Family affairs
Jacques Anquetil’s love life
Tour de France cyclists have always led complicated lives. The 1906 winner, Rene Pottier, committed suicide when he discovered his wife’s affair, and Henri Pélissier (1923) was murdered by his lover, Camille, with the gun his first wife Léonie had used to commit suicide – Pélissier was generally regarded as having deserved his fate, and this was France, so the judge let Camille off. But there were few like five-times winner Jacques Anquetil.
His first wife, Janine Boeda, was married to his team doctor when they met. Poor Dr Boeda realised what was going on and tried to hide her away, but love won out, and the pair eloped. During the period of Anquetil’s greatest triumphs, Janine travelled with him, gave interviews on his behalf, and became almost as famous as her new husband. But although she had had two children, Alain and Annie, by Dr Boeda, she had none with Anquetil. Some accounts say Dr Boeda had sterilised her, others that she miscarried. Janine’s children lived with them, but Anquetil wanted his own.
In 1969 when he retired to a country estate near Rouen he suggested paying a surrogate, but Janine had a better idea, her 18-year-old daughter Annie. Although a minor, the age of majority in France then being 21, she was up for it. As she wrote later:
“I was totally breathtaken by the proposition… . But, mind, I accepted willingly. I have to admit that at the time, despite being 18 years old, I was in love with Jacques. And I knew that I pleased him. What do you expect? That’s life. And that’s how I found myself in his bed in the sacred mission of procreation.”
On 31 July 1971 Annie bore Anquetiel a daughter, Sophie, and the ménage-a-trois lasted many years.
“Nobody thought it strange that Jacques Anquetil joined me in my bed each evening before returning to the marital bed beside my mother. Everybody was comfortable with it.”
But eventually tensions mounted and in the early 1980’s Annie moved out. Soon Anquetil began another intra-family affair, this time with Dominique the wife of his other stepchild Alain, who was working as the estate manager and himself in love with another woman. The birth of their son Christopher in 1986 seems to have finally been too much for Janine, who left. Anquetil died of stomach cancer the following year. He was 53.
Janine and Annie told their story to the papers, and Dominique and Sophie wrote books about it. Dominique stayed on in Chateaux Anquetil (click here) where she remains to this day, running it with Christopher.
Sources
Sidewells C (2010) A Race for Madmen. Collins. London.
Liberation. May 2004. Access here.
Sophie Anquetil (2004) Pour l’amour de Jacques. Grasset & Fasquelle. Paris.
Newborn Research
Double standards
A few days ago I wrote (here) that “no ethics committee would ever sanction a trial of infant circumcision.” I was worse than wrong. Although there hasn’t been a controlled trial, i.e. an experiment with half the babies circumcised, there has been one where all babies were. It reported last year. Click here.
The study happened in Western Kenya, where 1,239 infants were circumcised; 308 “research” and 931 so-called “non-research”. The “research” parents had more follow-up reminders. The aim was to measure adverse events. Eighteen (2.7% of the 678 reviewed) had a complication – mainly bleeding or infection, although one poor chap had a bit of his glans penis chopped off!
According to the authors “the University of Illinois at Chicago Institutional Review Board and the Kenyatta National Hospital Ethics and Research Committee provided ethical approval for the research study.”
The researchers would surely claim that they were just collecting data, and that the circumcision was part of normal medical care for the babies. Had it been performed in a setting where circumcision was a cultural norm, they might have had a case. But this experiment was done in Nyanza province where the majority Luo tribe do not circumcise males at any age. For them circumcision of newborn boys is a mass experiment. Sure it’s based on trials in adults, and done with good intentions, but it’s still an experiment. It might not work and might do harm. That’s why the Illinois researchers, who are organising it all, are monitoring the programme carefully and writing other research papers about the results. Here‘s one more.
This is experimental research on children. The University of Illinois at Chicago Institutional Review Board members should ask themselves if they would sanction a randomised trial of infant circumcision in Kenya. If not, it’s a double standard to allow researchers to cut off every baby boy’s foreskin because they’ve had the bright idea that it might later protect them against AIDS, but not do the experiment on half the boys to test if it does more good than harm.
Jim Thornton
Gunthorpe toll bridge
Destroyed by the council
Another for the igreens.org.uk list. Here’s the Old Toll House, now an Indian restaurant – the Bridge & Bayleaf, viewed from the old abutment. Original right.
.
Privately built in 1873, on the site of an ancient ford and ferry, by 1925 the tolls were walkers 1d, motorcycles 3d, cars 1/- and lorries 2/6. Then the local council bought the owners out, demolished it and built the present one. Shame!
About 100 yards downstream is a nice exposure of the Mercia mudstone, with its layers of white gypsum, alongside Gunthorpe weir. In medium water a canoeist could slip past the barrage and line down the fish pass. But don’t shoot the weir!
Jim Thornton
Breadfruit
The worst poem …
Larkin to Robert Conquest, 9 Dec 1961 (Selected Letters p 335);
“Dig a little squib of mine call Breadfruit in Cox’s mag* – bitterly regret letting him have it, as it is just about the worst poem I have ever let get set up. Don’t get any breadfruit up here, I can tell you.”
He’s joking of course about the quality – it’s Larkin at his best, reminding us unnecessarily that “the boys” play tennis to get laid. And he’s exaggerating the sexual desert of Hull. He told Maeve Brennan that he wrote it in frustration, when she turned him down one day, but she didn’t always, and he had other lovers. There is bitterness, but the ending is almost optimistic – not death, priests, or nothingness, but breadfruit, whatever they are.
Breadfruit
Boys dream of native girls who bring breadfruit,
ooooWhatever they are,
As bribes to teach them how to execute
Sixteen sexual positions on the sand;
This makes them join (the boys) the tennis club,
Jive at the Mecca, use deodorants, and
On Saturdays squire ex-schoolgirls to the pub
0000By private car.
Such uncorrected visions end in church
ooooOr registrar:
A mortgaged semi- with a silver birch;
Nippers; the widowed mum; having to scheme
With money; illness; age. So absolute
Maturity falls, when old men sit and dream
Of naked native girls who bring breadfruit
0000Whatever they are.
Philip Larkin
*Critical Quarterly
Male genital mutilation
Of children, by the US government!
Female circumcision is now properly called genital mutilation. We would imprison and strike off the register any doctor who did it.
But although foreskins also serve an important function – movement within them during intercourse reduces abrasions for both partners – male circumcision is tolerated, even in newborns or children. But attitudes are changing, and in most of the world the medieval practice of adults cutting children’s genitalia is dying away.
Except in Africa, if the US government has its way. The United States Agency for International development (USAID) plans campaigns to circumcise adults and newborns in Africa (click here for more). Circumcising men has some justification, it may reduce sexual transmission of HIV, although the evidence is only moderately strong (details here). Even so, it’s a jump to apply it to babies. There have been no trials in babies, and nor should there be. No ethics committee would ever sanction such an experiment.
Besides the damage of the operation, there are the usual complications of infection and bleeding, as well as the special risks of removing too much skin or accidentally damaging the penis itself.* More importantly infected needles may be a factor keeping HIV infection rates high in Africa (click here for more). How can USAID be confident that their campaign will not contribute to that?
Newborn circumcision is one of the many things governments should do less of.
Jim Thornton
*If you’ve a strong stomach and there are no children about, type “complications of circumcision” into Google. Most pictures are of procedures done in developed countries.
Translating Erotica
Should’ve studied harder
As part of its World Literature Series, the London Review Bookshop is running master classes where professional writers demonstrate the techniques they use to translate sensitively from one language to another. How to keep the writer’s voice, and the tone of the original, while remaining accurate.
On Friday March 8th, Adriana Hunter and Polly Maclean (click here for details) tackle sex. They will each read and discuss their translation of a erotic short story by the French writer Emma Becker, who will also read her original. Sarah Ardizzone will chair.
I guess translating erotica is women’s work now. I wish I’d worked harder at my French lessons.
Jim Thornton
How others see us
Pampered and repressed
This week’s (28 Jan 2013) New Yorker review of the Michael Apted film 56 Up, the latest update on the lives of 14 Britons, first filmed as in 1964, is unflattering. “The British class system has its protections at every level, but also […] a built in inertia. None […] have become alcoholic or drug-addicted, but the predictability of […] working class kids rising slightly, rich kids staying rich – makes one impatient.”
No, we cry. That’s not us. That’s the lazy French, and the socialist Scandinavians. We’re different. We stand on our own feet. We’re entrepreneurial, market-driven Anglo Saxons. But from across the Atlantic, David Denby, the reviewer, sees us as predictable, risk averse, wage slaves, made fat and lazy by our cradle to grave welfare state. The accusation stings.
It gets worse. Denby notes how “no-one in the group has married bravely up or down in class, however, and if there have been sexual adventures they are being kept well hidden. […] one has the impression that erotic drives were defined and constrained by a stern sense of social reality”.
What? Sexually repressed too? Give us a break. These are not the usual exhibitionist reality show contestants. Selected age seven, they have had the cameras on them every seven years since. Only one of the originals has withdrawn, but it’s hardly surprising that the rest don’t reveal all their secrets.
It ‘s odd to defend your countrymen against the accusation of having conventional sex lives. But trust me, David, we don’t. We just don’t go on camera to talk about them.
Jim Thornton
Naming bias
Progesterone and pregnancy
Research ethics committees have recently started objecting to randomised trial acronyms, like PROMISE or PROTECT, because people may be unduly encouraged to participate, thinking the trial is testing a “promising” treatment, or “protecting” them in some way. But what about experimental treatments given outside randomised trials? No-one seems to care how they’re named.
PROMISE is an ongoing trial (details here) testing the effect of progesterone to prevent recurrent miscarriage and PROTECT a planned trial from the same group, to test the same drug to treat threatened miscarriage. PROTECT got caught up in the above ethical nonsense and had to change its acronym to PRISM. But the drug they are testing is “pro/gest/erone”, the “for/gestation/steroid”!
Progesterone is one of many hormones needed for pregnancy, and early in IVF pregnancies, where the natural source from the ovary is missing, it works. But that’s it.
Most miscarriages are caused by chromosomal problems for which no treatment could possibly work and, although difficult to prove, many of the rest are probably caused by lethal genetic abnormalities. No progesterone deficiency syndrome causing miscarriage, has ever been described, and no animal studies have shown benefit. P4-ene-3,20-dione would never have been heard of again.
But it was called progesterone. Doctors prescribed it, women swallowed it, and since most women, even after recurrent miscarriage, will have a successful pregnancy anyway, they easily convinced themselves it worked, and half a dozen badly designed trials appeared to show an implausibly large benefit. It’s a similar story for premature birth (click here).
At last decent trials are being done. It’s bonkers for ethicists to fret about women getting pushed into them, rather than about the millions swallowing the For Gestation Steroid outside.
It must work – the name says so.
Jim Thornton
Mammogram Harm
Lung cancer and heart attacks
Fascinating paper in this week’s BMJ by Michael Baum (click here). We know mammography screening reduces breast cancer deaths slightly, but for every death prevented, about three women are unnecessarily treated with either breast removal, radiotherapy or both (click here and here). Although screening appears to have no effect on total mortality, enthusiasts argue that the trials were not large enough to demonstrate one. Another explanation would be unnecessary treatment causing some other deaths.
Baum reminds us that the radiation given to 80% of the unnecessarily treated cases will cause lung cancer (relative risk 1.78) and, by damaging the internal mammary artery, myocardial infarction (RR 1.27). He calculates that the additional deaths at least balance out the breast cancer deaths prevented, and at worst outweigh them three-fold.
So the advice should be.
Screening reduces breast cancer mortality. But for every death prevented three women will have their breast unnecessarily removed or irradiated. The radiation will cause at least as many other deaths from lung cancer and heart attacks as the screening prevented. Maybe more. Still want it?
It won’t happen. There are too many vested interests keeping this racket going.
Baum is professor emeritus of surgery at University College London, was chief investigator of many key breast cancer trials, and knows what he’s talking about.
Jim Thornton
My Book
A Poem by Troy Jollimore
People rarely blog to influence, or even to be read, but to own the thought by writing it down. According to John Locke, the homesteader doesn’t own his land when the bureaucrat allocates it – he has to clear, fence and dig it first. You don’t take a thought, or a poem, away from anyone else when you make it your own, but you still need to mix in your labour. Troy Jollimore is a philosopher, as well as a poet, so he knows all this.
My Book appeared in the New Yorker on 17 Dec 2012, and I typed it out here this morning.
My Book
I bought a copy, but it wasn’t mine.
I stole a copy. Still it felt somehow
as if it did not yet belong to me.
As if I did not yet belong to it.
So I sat down to write it. As the sun
put on the moon’s pale skin and shed its own,
my fingers made my pen push glossy ink
across the page. Out in the fields, the cows
sang ancient songs of mourning and of mating,
while in the boxes that contained the humans
the humans sat before their boxes. Still
I wrote, and though I did not comprehend
even an insubstantial fragment of
what that blood-thick black ink was aying, what
I knew was that when it was done I’d have
grown older, the grimy globe would have grown older,
and on my shel would sit my book, the shrunken
governor of an antique Chinese province,
surveying all that came within his purview,
including me, and passing judgment on it.
Troy Jollimore
Stonesthrow Studios
Great new recording studio in Nottingham. All facilities, centre of town. Click here
Ripe-tomato.org 