Saying I’ve got a bad back implies that the back and I are separate entities - Joe Bennett

So the truth of the situation is that a few muscles in my right lumbar region have become inflamed. Photo / 123rf

OPINION

I’ve got a bad back and it won’t go away - and if there isn’t a column in those eleven words then I’m a chiropractor. (I arrived at the figure eleven by counting ‘ve and n’t as halves. Though, strictly speaking, n’t is two-thirds of a word, and it also leaves the problem of the dangling wo, which isn’t a word at all. But I have so much to say about the bad back that I don’t have time to go into the maths. I’m sorry. Another day.)

Saying I’ve got a bad back implies that the back and I are separate entities, with me being the owner and the back being owned. It’s like saying I’ve got a bad dog. (Not that I have got a dog, at the moment, bad or otherwise. Nor, when I do have a dog, would I claim to own it. I just live with it and hope for the best.)

But the implication of owning my back is that there is an essential me - a self, a soul, a ghost, a spirit - that exists independently of my flesh. It’s an ancient idea, but one with no supporting evidence. All the evidence in living creatures from protozoa to us points to the fact that the self and the flesh are the same thing and that when one dies the other goes with it. In other words the notion of there being a me that owns my back is nonsense.

The definition of my back is a puzzle as well. The back of a wardrobe is the whole of one side of it, top to bottom. But the human back is only the stretch between neck and rump. Such places as the back of my legs and the back of my head are at my back but aren’t my back.

And how deep does my back go? Obviously the skin on my back is back, and presumably the muscles underneath the skin are back. But is the liver back? Is the back of the stomach back? And if so, where does the back end and the front start? I ask only because if I’m complaining of a bad back it helps to know what a back is.

And the plain fact of the matter is that I haven’t got a bad back. I’ve got an excellent back.

The skin that covers it, for example, is unbreached, and, as far as I’m aware, having never seen it in 66 years, unblemished. And the spinal column, which is surely as back as back gets, is in mid-season form, effortlessly carrying trillions of impulses up and down itself even as I type, causing my foot to kick the underside of my desk like so - did you feel that? the coffee cup jumped - and sending reports to headquarters on the condition of all manner of things down below.

So my bad back is no such thing. Rather it’s a bloody good back, a small region of which is not working quite as smoothly as it might and causing me occasional pain.

And I have allowed that pain to colour the impression of my back as a whole, which demonstrates a miserablist approach to life and a lack of gratitude for the many blessings that are conferred upon me. I mean, if my back is bad, how would I describe the back of someone with a broken spine or chronic psoriasis? I should cheer up and stop whinging.

But I am whinging and you will recall my whinge in the opening line that the bad back “won’t go away”. That too is an oddity. To go away is to leave one place and travel to another. Do I want my back to travel to another place? Obviously not. All I want is for the pain to cease. And it will. Every pain I have ever experienced has ceased after a while. How strange that we always forget.

So the truth of the situation is that a few muscles in my right lumbar region have become inflamed and when I perform certain activities, such as sitting too long at my desk, or bending to pick up a case of wine that the courier has thoughtfully left by the letterbox for any passing tippler to snaffle, or, and in particular, being mug enough to spend an afternoon keeping wicket when I am old enough to know better, the muscles go into sudden spasm and cause me to yelp like a scalded puppy. But it is no more than an inconvenience, and it will prove temporary. I am very well.

Or, as I should have put it in my opening eleven (or so) words, I haven’t got a bad back and it will soon get better.