COMMON LANGUAGE

He may be a man of the world with Italian and Viking DNA, but Maurice Gueret can still be shocked on a Dublin bus

My sole and dearest brother took a DNA test this summer. Nothing to do with a lifetime of crime, I hasten to add. His hobby is genealogy, and the test was being offered by the folks who run the popular Ancestry website. For about €100, they will send you an easy-to-use test kit. You spit into a plastic tube, shake the saliva around a bit and then mail it off. After a few weeks, they will write back to suggest exactly where you and your family came from. It’s a fascinating exercise in ethnicity for any family. If I make the reasonable assumption that my brother and I are twigs from the same branch, then his test indicates that I am 99pc European and 1pc south Asian. The small segment of tropical DNA is a surprise, but I recall a rumour going around the neighbourhood where I set up my first practice many years ago that, with a surname like mine, I must be Chinese. Within Europe, 83pc of my DNA hails from these westerly islands. I am a full 70pc Irish, and proud of it. My 13pc Great British blood is probably the bit of me that prefers to take its nightly news from the BBC. My father’s continental roots in Paris, and further back in Navarre of northern Spain, are well known to us, but I was surprised to learn that a strong 5pc of my DNA hints at Italian or Greek ancestry. I am also 2pc Viking, with a further trace of darkest Finland and the north-western frontier of Mr Putin’s Russia. The test that the people at Ancestry provide is of what is called autosomal DNA. These are the 22 pairs of your chromosomes that have nothing to do with gender. You inherit equal amounts from each parent, grandparent and so on, but the further you go back beyond four or five generations the more random the results might be. Genealogy DNA testing can give you information about your personal ancestry and suggest possible relatives for you already on their database. But it doesn’t really get involved in predicting your future health, which is no bad thing. I’m all in favour of finding out where we came from, but somewhat less inclined to peer into where we might be going. I did mention in a previous column that the only major disease affliction to hit me during a maiden half-century has been hypothyroidism. This is a not uncommon condition, where the thyroid gland goes on permanent strike and the resulting lack of thyroxine hormone leaves you feeling physically tired, mentally sluggish, or worse. Many fellow patients wrote to tell me of their condition, and I have enjoyed reading their accounts. Overactive and underactive thyroids fall within the medical demesne of endocrinology. One patient wrote to tell me that she felt that hypothyroidism was very much the poor relation of diabetes, and doesn’t get the attention from endocrinologists that it deserves. She may have a point. I did a little search of the Irish Medical Directory, which details the special interests of Irish doctors, to find that thyroid diseases got about 70 mentions, while diabetes received almost 450. Diabetes is only slightly more common than thyroid disease in Ireland — you are almost as likely to get one as the other. If you’d like to read or understand more about thyroid disease, my personal recommendation is to begin with the British Thyroid Foundation website. There is an old saying, popular among Lord Snooty types, that a man who takes a bus after the age of 30 can count himself a failure in life. It was once attributed to Margaret Thatcher, probably maliciously, as nobody ever recalls her saying it. Well, this summer, I abandoned the banger for journeys to the city, and treated myself to a frog-green Leap Card. The bus service in Dublin has come on a long way since I went to school on it. In my younger days, they were famous for all starting out together at the same time, and following the same route to the same terminus. Now they go all over the place and on schedule, too, with real-time information at most bus stops. Doctors can have great fun diseasespotting on the buses. Coprolalia was not the first diagnosis I was expecting. On my way home from O’Connell Street one morning, I became aware of a person right behind my seat using the foulest of Dublin language. Over and over again, she muttered the phrase ‘stinking bitch’. This was followed by a blaze of ‘effin effer’ and much worse. At first, I thought the lady was on a mobile phone, but the vehemence of the abuse would have made anyone hang up in seconds. The downstairs bus passengers simply had to put up with it. Even a pair of German tourists seemed to understand the lingo. The aged lady with the most scatological of tongues got off the bus before I did. I noted that hygiene wasn’t a strong point. She also looked like she had slept in her daytime clothes for at least a few months. I undertook to place coprolalia (‘copro’ means faeces/dung; ‘lalia’ means chatter) as my medical study subject for the weekend. The difference between coprolalia and everyday profanity that you hear in the city is that the utterances are involuntary. There are some syndromes where coprolalia is a distressing symptom, and in other cases it may follow a stroke, a brain injury or be part of an obsessivecompulsive condition. In rare cases, it can be a consequence of dementia. Ireland’s best known exponent of coprolalia was probably Father Jack Hackett from the wellknown parochial institution on Craggy Island. Though shouts of ‘feck’, ‘arse’ and ‘women’s knickers’ were very mild indeed compared to what I heard downstairs on that Dublin bus!