Under pressure
I learnt a new word this week: "meteoropathy." It refers to a range of physiological symptoms caused by the weather and, particularly, by changes in air pressure. I thought the English had discovered every possible way of talking about the weather, but apparently not. It never occurred to me to worry about the volume of gas molecules above my head. In Poland they encourage you to worry about it every evening on television.
I heard a lot of Polish people complaining about pressure, but I assumed they meant pressure at work. Later I noticed they were also complaining about pressure on Saturday afternoons after extensive and relaxing barbecues, and I remembered that none of the people I know have proper jobs. Something else was going on. I only discovered they were talking about atmospheric pressure when I saw somebody taking a pill to protect them against it.
There really is a pill that claims to do this. It's called METEO and it is recommended for people who suffer from: tiredness, mood changes, lack of energy, poor concentration and exasperation. I'm no medical expert, but doesn't that cover every human being on the planet? On the METEO website there is a picture of a model pretending to be a doctor, or a doctor pretending to be a model, and the words: "You can expect symptoms during changes in the weather, when weather fronts are passing, or just before weather fronts pass." So that's every day then. Everyone should take this every day and, if they do, there will be no more tiredness, mood changes or exasperation. U.S. Pharmacia has apparently discovered the secret of universal happiness.
I'm going to become a fabulously rich and famous by importing this idea to England. Up until now, English people have believed that tiredness was caused by lack of sleep, bad moods by bad things happening and exasperation by dealing with the income tax office. It will come as a huge relief to discover these problems are really caused by the density of oxygen and nitrogen atoms over Birmingham. We know how to complain about the weather and will take to this new topic avidly. Newton was pretty smart, but completely failed to add anything useful to conversations about the weather. By introducing meteoropathy to the British public I will tower above him, Darwin and the guy who invented fog.
What worries me is that the world may have misinterpreted other Polish contributions to science. Could it be that Marie "Skłodowska" Curie's discovery of radiation was really an attempt to explain why she felt a bit bored on Sunday evenings? Is there a missing last page to Nicolaus Copernicus' On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres that says "And, therefore, readers, we can see how this proof of the heliocentric theory fully explains why my feet hurt while I'm waiting for my wife to try on clothes"?
Jamie Stokes
