Read Online Amazing Disgrace by James Hamilton-Paterson - Free Book Online

improves blood flow to the penis and causes erection, which might be unwelcome while climbing Everest although it’s true I know nothing about Mallory’s later relations with Irvine. E. sagittatum also does wonders for menstrual irregularity.
    But the clincher is this guileless assertion: ‘Small amount promotes urination; large amount inhibits urination.’ As far as I’m concerned this sums up the essential vagueness at the heart of all herbal medicine. It’s not just that the effects of a single plant can be utterly contradictory but that phrases like ‘large amount’ are never explained. It’s pitiful. Just try imagining this principle applied to cookery: ‘Blend large quantity of flour with a lesser amount of butter and a number of eggs.’ Here we’re talking about potent weeds that might induce parts of the body to run amok, or just unstoppably to run . Looking at the other formulations of Horny Goat Weed on the market I can’t find any uniformity of dosage. Mr and Mrs ProWang, who make my pills and whom I now see as a hardworking Cantonese couple forever chopping dried herbs in their tiny kitchenette in Guangzhou, don’t mention any quantities at all on their label. It’s true I haven’t yet noticed any urinary irregularity but I shall be seriously displeased if I begin to have periods at my time of life. I realize that taking any pharmaceutical is a lottery but at least the stuff that doctors prescribe comes in standardized strength and dosage. Until they take the trouble to isolate a plant’s active ingredient and weigh it properly, I can’t see how herbalists can ever be certain their patients won’t see-saw arbitrarily between floods of urine and acute retention , not to mention appalling gusts of wind-damp-cold that in restaurants would give rise to long, incredulous stares over the tops of menus.  
    On balance I’m inclined to dismiss Horny Goat Weed as a threat. I’m much more anxious about the ‘orchic substance’ the ProWangs are adding to their pills. A classically educated pedant like Stephen Fry would point out that orchis is Greek for testicle, but that it is also the name of a family of orchids because of the shape of their root tubers. Frankly, I would sooner know the ‘orchic substance’ I’m ingesting daily is of strictly vegetal origin. Still, maybe there’s a recipe in all this: a hitherto-untested combination of animelles with orchid roots. There’s something intriguing about the union of testicles andsuburban greenhouses. Hortiball Stew? I shall have to find out if orchid roots are toxic.  
    Then comes the morning when Frankie rings up with his customary salvo of coughs. People sometimes ask him if he isn’t afraid of cancer. ‘Good God no,’ says Frankie. ‘Far too obvious. No, I shall die of mortality’ – a beady glance – ‘just like you.’ Today his tone is not very breezy. Ominous, didn’t I say? As usual, Samper was right.  
    ‘I’ve just had some feedback from Weetabix.’ This is our whimsical private name for my editor, Michelle Tost, a.k.a. the Breakfast of Champions.  
    ‘She hates the book,’ I say gloomily.  
    ‘She does no such thing, Gerry. She says it’s witty and discreet and Champions Press are honoured as always to have another title from you. No, what she says is that Millie herself wants a few changes.’  
    ‘Oh God. How few?’  
    ‘Oh, not a lot.’ Breezily evasive. ‘You know these people, Gerry. They make no end of a song and dance about an entire chapter and it’s often curable by removing a single sentence. Remember Per Snoilsson.’  
    I remembered. The Flying Swede had thought my vivid account of how racing drivers disported themselves between races, and especially when playing the notorious ‘Pit Stop Game’, would bring him into disrepute. Disrepute! The man who charges around the world’s circuits leaving behind him a welter of skidding cars and flying wheels; the man everybody knows was responsible for the