The meaning of healthPlop the Raindrop

AREyou healthy? How would you know? Do you even know what health means? We spend trillions globally pursuing the mirage of “health” which – like love and beauty – is very hard to define. Ask a hundred people and you’ll get a hundred definitions, with “not being ill” or “feeling ok” near the top of the list. Gwyneth Paltrow would doubtless have us all putting scented candles in every orifice to be healthy, but that’s not without its risks.

I’M in a water droplet heaven. A place where I can change in seconds to any watery form I like. The name might give you a clue: Iceland.

By DrPHIL HAMMOND

No-one I’ve ever met defines health in the same way as the World Health Organisation – “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”

When did you last feel like that, outside of an orgasm? The WHO is slavishly pursuing “health for all”, but wouldn’t it get a bit boring after a while?

Besides, we humans need variation, the ups and downs and ebbs and flows of life. They fire our imagination. Would we have great art, literature, music and comedy without the driving forces of impotence, alcohol, disappointment and melancholy?

A simpler definition of health is our fitness for purpose. We decide what our purpose is in life at any particular time and then try to be fit enough to do it – with or without the guiding hand of a health professional.

Health could also be defined as “doing what you want to do and being who you want to be”. But that isn’t quite enough. We can’t just leave Putin to do what he wants to do in the name of health.

I think defining health is complicated, but must encompass the idea that we’re all going to die. I use the acronym FADE. Our health is our:

FREEDOM to live a life we have reason to value, that also values others

ABILITY to avoid and recover from harm

DUTY TO CARE; for ourselves, other species and our planet

EXPERIENCE AND EXPECTATION OF DECENCY; decent living standards, decent community services, decent fellow citizens, decent politicians, a decent environment and a decent death

Dr Phil will be doing a comedy consultation in the Regen tent at Valleyfest on August 4th, 17.30-18.15pm. Please bring a sample.

There is lots of ice. There are caves made completely of ice in glaciers, where you can imagine trolls might live –there are apparently trolls living in Iceland, although I haven’t seen one yet.

I have met lot of my relatives and old friends in the melt water flowing from the glaciers towards the sea and we’ve been having a great time! Some water droplets have been stuck in glaciers for thousands and thousands of years.

They’ll probably end up next in a frozen lake with seals sleeping on them.

I arrived fairly recently in a snowstorm which blocked almost all the roads.

The world seems safe and comfortable to me, when it’s quietly covered in a thick white blanket of snow. The human beans also seem to enjoy this white icy world – do you like playing in snow?

The edges of the glacier look like white splinters of teeth, bathed in piercing blue sunlight. Where the glacier ends there’s a thick black sludge, the remains of ancient volcanoes ground into dust.

But the glaciers are melting and have retreated by more than 8km in just a few years. I wonder why?

Did you know that Iceland was made by volcanoes and some are still active, with lava still warm after boiling from the earth?

The old extinct volcanoes are huge mountains, like giant pimples all over the place, with old, cold lava fields stretching for miles and miles pushing back the sea.

There is a constant threat that the next eruption could happen just about anywhere at any time, so humans have invented a warning system in case people have to move quickly to get out of the way.

There are places where water comes out of the ground really hot, so that the streams steam in the freezing air!

These waters run into warm lagoons, where a lazy water droplet can snooze away for days - except that noisy human beans like to splash in them too.

So in Iceland I can be rain, snow, ice or steam, and sometimes all within a few seconds!

There’s one thing I forgot. The hot thermal springs also produce a thick, gloopy mud, which some human beans stick on their faces. Can you believe that?

I have to stop now. I’ve been swallowed by a reindeer.

MENDIP GRANDAD