to bother the doctor with it. They can’t help you get better and stay healthy if they don’t know what the problem is, and that is to quite a large extent the patient’s job: to tell the medics what the problem is and how it affects them.

It can’t possibly be that simple can it? When they ask you how you feel, you answer the question honestly?

Er, yes… it can be that simple.

Health professionals are trained to communicate sometimes very complicated concepts and information to people in a way that they can understand, and in a way they can comply with. Patients, on the other hand, are unnecessarily embarrassed about their conditions, and tend to put doctors on pedestals. I saw this first-hand not too long ago, when my Dad was in hospital. He was telling me a big long list of aches, pains and complaints, and in the middle of this his consultant arrived and asked how he was feeling. He said “Oh, I’m feeling much better, really nothing to complain about”. The consultant had far more use for my Dad’s list of aches and pains than I had, but my Dad wouldn’t tell him. Why? “Oh, he’s a busy man, he’s got lots of patients to deal with.”

But there is more to the communication issue than that. Some people think they want their doctor to tell them what is wrong, and then give them a cure for it. That may work for something simple like antibiotics for a chest infection, or antacids for a stomach problem, but what about more complex stuff like managing a long-term condition? The doctor can tell me what’s wrong, can tell me what to do and what medication to take, but is it a good solution? Does it manage the situation well? Not really. The problem is that I need to be able to manage my own health

If he tells me what to do, I might choose to reject his advice. If we discuss my problems, what the options are, and agree a course of action, it is far more likely that theagreed course of action will become my attitude, and then my behaviour. Salesmen have known this for years: don’t try and sell people things they don’t need by telling them they need them; find out what the people want, then work on turning that want into a need.

I want to get better. I want to be able to run about with my dog and not get breathless, I want to be able to play and sing at the same time, I want to sleep right through the night without waking up short of breath, I want to be able to tolerate air conditioning again. So the nurse I have been talking to has been working on what I want. Walking the dog is good exercise, so build that up, have a wee run about but don’t get too breathless. Pace yourself when you’re gigging and avoid the smokers. Plan your exposure to air conditioning – where is it, and how long are you going to be there? We talked a lot about what I do before I go to bed, and how to make sure I sleep through the night (I don’t have obstructive sleep apnoea – we checked!).

And it is working. I am now down to a tiny dose of corticosteriods at night, I sleep through to about six or seven in the morning, and I haven’t had to use my reliever in weeks. It is working.

Posted in Health | 3 Comments »

Double Trouble.

March 9th, 2010 by royston

My current double bass is completely knackered. There’s no other way to describe it, it’s knackered. The neck was broken in a fall, fixed expensively (but badly) by a luthier, the repair opened up again, was fixed cheaply by me, it opened up again, was fixed properly by me and a luthiery student friend, stayed fixed for 10 years, then broke again for no apparent reason. I fixed it again, but it’s not staying closed. In between times, a drunk idiot got into my van while I was loading gear out of a gig and fell on it, smashing the bridge through the top. It was repaired professionally (but I am afraid to say not too well), and it has never really sounded right. I’ve had enough. I need a new one.

My Old Bass.

: My Zeller bass in the middle of its latest repair

This is my bass in the middle of its latest round of repairs, on the kitchen table. If you’re at all interested, it is an Andreas Zeller model 1408, a 3/4 size with a solid spruce table, laminated maple back and sides, maple neck, ebony tailpiece, fingerboard and nut, and the cheapest, nastiest tuning machine heads that money can inadvertently buy. For some reason, it is finished in a rather garish glossy orange-brown varnish which does not flatter it at all. 3/4 size is the standard for basses, you would usually only find one or maybe two full-size basses in an orchestra, and almost never in jazz or country music. For those of you unfamiliar with the viols, here’s a bit of an anatomy lesson. From the top down, you have the scroll, which is connected to the pegbox (with the machine heads on the side), which is connected to the nut (a bit of very hard wood with grooves in it that the strings pass through at the top of the neck), which is connected to the fingerboard and neck (the neck is structural element, made of strong wood; the fingerboard is made of hard (but quite brittle) wood so the strings don’t mark it). At the bottom of the neck is a projecting heel that connects it to the body (there is a big solid lump of wood called ‘the block’ inside the body that the neck connects to). The bridge (not shown above) is not glued or nailed or held in place by anything other than the tension of the strings running over the top, and the strings connect to the tailpiece, which in turn connects to the endpin or spike that the instrument stands on.

The strings push the bridge down on the top of the instrument, carrying the vibrations of the strings to the body, and under the top there is on one side the bass bar, which disperses vibration along the length of the top; and the soundpost which disperses vibration from the top to the back. Without the bass bar and soundpost, the top would cave in under the pressure of the bridge. The gaps in the sides are called the centre bout, and are designed more for easy bowing than for anything else. The holes in the top are called ‘f-holes’ (for obvious reasons), and they allow air to move into and out of the body, and also allow the soundpost to be repositioned or replaced (it is held in place by tension, just like the bridge).

The neck is supposed to separate from the body in the event of a blow to the neck, so you can glue it back on again. My bass didn’t work out that way. The wood broke at the heel of the neck instead of the glue joint between the neck and the block coming apart. “So what?” I hear you say. Well, when the double bass is tuned up to concert pitch, there is somewhere between 120Kg and 150Kg tension in the strings at rest, more when you are playing it. Any repairs have to be pretty damn strong as well as aesthetically pleasing. The angle of the neck is important: the relationship between the fingerboard, bridge and strings defines the sound of the instrument, and if the neck angle is wrong, the whole setup is wrong. The angle between the neck and the heel is usually about 76° or so.

If you look carefully, you can see the dovetail joint with the body.

The neck on some basses is just a straightforward flat surface-to-flat surface glue joint. Not so on this bass: it is a dovetail joint that holds the neck in place, so if I were to take it apart, getting the neck out would be a job and a half, as I would need to dissolve and / or melt the glue; and instead of just pulling it apart, I would need to slide the neck out of the dovetail, which involves sliding two pieces of glued wood across each other instead of just separating them. I don’t have a workshop, I’m doing this on the kitchen table, and while I have some tools and some skills, I am not a luthier by any manner of means. So the way I see it I have two alternatives: repair the neck in an utterly indestructible manner; or whip the old neck stub out and graft on a new neck.

My plan so far for repairing the neck is as follows. First, I build a jig out of a big long plank of wood to hold the body of the bass still and rigidly on the kitchen table / workbench. Then I build a support to align the heel of the neck at the break, leaving enough workspace around it to clamp it up. Then I build a support for the other end of the neck to hold it rigidly at the correct angles (this is a 3-dimensional repair after all). Then I mix a great big batch of epoxy and get gluing and cramping. If I think it needs it, I will then drill the completed repair and run a big coach bolt through it, probably with more epoxy. It should be pretty strong, but if it is twisted or if it warps or anything like that, then I’m stuck with it the way it is. You wouldn’t see the bolt as the head would be under the fingerboard.

The plan to graft on a new neck is, if anything, more ambitious; but would produce a better result. First, I would need to get the old neck stub out, which involves using alcohol to crystalise the glue. Classical instruments are made with hide glue, usually sheep hide or cow hide, and you can melt the glue using a heat gun or a hairdryer, but the seams that hold the neck in place are adjacent to the seams that hold the table and the back onto the sides. I do not want to get into re-glueing them, so I don’t want to use heat unless I cannot avoid it. On the plus side, I could screw a dirty great eyebolt into the heel, run a rope through it, and pull it out that way. I don’t need to worry about the condition of the neck (other than to get the shape of the dovetail).

Then I need a new neck. I can get one from the manufacturer for about £300. Yeah, right, like that’s going to happen. I can buy one from the USA or Canada for about $140 (£100), but it will need to be shaped and finished as it won’t be for my bass, it will be for a Kay or an Engelhart. So I will need to make the dovetail on the new neck fit the block of the body, then I need to use wooden shims to make it fit properly in all 3 dimensions. Unlike shimming valves in a cylinder head, you can’t buy wooden shims in different thicknesses, you need to make them; and you can’t pile them upon top of each other, you need to have one piece of wood in each shim position. That’s the sort of thing that will make my head hurt.

Anyway, that’s the plan for the old bass, which is not that much of a priority because while I am working on that one (or breaking it), I have a new bass to play. More on that later!

Tags: music double bass luthiery
Posted in Music | 2 Comments »

Jeffrey Bernard is unwell.

December 24th, 2009 by royston

“Jeffrey Bernard is unwell” was a headline that used to appear with some regularity in The Spectator magazine, apologising for the now late Mr. Bernard’s failure to provide a column that week. It became the title of a play by the now also late Keith Waterhouse, in which Bernard is accidentally locked in his favourite pub overnight. This was because Mr. Bernard was not usually unwell when he failed to file copy, he was usually AWOL and pissed in a pub somewhere.

His reputation as the archetypal louche journalist earned him some fame: a sample of his voice talking about the seamier side of his life appeared on a track by the band New Order; he was often referenced either directly or more obliquely in newspaper and magazine columns (most famously in “The Regulars” comic strip in Private Eye magazine: “Jeff bin in?”), and of course the play by Keith Waterhouse. Bernard was aware of his self-destructive behaviour, and catalogued his four marriages, his Bacchinalian excesses, his descent into ill health, and the contemplation of his eventual death both in his columns (when he bothered to file them) and in his book Reach for the Ground: The Downhill Struggle of Jeffrey Bernard.

Now anyone who knows me will know I have a fondness for the grape and the grain, and that I list my interests on another website as “writing rubbish all over the internets”, but that’s not why I’m writing about Jeffrey Bernard. I am not locked in a pub after falling asleep on the toilet after a skinful. Neither am I about to ditch my wife for a younger, dumber model. I am writing about Jeffrey Bernard because I have myself become unwell.

I have been asthmatic since I was a teenager, about twenty-five years or so, and it has never bothered me much, but more importantly it has never stopped me doing anything. I could exercise, I could ride my mountain bike, I could play the drums all evening, I could sing at the top of my voice, I could swim a length of the pool underwater, and as long as I had my antihistamine tablets and my corticosteroid inhaler, my asthma did not affect me at all. I could effectively ignore the fact that I had a chronic health condition that kills 1,400 people per year in the UK.

A few weeks ago I contracted a throat infection. No big deal, I usually get them in the winter, and I know how to deal with it: plenty of garlic, chili and ginger in my food, Sanderson’s Throat-Specific Mixture (a favourite with actors and singers – also known as Sanderson’s Throat Horrific), and a wee hot toddy at bedtime (in extremis, I have been known to chew a bit of raw ginger and then not talk, eat or drink for a couple of hours afterwards. It works, but traumatises your taste-buds for the rest of the day).

The throat infection went away, as they do, but it left me feeling weak and tired, and with a nasty productive chest cough. “I’ve got a chest infection” I thought. No amount of ginger will work on that, you need antibiotics (not homeopathy, prayer, or the laying on of hands), and as I work with people who have chronic chest complaints like COPD, mesothelioma and bronchiectasis I need to make sure that I can’t be infectious to them. So I went to see the doctor.

The doctor was great, I cannot fault his consultation at all. I hear so many horror stories from patients and other health professionals about doctors who pull diagnoses and treatments out of thin air, but this guy checked me out properly, took a good history, and asked me all the right questions. I don’t have COPD, I’m not a smoker and it’s my first chest infection in about ten years (although I am in the age bracket and I have a productive cough, so well worth asking).

I am asthmatic, and my peak flow is down significantly from its usual level (on a good day, after exercising, I can bounce the indicator off the stop of the peak flow meter at 800; first thing in the morning I am usually 650 – 700; now I am 500 – 550, even after I expectorate and take my inhalers). But I didn’t have a chest infection. My sputum was the wrong colour, my chest did not sound heavy enough, and I did not have a temperature. What I had was an exacerbation of my asthma.

I don’t get exacerbations. People who are ill get exacerbations. The people I work with get exacerbations, but I don’t because I’m healthy. I am healthy, aren’t I? I am not in denial, am I? Well yes, I am a bit. I’m getting older (not old, but older), and things stop working as well as they did. A couple of years back I broke a toe messing about in the pool on holiday. The doctor told me “As you get older, your bones get less flexible and break more easily than when you were younger”. Older? Me? Denial? I know about exacerbations. I learned all about them for working with my client group. I didn’t learn about them for my own benefit, though. I don’t have exacerbations, other people do.

There was a running joke at a former workplace of mine: “A wee cough? A week off!”. This isn’t a week we’re talking about here. I’m a month in and I feel worse than when it started. The doctor said “Try upping your steroid inhaler for a couple of months, and if that doesn’t work we’ll put you on something stronger”. A couple of months? Something stronger? Healthy people like me don’t do ‘a couple of months’ of coughing, and we don’t do ‘something stronger’ unless it is amber-coloured and comes from Islay. This is interfering with my lifestyle, it’s affecting my work, and it’s pissing me off.

The thing that really worries me though is that I might have to learn to live like this. All the time. No, I can’t play football with the boys, I might get ill. No, I can’t climb Ben Lomond for charity, I might get ill. No, I can’t carry my drum kit down to the car and go and play a gig, I might get ill. I am not sure I am ever going to be ready to live my life like that. I am certainly not ready to live my life like that right now. I am not ready for poor health. I am not ready for self-handicapping in that way.

Now I don’t want this to sound whiny and self-indulgent. That is not why I am writing this: I completely accept that as I get older my health will get worse, and I will not be capable of doing the things I was capable of in my youth. What I am struggling with is that I feel that I lack proper control over my own condition, and that I have lost control of it very recently. My health is mine. My illnesses are mine. For twenty-five years I have been managing my asthma just fine, thank you, and I want to keep it that way. I went to the doctor, and he took a good history, asked me all the right questions, made what I know to be good clinical recommendations; and yet somehow I still feel that I have lost some aspect of control of managing my condition. Now why is that? What went wrong? Why did I feel that I lost control?

Control, as it happens, is extremely important. My doctor did his best, and delivered bad news well. He gave me good advice, and will pursue me for a follow-up consultation. He’s a good doctor. That does not mean that he took control of my condition away from me. He did the right thing, and did it well, but in doing so he inadvertently made me feel disempowered. Control of my condition must have passed from me to somewhere else. Probably the doctor took it away from me.

No, not really. It was not my doctor’s fault: it is the human condition that made me feel like that. Here’s some science stuff: Julian Rotter (1954) came up with the concept of ‘locus of control’: if you have a high internal locus of control, you feel that you control a certain aspect of your life, and that the external locus of control is low; if you have a high external locus of control, you feel that the aspect of your life is not under your control, and that somehow others now control what happens to that aspect of your life, and you have low internal locus of control. Right now I feel that I have low internal locus of control over my asthma, and therefore a high external locus of control. So of course I look for the external locus, probably in the place where I lost my internal locus: in the doctor’s surgery.

So far so good. I feel I’ve lost some aspect of control, and I blame someone else for that. What I feel fits the theory. But what am I going to do to get control back, to take charge of my condition? Right now I want to take control, my social circle will support me in that, and I know it can be done. More science-ey bits: the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA – Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975, 1980) combines three social psychological concepts in a very logical fashion: the person’s Behavioural Intention (BI) towards something is equal to their Attitude (A) towards that behaviour, plus the Subjective Norms (SN) of their community / peer group / whatever towards that behaviour.

I intend to get my health back (BI), I know that it can be done (A), and I can get support from my social circle (SN). All boxes are ticked. So why is it not happening for me? In most cases, the TRA is absolutely fine; it predicts all sort behaviours, but with certain other sorts of behaviour it doesn’t work out. If you are talking about behaviours that are easy to control, like remembering to feed the dog or set the burgular alarm before leaving the house, the TRA is a good analysis of the situation. But for other behaviours like giving up smoking, learning to juggle, finding love, it doesn’t work at all.

That’s why Icek Ajzen came up with an alternative / overarching theory: the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB – Ajzen, 1985, 1991). There is another concept to build into the model: the degree of Perceived Behavioural Control (PBC). The person has a Behavioural Intention (BI), and an Attitude (A), and everyone has a Subjective (Social) Norm (S(S)N), but if the person has a great attitude, their attitude complies with the subjective social norn, but they don’t believe that they can control what is going on, then the attitude, the norm and the intention count for almost nothing. According to the Theory of Planned Behaviour, perception of control is more-or-less everything.

So, I think I should apply the TPB to my current situation. I feel I have lost control (PBC), which trumps my intentions (BI), my attitude (A), and what I perceive the norm (SN) to be.

Bingo.

It doesn’t seem to matter what my intentions are, I just don’t feel that I am in control of the situation. So what am I going to do now? How am I going to get control back? Tricky, but not insurmountable. However, I am aware that I have been writing this post for a couple of weeks now, and that I should probably just publish and be damned. I will write up what I intend to do about it later. Do me a favour, though: make sure you hold me to it.

Happy Monkey, one and all!

Posted in Health | 1 Comment »

Hello world!

November 5th, 2009 by royston

OK, here I am, then. Blogging. That will be interesting. What am I going to talk about?

Er…

OK, then. Why are we here? I don’t mean all that existentialist stuff, I mean a little more specifically: why are we here at Edd’s Tavern?

Well, about two years ago, my son came home from school absolutely livid. He told us that his Religious, Moral and Philosophical Studies teacher had told the class that what they learned in the Science classroom was mostly theories, and that sometimes these theories contradicted things they might hear in other classes, such as her own class. So, if a Science teacher said the Earth was about four and a half billion years, but a Religious, Moral and Philosophical Studies teacher said (using Bishop Ussher’s calculations) that the Earth was created on 23rd October 4004BC, the kids would have to choose which one to believe.

The Boy was incensed at this: both his parents are science graduates, and he has been raised from about the age of three to produce evidence to back up his arguments, and to question the validity of the evidence that was presented to him. The Tooth Fairy and Santa were fairly early casualties in our house. The Boy asked the teacher was she seriously suggesting that he discount the huge body of theoretical, experimental and observational evidence that science has to offer, in favour of the arithmetic of a sixteenth century cleric who had read a heavily edited book of uncertain provenance? She said yes. He’s a polite boy, so he didn’t call her a raging nutter to her face, he waited until he got home and started ranting to us.

Now I was a bit taken aback at this. A literal interpretation of Genesis in a Scottish classroom? That hadn’t happened when I was at school in the 1970s and 80s. Was this part of the curriculum? No, it was not. Christianity was supposed to be taught as an observation of one of many religions and cultures, not as a belief system to be adhered to. Was this some sort of throwback to the 1700s? No. Not quite.What I hadn’t realised until right there and then was that Christian fundamentalists were trying to get into schools, to change the way religious education and religious observance are carried out, and to discredit and disempower science. I was shocked.

Diogenes Laertes wrote that “The foundation of every state is in the education of its youth”, and he wasn’t wrong. The fundies wanted to get into schools by teaching Intelligent Design, an alternative theory to evolution (although not a good one); and if not by teaching it as an equal theory, by ‘teaching the controversy’ about ID wanting to be treated as a credible alternative to evolution. That’s how the ID proponents (who usually claim a scientific background, but turn out to be fundamentalist Christians) get a foot in the door. They are motivated, they are energetic, and they want your children’s minds.

Where had they come from? What was their agenda? How come nobody had noticed? Well, they originate in the USA (as does a good deal of their money); it appears that their agenda is to pursue a religious fundamentalist line of education in schools, and the great conspiracy theory is that their ultimate goal is the establishment of Christian Theocracies (much like the Islamic Theocracies of Saudi Arabia, Iran etc.) in the western world (although I am not sure how much credence I give to that idea outside the USA); and many people have noticed. And now I am one of them. And many of the other people who have also noticed are… pirates.

So… pirates. Yes, pirates. If you’re here, you probably already know about Bobby Henderson and the Flying Spaghetti Monster (pbuh), pirates and global warming. If not, you can find about it here. It’s great. Knock yourself out. So I signed up to the FSM forums, and what do you know? There was a crowd of extremely intelligent, witty and creative people there who shared my point of view on many things, and were prepared to argue the point on those they didn’t share with me. I was delighted to be in the enlightened company of people such as Edd, and Tigger, and even (dare I say it) Nef Yoo.

I am at pains to point out that, while I am not religious myself, I am not anti-religious. I have no problem with teaching kids about religion. What I have a problem with is teaching kids poorly thought out theories without any supporting evidence and calling it science. That is exactly the point of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster: it is not to knock religion or God; it is to knock the teaching of superstition as science. Which is why I am here today.

Posted in About me. | 4 Comments »