Tony Deyal | How good is touching wood?

Because my columns have been running for more than 32 years in the Barbados Nation and other newspapers, especially the The Gleaner, I try to read all of them. What I never miss is The Gleaner’s Thursday column, ‘Stranger Than Fiction’. They always have some interesting stuff like “Tooth fairy gets a raw deal after Guinness world record”; “Message in a bottle travels across Europe”; and “Boy makes history after being born with three penises”. Tooth fairies and raw deals are tough enough, but adding Guinness to the stew is enough to make beef jerky. Messages in bottles, even in Europe, are no big thing, but a one-man threesome is really what should be in the Guinness world records. For older folks like me, it can start a renaissance revival.

Last week, among the new ‘strangers’ in The Gleaner, I found out that “Coffee is good for the heart and brain”. That immediately caused my cup to “runneth over” but I was so happy that I read the rest of the fiction with so much dolce gusto that it was good to the last drop. Next was “Dog and human brains are in sync when they make eye contact”. I suppose it was a case of sync or swim, and they do both. After all, every dog should have its day, night or boat. The next would have been considered “A right rum do” or what the British call a strange situation or event. The word “rum”, in this context, is used as an adjective to mean “odd” or “strange”. What The Gleaner made many people become worried was, “Drinking water won’t cure a hangover”. Then I went to one that was so much stranger than fiction that it almost blew my mind. “Touching wood can alleviate stress”. Given how most Caribbean people use the word “wood”, I had to stop right there.

DEEP TROUBLE

We all know that touching anything without permission can put us in deep trouble. One man asked a lady if he could touch her hair. She said “Yes”, so he ran his fingers across her lip. That’s how the fight started. Another advised me, “Touch it softly. Put two fingers inside. Put three fingers if it is wide. Rub up and down when it is wet.” Luckily for me, he added, “This is how you wash a cup.” While the scientists say that placing your hands on a wooden surface can have the same calming effect as petting an animal, what I know is that it is bad enough with humans who want more than your hands on their surfaces, far less animals whose bite is worse than their barks, sides or behinds. Imagine you are put into a room completely naked, full of weird creatures that look nothing like you, and all they want to do is touch you. That is a no-no. If you’re into that stuff, the only way you can get away when the boss touches you at work is if you’re self-employed. If you think “touch” is bad, wait until you “touch wood”. It means that you hope a situation will continue to be good and you will not have any bad luck. Fortunately, in some countries, wood has no other meaning, so that you get board rather quickly. One old man built a car entirely out of wood. It had wooden seats, doors, steering wheel, floors and even a wooden engine. When he tried to start it, the car wooden start and worse, wooden work.

I went back to the article and found that Professor Baroness Kathy Wills of the University of Oxford still believed that “If you stroke wood, it is still like stroking a dog.” I don’t see that as a stroke of luck. One of my good friends recently had a stroke. He said he lost functionality of the left side of his body. When I asked him how he was doing, he replied, “I guess that I am all right now.” The professor then left the dog for the wood stroking. She was sure that stroking wood can lower your blood pressure, especially if you compared it to stroking marble or steel, even if they had the same temperature. I’m not sure of that. Two nuns were sitting on a park bench when a guy came running through and flashed them. One of the nuns had a stroke. The other one couldn’t reach.

I then went back to see how the baroness dealt with that. But she changed the subject again. “If you ever go to a home store,” she said, “and you look at people at the kitchens, they always stroke the bench. We subconsciously do it to see how it feels.” If she were in my presence, I would have told her, “Speak for yourself.” However, she went for another topic, “People who worked on a test in a concrete room versus a test in a pine room had really quite a significant difference in scores. They suggest it could do with the scent.” I added that scent was not as important as consent, especially if you were in the pine room and you were pining for one of the ladies in it.

FOUR MAIN TYPES

The perfume people say there are four main types of scents – warm, woody, oriental and fresh – and six basic ones – fruity, flowery, resinous, spicy, foul and burned. We who grew up in the Caribbean know about ‘foul’ and ‘woody’. Worse, if we said anything, we would be considered ‘fresh’. One thing I learnt was that buying a perfume for my wife that was not very fragrant made no scents at all.

Thinking about foul, fresh and woody, my mind strayed to the US with its ‘politrics’. It reminded me of the song by one of my favourite Calypsonians, the Mighty Zandolee, who was named after a fast-moving ground lizard. The chorus of the piece, called The Stickman, was “Wood make you bawl, wood make you crawl, and wood will make you get up.” I feel all three woods were designed for Trump. First, in the hands of British doctors, Trump had once ended being delusional, combative and argumentative. Instead, he had returned to what, for him, was reality. The Brits believed it was nice to see that Trump was feeling like his old self. They then contacted the US and made it clear, “We Brits have your president! If you do not send us 50 million pounds by Sunday morning … we’ll return him back to you.” When they heard this, all the major US groups got together and responded, “We, the taxpayers of the United States, keep trying to send Trump on very expensive trips overseas, like Britain. It might be worth it, too, except he keeps coming back.”

This was then. What is now? Donald Trump just turned 73. This makes him the first president whose age surpassed his IQ.

Tony Deyal believes that Trump will play golf right after the election because that’s where the winner has the lowest score. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com