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Oh dear! If only I’d bought myself an ‘electromembrane’ for just £13.08
three months ago I’d have saved myself a good deal of physical distress,
plus the cost of a walking stick.

You see, I have this deplorable habit of throwing boring-looking items
from the mail, unopened, onto the morass of papers weighing down my desk.
If I was more courageous I’d chuck them straight into the bin, but I’m not
that self-assured.

Boring-looking items include any press releases from the World Health
Organization, which flood in at the rate of six or more a week with sometimes
three arriving in one post. (Why don’t the governments that fund this self-adulating
bureaucracy discover how much of their taxpayers’ money is wasted on prolix
and valueless WHO press hand-outs, and put a curb on the costly exuberance
of that body’s doubtless well-paid publicists?)

Also added to the pile is anything in a buff-coloured envelope bearing
a second-class stamp and a stick-on label, which means that your correspondent
is just some rotten old computer which has picked up your name from a mailing
list. And then there are the missives marked ‘Urgent – Open at once to secure
your chance of winning £75 000 or a Luxury Round-the-World Cruise
with All Expenses Paid’.

In common with, I suspect, most of my fellow citizens, I cherish the
vague hope that the next time my friendly neighbourhood postman calls he
will deliver a marvellous surprise. Perhaps, at long last, ‘they up there’
have recognised my sterling worth and want to make me a life peer. Or, after
several sterile decades, one of my few premium bonds has finally hit the
jackpot. Or there’s a letter from a long-lost friend saying that he (or,
as it might be, she) still loves me. The possibilities are endless.

So the let-down is traumatic when the good mail man hands over nothing
but trash. It would be better had he passed me by entirely. Don’t the senders
of these non-events realise that they are not only failing to recruit good
will but are breeding in the recipients an active hatred for their name?

(Many years ago, when I was but a lad, certain pharmaceuticals companies
used to flog their wares by sending doctors one of those blue ‘aerogramme’
forms, stamped with a proper colourful stick-on stamp and despatched from
some exotic spot and bearing a handwritten address. The pleasure of receiving
an unexpected message from abroad dissolved into fury when you slit the
thing open and found yourself invited to ‘Solve your elderly patients’ constipation
problems by prescribing Shitogel – the gentle, natural way to activate the
bowels’. That ploy didn’t last long. Pharmaceuticals companies go to a lot
of trouble to discover how their costly propaganda affects their customers.)

Anyway, there’s my desk, smothered with papers of vastly varying degrees
of interest and importance, and every two or three months I have to attack
the problem and sort things out, if only to make the space on which to rest
a mug of tea. Fearful, as ever, of missing out on the main chance, I read
each item of rubbish before ditching it in the bin, and open all those dreary-looking
envelopes. And that’s how, only the other day, I came across, too late,
the letter which Roger Coghill MA had addressed to me last June in a buff-coloured
envelope bearing a stick-on label and a second-class stamp.

It was a revelation. Starting matily by addressing me as ‘Dear Donald
Gould’, Roger went on to describe the virtues of the first British electromagnetic
hazard meter, developed by Coghill Research Laboratories (a division of
Med Cross Ltd).

This is a device costing only £39.44 (excluding VAT) bearing
a lamp which glows red whenever it finds itself within an area plagued by
electromagnetic fields above a certain strength.

But why should we care? Because, says Roger, ‘it is now reliably agreed
by scientists researching this field’ that chronic exposure to electromagnetic
energy at a level commonly induced by the use of electricity within homes,
offices and factories is carcinogenic (especially for children), and that
‘immune damage, neoplasms of tissue, behavioural aberrations, muscular fatigue,
myalgic encephalomyelitis, repetitive strain injury, memory impairment,
spontaneous miscarriage, birth defects, sudden infant death, asthenia, cardiac
problems, and other novel diseases among livestock’ may be the price we
are paying for our profligate use of energy. ‘Scientific literature,’ he
says, ‘abounds with the evidence.’

You know, I’d never realised this. I’ve certainly suffered from behavioural
aberrations, muscular fatigue, and memory impairment within the past few
years (although never a spontaneous miscarriage), but I’d thought these
failings were nothing more than the inevitable concomitants of old age.
I’d never guessed they were probably caused by sitting in front of my beloved
Amstrad day after day.

Specifically, I’ve recently been made a partial cripple by painful feet,
and have had to hobble with a stick. I’d thought this was a rare side effect
of some rotten pills I’ve had to swallow – an opinion apparently confirmed
by the fact that the pains disappeared when I stopped taking the horrid
things.

Now I understand that my distress was probably due to the malign influence
of electromagnetic fields, possibly encountered as a result of spending
too much time slumped in front of the TV, and that I could have scotched
the problem by buying an electromembrane which is ‘a neg-ion bandage for
alleviating RST, muscle ache, and other myalgias’, and is just one of the
several devices which Roger offers as a protection against the invisible
rays.

Roger ended his letter to me by saying ‘Please write about our research
in your articles, and thereby tell Britain about this invention.’

This I have now done. And I’ll never cast aside a buff envelope bearing
a second-class stamp and a stick-on label unopened again. You never know
what’s in ’em.