Published Messenger Newspapers, Adelaide, February 12, 2003


NO WONDER WE ARE SO SUPERIOR


ANOTHER birthday passes this week and let me say death holds no fear for us Aquarians. Of course we are just as mortal as the next person but, being the privileged star sign that we are and obviously superior at so many things in this life, we simply expect to do just as well in the next life too. The worry is how the rest of humanity will cope after we have exited. I like the way Astrology, in apportioning the various talents and frailties, saw fit to give Aquarians creativity, insight and considerable charm while Cancerians got hypochondria. My father was a Cancerian. He had a medicine cabinet stuffed with pills and potions, which made him the butt of family jibes, and he was always seeing a doctor about one thing or another until the day he died. The fact is Cancerians as a group seem to be more preoccupied than Aquarians with their health. I know another Cancerian, a member of the Whinge Generation born in the 1960s, who always has two headache tablets waiting in a plastic cup on her desk just in case. At weekends, she goes to the local pharmacy and buys a random selection of medicines and then goes home to see if any of her symptoms match what she has bought. Asking after her health the other day - to which Aquarians would generally answer ``fine, thanks'' - she sighed: ``Oh, I'm fine, I guess, but I was driving to work this morning and hhrrykkk I could feel this catch in the throat and I must be getting scabies or meningoccocal or something.'' Gastric reflux, more like it. Actually, the men in my family have a bad habit of dying younger than the average male lifespan of 75 years. My father and his father both died in their early 60s, a cycle I would like to break, astrology permitting. They both smoked, which would not have helped, and my emphysemic dad died in winter when the odds were stacked against him given his condition. By at least one account*, the death rate from natural causes in winter is 25 per cent higher than in summer and there are also many more deaths from heart disease in winter than in summer. Some other thoughts:
^ traffic fatalities are more common at weekends, which is not at all surprising;
^ heroin overdose deaths are more likely on Thursday and Friday, possibly coinciding with the desperate cashing of welfare cheques;
^ suicides tend to be seasonal: male suicide rates peak in spring and summer; female in autumn. Noone knows why;
^ many people somehow manage to postpone their deaths if their birthdays are impending; but
^ people are more likely to die from natural or accidental causes on their birthdays than any other day of the year, although not by suicide. Who said astrology was utter rubbish?
Which is all very interesting but what I am really looking for, as I cruise through another shining year, is a set of statistics to show more Cancerians die than Aquarians.
*(Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine.)