Earlobe creases, Hadrian, my nephew and me

I have just discovered that I have creases in my ear lobes. Big deal, you might say, except that diagonal ear-lobe creases are, to quote one recent medical study on the subject, ‘significantly associated with coronary artery disease and coronary risk factors’. How significantly? Creases in both lobes have a ‘positive predictive value’ of 89.4%, according to the study. Or, to put it another way, they mean a 77% increased risk of heart attack (33% if only in one lobe), according to another report.

I wouldn’t have known any of this if it hadn’t been for the Hadrian exhibition at the British Museum, where the combination of my historical/archaeological expertise and, more importantly, museum membership (I can take a guest in free) means I’ve been acting as an unofficial guide to every friend or family member with half an interest in things Roman. My last visit before the exhibition closes tomorrow was to take my 11-year-old nephew, recently back from a holiday in Rome and interested enough in Hadrian to know that he built the Pantheon and that his mausoleum is now the Castel Sant’Angelo.

For the umpteenth time, I did my by-now pat routine about Hadrian and his empire, Hadrian and his architecture, Hadrian and his statues, Hadrian and his wall. I curtailed my usual extensive discourse about Hadrian and his sex life, and opted against pointing out all the detail of the homoerotic sex scenes on the Warren Cup. (‘£1.8 million for a mug?’ ‘Bugger me!’ as the Private Eye cover had it when the silver goblet became the museum’s most expensive acquisition a decade ago.)

But I got enough interest from the nephew to keep me going with the Vindolanda tablets (two-millenia-old letters dealing with everything from requests for clean underwear to complaints about the ‘wretched little Brits’), the keys that the Jews took into the desert in the expectation of returning home during the revolt of 132-35, the hobnailed sandal imprint of a Roman soldier preserved on an ancient paving stone – and the diagonal creases on Hadrian’s earlobes.

These were first noticed on statues of Hadrian by Nicholas L Petrakis, a San Francisco MD, who published a paper in 1980 linking the creases to classical writings suggesting that Hadrian died from congestive heart failure resulting from hypertension and coronary atherosclerosis. I pointed out the creases to my nephew on some of the busts of Hadrian in the BM exhibition and told him about the link with heart disease. ‘Are they the same as you’ve got?’ he said.

I must have told this story about Hadrian and his earlobe creases a dozen times since the exhibition opened and no one, least of all me, had ever noticed any creases in my earlobes before now. Have they only just appeared? Old photos are inconclusive. Is my nephew imagining it? The mirror says no. Should I be worried? Medical opinion seems to be divided.

Both earlobe creases and heart disease become more common with age, so the studies may simply be reflecting this fact. (I wish.) And anyway, there’s just as strong a correlation, according to one of these studies, between heart disease and hairy ears, which I don’t have (or didn’t the last time I looked), so I’m taking the usual male approach to personal health issues, putting my fingers in both ears and pretending I never heard my nephew’s question in the first place.

Never lend me your Rolex

When I was a kid I used to have a problem wearing watches. Apart from insisting on wearing them on the inside of the right-hand wrist (a five-year-old’s assertion of individualist identity that I’ve stuck with to the present day, with inconvenient consequences at the keyboard), sooner or later they’d stop working. An adult who knew about these things (people did in those days: they still made them) told me it was something to do with the electro-magnetic field around my body.

That was the best possible explanation I could have hoped for – short of being the adopted son of parents from the planet Krypton. Wind-up watches didn’t work on me because I had an invisible force surrounding me that stopped them ticking.

I’m still not entirely sure whether it was me that was being wound up, but I’ve long since fallen out of love with electro-magnetism. Part of the reason for going a little quiet on the blog recently (apart from spending a fair chunk of the time fell running in the Lake District, avoiding coming last in my category in the Northern Veterans 10-mile road championship and taking my grandson, aged one on Monday, up his first Wainwright – Loughrigg, 211th out of 214 in height order; he slept through most of it) has been a kind of reverse Midas touch, whereby everything electronic I come into contact with stops operating.

The car, computer and even the kettle have all given up the ghost in quick succession – so quick that I’ve almost convinced myself that my electro-magnetic field has gone into overdrive again. Losing your computer hard drive when you’re 300 miles from anything resembling a back up is bad enough, but have you ever tried to organise an auto-electronics spare parts delivery when you’re halfway along Striding Edge? Not helped by the fact that while there are scores, probably hundreds, of companies with variations on the name ‘Ford Electronics’, hardly any of them appear to be a) in this country or b) in the business of electronics for Ford cars.

Up in the downs

I have spent the weekend avoiding the ‘Family Man’ and ‘Action Super Hero’ soubriqets from friends, family and casual running acquaintances after my daughter’s portrayal of me as some sort of fitness sadist in the Guardian on Saturday. I was doorstepped for a while by Fleet Street flashers when John Major sued the New Statesman and me for libel back in 1993; and I was put under photo surveillance by police long-lensmen once when the Special Branch confused a direct-action trespass I was involved in organising at Windsor Castle with a plot to kidnap the queen. But I’ve never been followed around on a sporting event before by a professional photographer as I was for the Guardian piece. I’m just glad she wasn’t there to capture me writhing around with cramp at the end of today’s 20-mile trail challenge at Dunstable. Gorgeous day, but there's an awful lot of up in those downs ...

Photo: Lisa Carpenter

Family challenge

Well we didn’t come last. My daughter is writing about our first team venture into the world of triathlon trail challenge events today for the ‘Family Challenge’ slot in this weekend’s Guardian. So I’ll say no more about it here for now. Except that three family members (her boyfriend being the third) squashed together in one sack for a ‘special challenge’ at the end of five hours of running, cycling and kayaking is about as close as I ever want us to get. There are times when your personal space really should be protected.

Shakespeare and football

I’m knackered. I’ve done a 5k-5mile-10k series of races over the weekend and I’ve got football this evening. I’ve been limited to one glass of champagne to celebrate my sort-of niece Lizzie getting a 2.1 in English Literature (‘sort of’ because she’s my daughter’s mother’s brother’s daughter, if you follow the connection, but there was never any marriage there to formalise the relationship). I could really do with a spliff right now but I know it would set back my recovery from injury out of all proportion to the pleasure I’d get out of it. And football has turned into a strange enough experience of late anyway without the assistance of some Class B psychoactive pumping through my capillaries.

One game I played in last week finished off with a punch-up between two players that only just stopped short of the kind of scenes that followed the Poland v Germany and Croatia v Turkey games in Euro 2008. Then I learnt that one of my team-mates, Andy Havill, who appeared with Kylie Minogue in last year’s Dr Who Christmas Special, is currently performing in The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Globe Theatre - a pathetic excuse for his missing out on this summer's football fixtures, if you ask me. The Daily Telegraph review says his ‘chisel-faced Ford is a sublimely comic study of obsessive jealousy and tortured masochism’ – a description that also tells you something about how he plays football.

As if that isn’t enough Shakespeare for one football story, Stephen Boxer, who is one of our Sunday evening football regulars, has just quit as Dr Joe Fenton in the daytime BBC soap Doctors and got himself the role of Petruchio in Conall Morrison’s production of The Taming of the Shrew at Stratford. I don’t know whether I should be practising my free kicks or learning my lines.

As for Euro 2008, my politically-correct guide to who to support, which for a brief spell appeared to be following the actual results, turned all-too-quickly into a ready-reference guide to who was going out of the competition. I found myself in the strange and unfamiliar position of supporting Germany by the halfway stage of their quarter final against Portugal (something to do with the Pinochet apologist, gay hater, Chelsea incumbent Scolari, I suppose, but it still didn’t feel right). Tonight, I hardly dare say that it’s got to be Spain but it really does have to be Anyone But Italy, doesn’t it?

Photo: Andy Harvill and wig. Would you play football with this man?