held by Ken Twyford and Gerald Smewing, who drove an Indian auto-rickshaw 11 908 miles (19 165 km) between Hyderabad, India, and Great Harwood, Lancashire, England, from 17 December 1999 to 23 June 2000. The only slight caveat is that the rules stipulate that the vehicle must have ‘no modifications’. Do roll-bars, a comedy horn and shocking-pink paintwork come into this category, I wonder?
Our wonderful web designer, Brian at Indrum in Brighton, has been busy adding all sorts of gadgets behind the scenes this week. We can now see how many hits we’ve had at www.tuktotheroad.co.uk and where our hits are coming from. You can imagine our excitement on seeing that in the past three days we’ve had over 3000 hits. Amazing! Who are all these people looking at our site? And no, it’s not just us, although we might have added a few to the counter.
On the press side of things, Marie Claire is interviewing us for a feature on 3 May, and the Mail on Sunday has said it wants us to write a piece on our return. And then there was the journalist (who shall remain unnamed) who, in a brilliantly camp voice, asked Jo whether our ‘luxurious’ tuk tuk was equipped with a microwave. Dream on!
Ants has really put me to shame with her blogging skills. She had to remind me yesterday how to actually use our blog. So, this is the first post from me.
It’s now only 35 days until we take off for Bangkok, but still this whole trip doesn’t feel real. Ants has likened it to doing all the preparation and reading for your university dissertation before having to sit down and write the bloody thing. We are so involved in all of the planning and preparation that it is difficult to comprehend that in five weeks we will be flying out to Bangkok.
I went to see the nurse at my doctor’s surgery today and was informed I will need to have four jabs before I go, including a polio booster, which I was most upset to learn is no longer given on a sugar lump. I have also been advised to have a meningitis jab and to consider jabs against rabies and Japanese encephalitis. So, next Tuesday I have an appointment with the nurse and will have the pleasure of two injections and my overdue smear test. I can hardly wait.
Before that, however, it is Easter—which means a couple of things: hot cross buns and chocolate. See, being made to go to church every day at school doesn’t necessarily make one a good Christian. I am totally clueless about the Bible and its contents. Not that that makes me a bad person, does it? I think I am just one of the hundreds and thousands of young people out there who are not particularly religious and God-fearing. The closest I get to God is probably uttering the phrase ‘Oh my God!’ on a reasonably regular basis. The god on our trip will be Ting Tong, and I hope that she can undergo a blessing before we leave Bangkok. I will kiss her every day and worship her beautifully formed three wheels and pink bodywork. Actually, that reminds me that I probably need to read my latest purchase, Auto Repair For Dummies. Plus, I need to get intimate with my unloved motorbike and learn how to remove her front wheel, because on our trip we will need to change our front brake pads roughly every 2000 miles.
This was the headline of the Independent on (Easter) Sunday. Not exactly uplifting or Easter-Bunnyish but an extra reason why you should all sponsor us and help Mind fight the war against the depression pandemic that seems to be sweeping our green and pleasant land.
According to the article, 3.5 million Britons are popping pills daily. Fluoxetine, citalopram, paroxetine, sertraline, mirtazapine…you name it, we’re on it. In the past decade, our collective misery has seen prescriptions of these pills rise by more than 120 per cent, costing the NHS £400 million a year. Alarming stuff. And not to mention that the World Health Organization predicts that depression will be the second biggest health problem globally by 2020. Mind and other charities campaigning for better mental health hence need all the support they can get.
The article in the Independent on Sunday made quite shocking reading. Are that many people really suffering from clinical depression caused by a neurochemical imbalance? Maybe, maybe not. Unfortunately, there are no conclusive scans or blood tests that can be carried out by clinicians to diagnose mental health problems. Diagnosis is based on reports from the patient and observations from clinicians, friends and family.
Is the fact that modern life is so stressful the cause of so much unhappiness? A recent report in a scientific journal demonstrated that animals exposed to high levels of stress can exhibit depressed behaviours. This is not exactly a new finding, and extreme stress can lead to the development of a state called ‘learned helplessness’, characterised by apathetic behaviour.
I often feel stressed, but I usually feel stressed because I choose (or have learnt) to interpret situations as stressful. For example, when I am stuck in traffic and am going to be late for an appointment, there is little point getting stressed, as me being pissed off and uptight will not clear the motorway of traffic. I am sure that there are a lot of people out there who get stressed about things that they cannot alter. Over long periods of time, high levels of stress can eat away at one’s physical and mental health. But are our lives today really more stressful and harder than those of people growing up 50 years ago? Are the causes of stress in modern society really the end of the world? No, they are not. I think in many cases we all need to re-evaluate our lives and work out what is important and what is not. Also, we need to remember that being a stress-head is generally not helpful and conducive to being a contented individual.
Another problem is that GPs are under huge pressure to treat patients within a finite period of time; it takes more than a ten-minute consultation to diagnose and treat mental health problems correctly. Unfortunately, the waiting times for non-drug therapies can be far too long—often months. While a patient waits for a referral for a talking therapy, is it better to just prescribe them antidepressants? Many people may be better suited to a talking treatment rather than medication, but what can GPs do with such long waiting lists for these psychological treatments? It also very much depends on the individual patient: some respond brilliantly to medication alone, some to psychological therapy alone, and some to a combination of both.
From personal experience, I honestly believe that antidepressants saved my life, although it took a while to find the one that worked best for me. I think the government needs to invest a huge amount of funds into NHS mental healthcare, because the problem is only going to get worse. It has been predicted that the cost of mental health problems to the country’s economy already runs into billions of pounds. Surely that in itself is reason enough to increase funding?
I also believe that we need some kind of social revolution in this country. What has life come to when the majority of assaults are drink-related and 30-year-olds are being treated for cirrhosis? I think the media need to become more responsible to the young people in today’s society, because many popular media aimed at young people are promoting superficial ideals. The majority of women are now dissatisfied with at least one part of their body, and many are just too caught up in our ever-expanding
