Stress related illness - 12 July 1991

It was said long ago and it's been said many times since, that we'd better look to America because, whether we like it or not, we see there our likely future. Now today that sounds like a very vague piece of advice and perhaps to some countries irrelevant. But coined, I believe shortly after the end of the Second World War, what it was mostly about was a vision of the ways, the methods, the techniques by which a bombed and badly damaged Europe would begin to restore the fabric of European life as Dean Acheson put it, in urging the Senate to pass the Marshall Plan. In short to learn, to copy American machinery, factory construction, salesmanship, labour management relations, and the introduction of every gadget from trouser zippers to frozen foods.

Well it's been a long, long time since Europeans were eager to acquire or even pronounce the phrase, American know-how. The last time I heard it fall from anyone's lips was oh, maybe 10 years ago or whenever it was that the poker-faced Czech, Ivan Lendl appeared on the tennis scene, in particular appeared in New York for the playing of the American national championships on their brand new tennis centre at Flushing Meadows – not, come to think of it, ill named since it was a large body of water rambling into the upper reaches of the city from Long Island Sound and receiving a lot of the waste products from the shoreline towns.

Several things were remarkable about this new tennis centre, the old one was in a quiet and leafy suburb, the new one was planted bang next to LaGuardia airport, now it's not strictly true that the great centre court was carefully placed on the tarmac, but it is under the glide path of the incoming and outgoing jets and the tense moments in any match the rolling thunderous din is so awful that the players complain they cannot hear the ball and the spectators can't hear the obscenities of John McEnroe.

Another remarkable feature of the place is a huge rectangle of a monolith, if that's possible, which contains a battery of lights for night play and the details of the score. This great high, flat block is so placed that about 6pm in late August, early September when the championships are held, when the sun begins to go over, it throws a great triangular shadow of the block across part of the centre court, thus adding a hazard that previous tennis architects had never thought of. Let's admit it, some famous tennis players especially when they're losing, look on the United States national tennis centre as a foretaste or pre vision of hell. And when Ivan Lendl was asked what he thought of the placement of a tennis court on a tarmac and the looming shadow of the scoreboard, he said, "I think it's what they call American know-how".

Well, I don't believe we've heard the phrase since, it tiptoed out of the language once, 20,30 years ago, once Italian shoes, women's shoes began to put a crimp in the Massachusetts monopoly, once the defeated Germans came through with their cameras and calculators, and when 30 years ago now the Japanese began to outshine us and overwhelm us with their cars and television sets and tape recorders, relentlessly on and on until just when I was thinking of yielding and buying a compact disc player, an expert in New York says, stop, don't. Next year the Japs are putting out a player the size of a cigarette package taking discs or chips I don't know, the size of a thumbnail that contain all nine of Beethoven's symphonies. I think I'll just play the piano. American know how if it means anything today must mean the manufacture and retailing of junk food, and I was going to say smart bombs and such till I remembered that 16 of the vital, not vital, on the contrary, death dealing weapons used in the Gulf War had essential components of Japanese manufacture.

What brought on this meditation was the recognition on this present visit to London of how completely by now the ways of life in working, playing, eating, shopping, the whole routine of what my wife calls maintenance, how completely it has been Americanised. This is not a blindingly novel remark, it's been made grudgingly or protestingly by Englishmen since at least the middle of the 18th century. But what struck me more vividly this time than at any time since the War, that's the Second World War, was that so many material things, institutions that were new to me on my first visit to America which is coming up 60 years now, have been taken in painlessly. I remember in October 1932 seeing my first parking meter, in Newhaven Connecticut, I had no idea what it was for, I thought it very ugly which may be millions of Britons 20 years later thought before they adopted it. The same with teabags, paper towels, same later on with the supermarket and everything in it. However, on this trip it was not the continuing take over of American objects, conveniences, tastes, language, it was – how shall I put it – the same concern throughout the country over social issues that I had assumed were not exclusively perhaps but typically and topically American. Let me give you an example right away.

One of the preoccupations of American psychologists has resulted in the past year or two of much talk and writing about an affliction which affects millions of people, and now the setting up of clinics, advisory centres, television programmes, to help us all cure it. You know what it is, it's called SRI, don't confuse it with MRI, that's a magnetic resonance imager, which can discover all sorts of oddities about your insides at fabulous expense. No sirree, SRI is stress related illness. The stress comes on, either when you get up and face the prospect of work or when you get home, dog-tired from work, again. Huge studies of this ailment have been made over the past few years, and the conclusion is that work is bad for you. I think the battle song of these sufferers ought to be, Irving Berlin's How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning.

Not long before I left New York, I read dead solemn stuff about exercises, pills, treatment or, as we love to say, therapy for curing this distressing condition. Nobody has yet suggested abolishing work but, for a fee, there are stress doctors willing to help you evade, soften or forget it. Now I certainly thought this is one piece of psychological mumbo jumbo that good old sensible Britons will not be going into. Not so, a report out this week repeating, confirming, lamenting this same affliction and suggesting that British people who are chronically tired or bored, can now get treatment under the NHS for SRI.

Those of you who listen more than occasionally to these talks must surely be aware by now of the American obsession with cholesterol, saturated and unsaturated fats, the perils of salt, sugar, milk, eggs, meat, cakes and the pure therapeutic joys of plain yoghurt or yoghurt, cottage cheese, coleslaw, lemon grass, fresh fruits, veggies. Only I think a month or two ago I earnestly explained why Americans night and day weigh and watch and avoid this food and that. I believe I quoted the best authority on the subject the American girl sorry, woman, person, who said, right on the first page of her book, that you couldn't understand why Americans were so obsessed with weight and diet, until you realise that quote "in American death is optional". It's true, deep down, even the mocking Americans sneakily believe that if they play it right, they can live to be 150.

Now I come to England, and bless my lemon grass, there's a government committee on medical aspects of food policy, saying the same thing, urging people to cut out what in substance, that's to say in chemical composition are the staples of the British diet. And wagging the same American warning finger, coronary, unfortunately it can be truly shown, that Britain is just about at the top of the industrialised or developed – used to say civilised – countries, when it comes to heart attacks.

I notice one or two places where government, British government is finally moving in to do in the public interest what the United States did years ago. Health warnings on cigarettes, it says here, are to be compulsory, I may have read that wrong, I thought they'd been compulsory in Britain as in the United States for years and years. Ours, thanks to a missionary surgeon general who is the chief government medical officer, ours get more and more lurid and precise, mentioning lung cancer, emphysema, peril to unborn children, imminent heart attacks, and they've certainly had their effect. But the tobacco companies are unruffled they've simply stepped up their advertising and their sales among the innocent populations of the Third, the under-developed, and the Asian worlds.

Another encouraging item says the British food industry will be encouraged to provide more explicit food labelling. Although, this is the shocker, legislation is unlikely. Why? Finally there's one bit of Americana that you could well import, it is a word, one word which neatly replaces 10 English words. Wimbledon I read is going to have to face the problem of guaranteeing, here it comes, substitute tickets in the event of rain washing out play. In America, they're called, rain checks.

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