How Your Body Works

The human body is indeed a wonderul thing. Its infinitely complex way of functioning would take a computer, working flat out, day and night, excluding Bank Holidays and Christmas, 3,971 years to work out. The slightest flicker of the eyelid, the smallest movement of the big toe, involves such extraordinarily complex processes that the average man, working flat out, excluding Bank Holidays and Christmas, but *including* weekends, would take 84,643 light years to work it out. If you can imagine an Airedale terrier jumping in and out of a watering can once every 7 minutes for 12 years you have some idea how long that would take. And that's only one light year.

Even the most simple process that the body can perform -- like paying the doctor -- would take a piece of asbestos over 9 billion years to work out. If you can imagine a man at a cocktail party congratulating the hostess on the avocado dip 40,000 times every second for 2 1/2 hours twice a week for 28,000 years you can begin to realize what an extraordinarily wonderful thing the human body is.

To put it even more simply, if you can imagine a doctor leaving his lucrative Harley St. practice to a younger partner, and cruising round the world 4 times a year, drinking 3 bottles of champagne with a friend's wife every afternoon, and writing an article on How Your Body Works once every 96 days, you'll get some idea of why I was struck off the register. Good evening.