So everyone was relieved to find her latest proposition wasn’t particularly dodgy, just a simple experiment to find out more about the nature of happiness. 

The Nurse’s happiness experiment

Splitting the inmate population neatly and randomly in two, The Nurse briefed each group as follows.

Group 1:  

• Before you go to sleep, imagine tomorrow is the best day you’ve ever had. You feel fantastic. You look great. Everything’s going your way. You’re fit, healthy and the world is full of possibilities.
• Pick up the thread when you wake up and carry on all day with your positive internal dialogue     

Group 2:

• Before you go to sleep, imagine tomorrow will be the worst day you’ve ever had. You look like a bag of shite, your feet smell, everyone hates you and you’ve just been sacked. 
• When you wake up, carry on convincing yourself your life stinks and the entire world thinks you’re an arse.

The Results

The Nurse asked everyone to describe how they felt about their day.

• Group 1:  Had a great time.
• Group 2:  Just wanted to die and get it over with. 

The next night The Nurse reversed the process.

• Group 1:  Had a dreadful time.
• Group 2:  Enjoyed themselves despite being banged up in a loony bin.

Conclusion

Sadly she daren’t try the experiment herself. The Nurse understands better than anyone how unpredictable and deadly she can be when in a bad mood.  But she suspects we’re in charge of our own happiness. Interesting.

The Nurse wants YOU!

Nobody’s going to take this seriously… an experiment run by a mass murderer, undertaken on the population of a mental institution, none of whom were given the remotest choice in the matter. 

The Nurse needs fresh test data, from normal people like you. Feel free to experiment on yourself and let her know what happens.

Do you believe in Homeopathy? The Nurse isn’t convinced. Why? Because to work, it’d have to defy the laws of physics.  

Even if you wouldn’t know a law of physics if it punched you on the nose, you probably realise that it is 100% impossible to defy them. 

Fact: the only way homeopathy could work is if it managed to defy those laws. It can’t. Nothing can. Conclusion: homeopathy is bollocks.     

That’s not all. High quality clinical trials cannot find any scientific basis whatsoever for homeopathy working. Nobody ever has.

Invented in the 1700s, homeopathy is based on three so-called ‘laws’; the law of similars, the law of infinitesimals and the law of succussion. All three are too silly to merit any detail. And all were disproved a very long time ago. 

But people still persist in believing that homeopathy works… to the tune of £40 million a year in the UK, £4 million of which is spent by the UK’s NHS. 

The Nurse thinks she knows why. It’s the placebo and nocebo effects, both of which are much more powerful than you might realise.

There’s the true story of the man misdiagnosed with terminal cancer who was found, at post mortem, to have  nothing wrong with him… classic nocebo effect. There are many reports of people dying because they believed they’d been cursed – more nocebos.

The placebo effect is well documented too, with countless cases of people given a placebo and recovering. And there’s even a recent study where people who thought they were watching HD TV reported experiencing a dramatically better picture when they were actually only looking at a regular TV. 

The Nurse marvels at how easy it is to fool ourselves! 

A fellow inmate argued the other day that it didn’t matter whether or not homeopathy worked because some people’s belief  is so strong that it works for them. So what’s the harm.

Hm. The Nurse thinks that’s a thin excuse for perpetuating such a scandalous and expensive scam. Surely it’d be better to save a considerable amount of cash, spread the word about placebo / nocebo effects and make it clear to everyone that believing you’re healthy goes a surprisingly long way towards making it so.

In fact scientific experiments have proved that 30 minutes of meditation a day over eight weeks can significantly strengthen your immune system. Who needs quack medicine when you can DIY? 

Until she’s perfected her meditation techniques, The Nurse vows to steer clear of homeopathy charlatans. No doubt they mean well but even they can’t defy the laws of physics. 

The Nurse is delighted to discover that, from a genetic perspective, she’s 50% black.

The Nurse has a little Brother. He’s had his DNA analysed by Oxford Ancestors to find out the family’s genetic origins. 

The test establishes where your great, great, great, great (etc) granny and grandad originated. It traces your rellies back through the millennia, as far back as they can go in an unbroken line. Right back to your original maternal and paternal ancestors.

The results? The Nurse’s paternal origin lies with a clan who lived in the Middle East about 50,000 years ago. Later they migrated back to Africa where most of her genetic descendants are found today. She only shares 2% of her paternal DNA with the UK population but she has 98% in common with Western Africans.

On the maternal side her great, great, great (etc) granny belonged to a clan who lived in Portugal 17,000 years ago. Over the millennia they moved up through Spain and France to Britain and then further northwards to Norway, Finland and Arctic Russia where The Nurse’s genetic clansmen live today.

The Nurse is enjoying the irony. She has dark red hair and freckles. Her brother has bright red hair and freckles. But they are both, fundamentally, 50% black. Black ‘n’ proud.

Very cool. And a big one in the eye for Nick Griffin and co. Because The Nurse is feeling particularly provocative today she’s challenging Nick Griffin and his BNP membership to take genetic tests and establish their ancestry. As far as we know, Nick Griffin might be half black too.

Ha! The Nurse finds that most amusing. She crouches, rocking, on her hard iron bed, grinning in the half light… 

The Nurse is getting on a  bit. She’s long in the tooth. Her intimate bits are heading south fast and she automatically lets out a wheezy old lady groan whenever she sits down.

But is she finding the ageing process terrible? Not particularly. There are loads of advantages to getting older. Here are The Nurse’s top six reasons for relaxing and enjoying the ride.

1. At last, you can finally distinguish your arse from your elbow. Decades of experience mean you finally begin to understand who you are and what you want.

2. You know what you like – and what you don’t like. All those years spent experimenting and practising. Now you know exactly what you like and what you don’t like. You’ve tried and tested the lot. Now you can start enjoying yourself properly.

3. Age is a great disguise. You no longer give a flying stuff what other people think and they don’t notice you anyway. You can sail forth into senility secure in the knowledge that you can do, think, eat, wear or say almost anything you like. Most younger people will dismiss you as an old nutter, or simply fail to acknowledge that you exist. As you age, you become wonderfully invisible.  

4. You’re wise. Ok, so your bum’s gone a funny shape. Your face is roadmapped with craters. Your feet hurt and your elbows are giving you all kinds of gyp. But, in compensation, you’re as wise as an extremely wise person from a very wise place. You might not be pretty. But you sure ain’t stupid.  

5. You keep warm and dry. No more foolish youthful clothing. You’re in cagoul and waterproof trousers territory now. The agonies of high heels and following fashion belong in the past. Next stop? The thermal vest department. Yay!

6. It’s inevitable. Everyone gets older. Trying to stop, slow or deny ageing must be one of mankind’s most pointless endeavours. Why not loosen up, let it lie and spend your remaining time concentrating on achievable, realistic goals instead of trying to stay young? 

If false teeth were hot stuff The Nurse would have her gnashers whipped out without a second thought.  

As the UK’s population ages, will false teeth ever become stylish?

The Nurse, brought up in the ’60s and ’70s, has crap teeth. Her 1970s childhood dentist was spectacularly bad as well as really scary. So when she left home she daren’t go to the dentist for a decade. Her teeth don’t do the job any more. And they’re no oil painting. 

Bored one long dark winter, she filed her front teeth to sharp points. Cute. But painful in a draught. So this summer - in solitary again for an ill advised medical experiment on a fellow inmate - The Nurse has been speculating about marketing false teeth as the next hot new fashion item.

Hip hop has gone some way towards kicking things off. The Nurse can envisage a time when ageing hip hop superstars might go the whole hog and replace their bejewelled tombstones with super-blinged falsies.

Party teeth for party occasions: royalty with diamond encrusted teeth. Self assembly Ikea false teeth in cheery primary colours. LED flashing teeth. Glamour teeth. Limited edition teeth. Hello magazine would wet themselves over the latest celebrity teeth. Exclusive designer false teeth boutiques. Porn teeth. Gok Wan making recycled funky teeth.  The opportunities are endless.

But… the worst thing about false teeth is the way your face collapses into a terrifying, lumpy heap when you take them out. 

To remedy this The Nurse proposes that someone invents a self-cleaning, totally comfortable device that sits permanently in your mouth. You just slot your various sets of teeth smoothly into it; your mourning teeth, Bah Mitzvah teeth, Divali teeth, Valentine’s day teeth, wedding teeth, Fatwah teeth and whatnot.

That way you never have to horrify your partner – or yourself - with a face that hangs like a brown paper bag half full of jelly. You always look nice and pert, with cheeks like a baby’s bum. Stunning false teeth plus the extra benefit of a non-invasive partial face lift. Howzat?

What The Nurse needs is the support of some great science brains, a marketing genuis and a celebrity endorser. Then she’s off. 

Imagine. A huge and growing market of people all over the planet who are sick and tired of things going wrong with their teeth. Many of whom would, if it suddenly became de rigeur, jump at the chance of having The Nurse’s groundbreaking false teeth system fitted.

The basic permanent mouth unit would be painless and simple to fit at home. And affordable. We’re talking high fashion false teeth for the masses here. No elitist nonsense.

But once you’ve got your basic kit in place, the sky’s the limit as far as your falsies are concerned. From basic white to rainbow, ruby or billiebobs. Pure gold to plastic disposables. Whatever tickles your fancy.

The Nurse, a generous type despite her murderous tendencies, would like to throw open the false teeth fashion challenge to the world at large. All she asks is a 1% cut – for life - of the profits of every single company that hits the market with her invention.

While it might seem naive to be so free and easy with such a superb business opportunity, The Nurse is confident that nobody will take the piss. She is a very, very scary person indeed.   

And the sooner it happens the better, as far as she’s concerned. Winter’s coming and The Nurse is keen to be in a position to get Vlad the Dentist, in the next cell, to knock these super-sensitive, pointy fuckers out for her before the icy winds start to blow through them.

The Nurse wonders how many women realise that the claims made by skincare manufacturers are utter bollocks.

Cosmetics companies have always relied on subjective assessments of the improvements their products make to women’s skin. Why? Because until very recently there’s been no scientifically valid way to test their claims.

So skincare advertising is all pretty words with no substance. Or - as The Nurse’s Mum would say - ’fur coat and no knickers’. Basically all they do is get a load of gullible women to test their skin products and report back with the results.  Hm. 

Even cosmetic giant Proctor & Gamble’s Rosemary Osborne says that testing the effectiveness of skin care products has, so far, always been ‘totally hit and miss’. 

Anti-ageing creams and potions are the worst offenders. They take junk science to a whole new level. Which would be amusing if everyone understood it was nonsense.  The thing is, a lot of women are so desperate to retain their youth that they’ll believe anything.

Here’s the facts. The scientific language you hear on skincare ads is meaningless rubbish. Some cosmetic manufacturers even employ advertising consultancies to create fictional consumer organisations, research bodies and scientific forums. Why? So they can quote made-up ‘facts’ and ’research’  from these  ’independent’ sources in their ads.

If you’re a person who worries about getting older, there’s hope on the horizon. Cosmetics researchers are confident that new techniques for testing the genetics of human skin will eventually deliver clues about how to create anti-ageing and skincare products that actually work.

But there’s also an interesting underlying issue. Why are so many women so terrified of looking older? What’s the big deal?

The Nurse is enjoying ageing. OK, at forty six her physical self is heading South fast. Everything that dangles is becoming a tad too dangly for aesthetic comfort. But, on the bright side, The Nurse’s spirit gets prettier by the minute. And she gets a tiny bit wiser every day. 

On balance she’s happy with the deal: as the outside falls apart, the inside flourishes and grows. Now that The Nurse thinks about it, there’s a pleasingly logical symmetry to the business of getting old. After all, your body isn’t really you. It’s just where you live.

Until the new science bears fruit The Nurse recommends that women cease and desist spending vast amounts of wonga on anti-ageing lotions and potions. There’s absolutely no proof that they work. Zero. Nothing.  Spend the money on shoes instead… you’re worth it!

Just because women were treated like idiots for centuries doesn’t give us the right to take revenge on men.

The Nurse remembers when very few women had decent jobs, if they worked at all. 

The telly showed us climbing all over hunky blokes wearing ‘Denim’ aftershave, breasts heaving. 

Or flitting around the living room in a frilly pinny dusting the skirting boards. As secretaries, fair game for male colleagues, leaving work when they married as a matter of course. Or as perfectly groomed, empty-headed ornaments.  

Yup, women were patronised and repressed. True, we were treated as second class citizens. Too fluffy and pink to manage anything more intellectual than getting to grips with a recipe for fairy cakes.  But things are very different today.

The Nurse never liked bullying. She might be an evil, pointy-teethed mass murderer but she isn’t the type to pick on people, take the piss and make them look stupid. 

So she’s disturbed to see the trend for dissing men on TV continuing. With the end of the new century’s first decade fast approaching, we seem to be stuck in an ugly rut.

Today’s TV ads and programmes are the diametric opposite of the ’60s and ’70s classics The Nurse remembers so well.

Switch on to see inept men struggling with simple household tasks. While super-efficient, shiny women look on, smiling or tutting with ill concealed contempt.

Sharp lady business moguls wipe executive floors with their male counterparts. Male stereotypes are reinforced left right and centre. Witness Mr Muscle ads where the skinny, weedy bloke is rescued by the macho products of the unpleasantly muscled and ‘packaged’ superhero.

So what’s going on? The Nurse thinks we’ve gone a bit too far the other way. Perhaps women were repressed for so long that when society took the pressure off we went crazy with freedom.

Which is understandable. When The Nurse left home she went a bit mad herself, staying up late and partying too hard in reaction to her super-strict childhood. And Russia’s criminal classes – released by the fall of uber Socialism - went a bit mad too. 

The Nurse would prefer real, honest equality instead. Come on girls, we’ve had our fun. It’s time to start treating men like human beings and equals rather than recalcitrant children.  Have some respect. If you were as old as the Nurse you’d remember when the boot was on the other foot and you’d tread more sensitively. 

…compared to what the next big solar storm will do!

The Nurse is glad she wasn’t around for the biggest ever recorded solar storm , 1859’s so-called ‘Carrington Event’. 

She’s even more pleased she was locked up safely here in the UK when, in March ‘89, a solar storm hit Quebec leaving six million Canadians freezing their jibblies off for a miserable nine hours. And she definitely doesn’t want to be around when – rather than if – the next big one hits.

Why all the drama? So what if we suffer the daddy of all electricity cuts?

Sadly the next big solar storm won’t just put the lights out for a few hours, days or weeks. It will completely fry the world’s electricity grids. Some experts reckon that Europe, the US and UK might never recover.

Put bluntly, without electricity we’d be utterly fucked. Chew on this:

• No healthcare – hospital emergency generators will last a few days then that’s it. 
• After a couple of weeks, no medicines – you can’t manufacture drugs, or anything much for that matter, without power.
• No fresh water or fuel – almost all pumps run on electricity.  
• A massive and sudden food crisis – if you can’t pump fuel you can’t run cars, lorries, ships or aeroplanes and you can’t deliver food to supermarkets. Even if you could, the tills wouldn’t work.
• The internet would die pretty much instantly.
• Your home would be cold and dark. No cooking, even by gas… gas pumps use electricity too.  And you can forget telly. 

The Nurse could go on, but she’s sure you’ve got the point. The next big solar storm will be the end of society as we know it.

It was bad enough for the Victorians, wrecking their unsophisticated telegraph systems and magnetometers. Unless you live in some godforsaken desert or jungle and wouldn’t know electricity if it bit you, you’ll be absolutely and completely stuffed. 

So what’s the risk? The Carrington Event was the biggest we know about  but solar storms are a fact of life. The sun’s activity intensifies every eleven years or so, following a rough but regular cycle. The next solar maximum is due in 2012. Having said that, solar storms can happen any old time whether or not the sun’s throwing a wobbly. 

All of which sounds pretty grim. But it makes the current economic climate look like a walk in the park, and global warming seem like a picnic.

What to do? We can’t do anything about it. NASA’s aging ACE probe can only give a maximum of 45 minutes’ warning, so being warned is bugger all use to anyone. And if we had plenty of warning – an impossible task because solar particles move so fast – all we’d be able to do is turn the planet’s power off, hang on to our hats and keep our fingers crossed.  

The phrase ‘hoist by our own petard’ springs to mind. The Nurse has decided that the only thing to do is party.

The Nurse proposes a sensible, fulfilling, fun spiritual framework for atheists and sceptics

 The Nurse has been an atheist since early childhood. But, when bored last week, she invented a spiritual framework. If yuo can’t beat them…  

It’s just a shame that – owing to past indiscretions and lapses of judgement – she’ll never be taken seriously as a spiritual leader. The Nurse supposes she’s a bit of a minger these days, which doesn’t help break into a celebrity culture. She hasn’t been let anywhere near a mirror for decades. But then again, Mother Teresa was no oil painting…

The Nurse rejects gods, rules and guilt. She doesn’t do deities and mythical beings. In The Nurse’s ‘religion’ you don’t need to join anything, commit to anything, pay anything, give anything or give anything up. You don’t have to feel guilty, regret, repent or feel bad about anything. You don’t have to pray or worship or go anywhere.

The Nurse types far into the night, gimlet eyes gleaming in the light of a smelly stub of candle retrieved from its hiding place in her toilet bucket. This is what she writes:

1. Think positively all the time. Believe the best of people. Smile. Be polite. Commit acts of random kindness. Be generous with yourself. Give a few quid away when you can
2. Know that you’re a really great person, even if you’re actually a bit of a shit! Be kind to yourself. When you’re chatting away to yourself in your head, have respect
3. Treat other beings, whether they’re human or furry or many-legged, the way you’d like to be treated yourself
4. Forgive yourself for all the nasty, mean, dishonest things you’ve ever done. Then forget them forever
5. Live in the present. The past is dead and gone. The future doesn’t exist
6. If you’re worrying about something that can be changed, change it. If you’re worrying about something you can’t change, worrying is pointless
7. You’re directly related – at genetic level – to every living creature that has ever existed on earth. Even viruses and algae
8. Don’t gossip, tell tales, spread lies, stir trouble or interfere in people’s business
9. Every living thing is equal. Don’t kill things even if they’re small and scuttly with too many legs for comfort. They have just as much right to be here as we do
10. Follow your own compass. Don’t do things you don’t want to do; say no. Life’s too short for obligations, guilt and resentment
11. Put yourself first. When you’re happy you have love left over to give back to the world
12. Do your best to look after the earth. It seems rude to trash it
13. When you die, that’s the end. But spark of pure energy that made you alive will still exist. The chemicals that make up your body will decay back into the earth and air, and those molecules will still exist. That’s enough mortality to satisfy your ego!

The Nurse marvels at the universe and wonders why people need gods.

Just because she has misbehaved in the past doesn’t mean The Nurse is spiritually bereft. Her feelings still soar at the sight of a glorious sunset, even though she can only glimpse a slim slice of sky between the grim buildings, through the thick bars of her cell. And despite everything, she has held on to a sense of wonder.  

Religious people often complain that science takes the mystery out of the universe, stripping it of meaning to leave an empty collection of dust-dry facts. 

The Nurse begs to disagree.  The real creation story is so wonderful that The Nurse is puzzled why anyone, once they’d discovered the science behind it, would continue to bother with the dubious doings of mythical deities.

Consider quantum physics. Quantum particles are very weird. If you look at one, the very act of doing so fundamentally changes its properties. Some particles come in pairs. If you observe one the partner particle will change too, instantly, even if it is billions of light years away. Howzat.

Then there’s Darwinism – the theory of evolution. The sheer elegance of the origin of species renders The Nurse breathless with excitement and delight. The christian garden of eden and god myth pales into insignificance in comparison. Absolutely no contest. Nothing any god can offer can beat this story. 

Or take mathematics. Maths makes most people groan and The Nurse is no exception. Sadly, she has only ever been able to grasp more than the most basic fundamentals. But she can appreciate things like the golden number, 1.6180339887 (‘Phi’). At least as far back as the Renaissance, artists and architects have used this magical ratio to create perfectly proportioned buildings and compositions. And – remarkably – it appears everywhere in nature: in accoustics and music, plant and animal physiology and biology, geometry, colour, light, chemistry, in our bodies… wow. Why is this number so intrinsically right? The Nurse’s scarred arms prickle with goosebumps.

All splendid stuff, all utterly amazing, mind blowing and true. Who needs gods!