It is for these very reasons that when a health message is predicated on a statistical feature, you really want to be sure that the messenger is being honest with you.

The recent Lancet report of cholesterol used a meta-analysis of prior research results to conclude that all over-50s should be given statins even if they were healthy as a preventative treatment. The matter of side-effects, which can be pretty nasty for statins, was downplayed.

The conclusion was that you could reduce the long term chance of a coronary heart disease (chd) by a certain percentage by taking them. The exact details are not so crucial here as the principle in such statistical matters is that they sound appealing more because of the manner of expression than the reality that this expression hides.

If the chance of something happening is currently 5% for most people, then it will happen to 5 in 100 people. If action is taken to reduce that chance by 20%, then the 5% is reduced to 4% or 4 people in 100.

If all 100 of those people had to take a tablet every day for the rest of their life to try to appreciate the advantage of the 20% improvement, then only 1 of their number will gain, statistically speaking. So 99 people will be taking the tablet for no real gain – 99% of people doing something for no reason. This is a much more telling statistic.

But the large percentage now recommended to take statins will not just be wasting their time, but now introducing ‘side-effects’ into their bodies, adding to risks of other ailments.

This is why stats can be very dangerous – even a reasonable reduction in a small probability does not make much difference. By way of example, if you buy a second lottery ticket, you increase your chances of winning by 100% but the chance is still in the millions to one against.

And what about those truly nasty jelly fish in Australia. One sting and a human will endure at least an hour of the most excruciating and intense pain before certain death. (And why does the Apple Mac British English dictionary not recognise ‘endure’?). And what about the nasty creatures that enter the brains of spiders and take over, subverting the life of the host to the sole benefit of its unwanted cargo?

You cannot claim ‘Intelligent design’ when the creatures can be as barbaric as this.

You cannot claim that the designer was God in infinite wisdom if you want us to worship him.

Two of this group drink rather too excessively, and have become increasingly judgemental of me. At the same time, I have started getting ever more easily triggered headaches.

When struggling with a headache, as was happening more often, I was increasingly affected by these judgements, and slipped into a period of mild depression.

But I went with the flow of the depressed state – felt its urges to slow down, and the loss of motivation to do much.

After a few days of depression coerced reflection, I saw the two rogue characters from a more rounded perspective. That they are a corrosive element in the social nature of the group. So I am better not spending much time with them.

However, I am now in a quandary – do I avoid the group because of a few bad pennies? Now that is a hard question to answer. I can confront them to say why they are making my visits their unenjoyable, but will they change as a result? Maybe. The alternative is that they prevail – I no longer visit the cafe/bar and no longer see the other friends.

So the problem is not yet resolved, but at least the detachment forged by the depression (which soon disappeared) has given me a clearer understanding of what goes on.

My stance is to split suffering into two categories :

1. Appropriate suffering
2. Meaningless suffering

As far as I have read, arguments concerning God’s role with regard suffering are generally not made with such a dualistic approach.

The distinction between the two types clarifies some arguments that normally get trapped in a religious circular argument. My motive for exploring the distinction is simply because my own life is blighted with an excess amount of the meaningless suffering. Best explain by an example before I go any further.

If my neighbour Mel goes out for a night of heavy drinking, he will awaken next morning with a thick head. He will be suffering for his night of indulgence. More or less, the suffering will be appropriate and approximately proportional to the cause. It is not quite so easy to criticise God for the suffering here.

However, Mel has a history of excess drinking and suffered recent liver damage, thereby limiting his life. Again, there is a degree of appropriateness and proportionality here – abuse your body long enough and it will start failing on you. For that relationship, again, you cannot readily criticise God for the suffering. However, I believe that God can be criticised for failing to stop the bodily degradation. It is not the act of a loving, compassionate God to see an avoidable decay to the health of one of his people. So God could have added a short term effect to make the drinking of alcohol to excess less inviting. He could have interfered so as to stop Mel wrecking his body. Mel would not have felt the gradual decline in his health, (although he should have taken heed of the morning hangovers), but God would have known this – to fail to intercede is a failure of compassion.

For my own situation, things are not so simple. For reasons that hundreds of hours of exploration have not revealed an answer, I frequently awake in the morning with a headache and/or foggy mind. The condition tends to last all day. I have found no pattern in my activities or thinking the day before that could explain this suffering. So it falls into the meaningless category. An arbitrary suffering that is not a price paid for any excess. So where is the compassion here for my plight from God?

A typical defence from the religious on the matter of suffering, is that God is testing us. I have covered this matter before, but suffice to say, I am sick and tired of decades of meaningless suffering, as many millions across the world are. If I am being tested, then after so many years, God must realise that I have either passed or failed the test and am merely living a compromised existence – the suffering is entirely arbitrary and meaningless.

I mention God as if he exists. We cannot know for sure, but the possibility that he does exist and is all-loving, all-powerful and compassionate disappear in the light of meaningless suffering.

A problem with much that we are ‘taught’ in school is that we are rarely engaged in the subject – it is poured forth and frequently washes over us.

The consequence, for myself, is that I never felt the beautiful elegance of the works of Shakespeare. Instead, I had to learn them parrot-fashion, an exercise almost perfectly designed to do the opposite of what was intended. Now I hated what I had memorised because it felt like a chore.

So when I encountered a short quote by William Shakespeare in the book on teaching I am currently devouring, my tendency was to skip past. But I am glad I chose not to :

Our doubts are traitors,
And make us lose the good we oft might win
By fearing to attempt.

Whilst the phrasing is, in a sense, awkward by modern standards, the more I re-read it the more I saw a talent for using words to convey meaning that is beautiful in its succinctness. It feels like clever, fancy words were used to remain economical, but as you can see, none were. It is the choice that was clever.

He read out an email that pointed out that God was not happy with male marriages because it stated quite clearly in the bible that ‘man should not lie with man’. As I said, the host was a new to me, so I have no idea if this stand in was religious or not, but his reply put a sweet smile on my face. For he pointed out that the bible also says that misbehaving children should be stoned.

This religious honesty and balance is extremely rare – the normal stance is to cherry pick the parts of the bible that support viewpoints, and gloss over the many unsavoury parts that totally undermine any good that the bible might offer. Here is my own example from Exodus 21:17 :

He that curseth his father, or his mother, shall surely be put to death.

If this is to be discounted as patently barbaric and out-dated, then how can we trust the bible to be a ‘moral’ guide?

We humans are essentially tribal creatures. Many psychological tests show that we have a very strong instinct to be part of and endorse a tribe, whether that be a football team or the family unit. It is natural for us to defend the in crowd and reject the rest, to varying degrees of course.

So some manifestation of hostility to someone outside of one of the groups you are in is going to happen some time or other, even if it is as relatively benign, such as “no daughter of mine will go out with manual worker”. Hence the occasional racist feeling will manifest. We are all racist to a degree in that we feel the difference – we cannot naturally accommodate people very different from ourselves as easily as we do people like us.

So a racist comment is a tribal reaction. But in this day and age, that is taboo. We must tread very carefully, it seems.

But, by the same token, that sensitivity to slight is also a tribal reaction – you must not say anything derogatory about my tribe. It is equally tribally divisive, but in the opposite direction. It is justified as a defence against slight, but it is still a tribal reaction. If we become ever tribally defensive, this is not healthy – we adopt increasingly vigilant stances towards others, and not just via the racial grouping, but via other collectives. Such as hoodies killing because of perceived ‘dis’-respect.

So the point here is that the focus is on the ‘offender’, and not the big picture that is incurring a widespread loss of trust and social cohesion. That, I would say, is the real problem.

The say this glibly without thinking about what they are saying. In effect, they are regurgitating the stock reply that has been taught them. If you dig deeper, the catch-all dogmatic response – “God works in mysterious ways” – gets rattled out.

In their defence, the concept of testing they mean – that we are in effect being challenged to see how we cope, or to make us stronger – is not a bad excuse for pushing and extending people. But when it drags on weeks, months, years or decades, with no explanation or intervention from the almighty, then his motives have to be questioned. He would be struck off if he were an army officer, where the ‘testing’ maimed or killed far too many people. But what about the gigantic range of suffering types. Like genetic conditions that lead to a long, slow decline towards death with no respite? Or intense insomnia that leaves the sufferer exhausted.

If He made us, does He not know how we can cope? He loves us deeply, so can He not see that the testing is really bad for us, wrecking many lives, and not yielding any benefit?

To put it bluntly, if God exists, and is responsible for the arbitrary suffering, then He is a criminally pathological bully.

And the religious want me to worship Him?

One recent problem is that the games have become too successful – they now attract to many players.

On a dull wet day, we may start with a 6-a-side game but as players arrive, as much as an hour late (the games last a long time…), the games stretch to and beyond 11-a-side. Sometimes, we manage to split into two games. Often not, though, with as many as 40 players chasing a single ball.

So I have had great experience of various numbers of player numbers. And I have no doubt that 7 or 8 a-side is my favoured number. 5-a-side is simply to tiring. But 11-a-side really does feel like too many players, and yields too few goals.

Of course, you may say, 11-a-side was determined as the optimal number for football games, amateur or professional. But it is my contention that there was no decision made. Or rather, the original choice was arbitrary – 1 goalkeeper and a round number of outfield players. By the time this was established, it became entrenched. And it is far far too late to change that.

But I still maintain that 7-a-side or 8-a-side gives the best balance of spread, engagement and goals.

Sadly, it seems invariably the case that I seem not to count as a potential hazard for such couplets and triplets, who rarely break rank to allow me to pass.

So I have to slip sideways, moving from one person width to half a person width simply because they cannot reduce their 2 or 3 persons width share of the pavement. They march along as if they owned the pavement.

This is of course a very trivial matter and I do not get overly fussed by my need to be subservient to the laziness of others. Except that it is more than laziness. It is endemic of a lack of respect for others. A fundamental difficulty many have in sharing or coordinating with others.

Fortunately, every so often, I encounter someone walking the other direction who will make eye contact and smile at me, making the effort to connect with a stranger. And it damn well nearly makes me cry with joy. Occasionally, the smile is so endearing that I feel uplifted for the rest of the day.