Garth George: Be lazy and live longer? Oh how I wish that was true

When I read the heading on the front page of the Herald on Tuesday, "Laziness new ticket to old age", I thought all my birthdays had come at once. And immediately resented the fact that I had already taken my daily (well, almost daily) brisk early-morning walk.

You see, I was born lazy. Or, rather, as my father used to say, I was born to be rich, lazy and immoral - and so far haven't managed to get rich.

But, sadly, by the time I had read the article I realised that this was another load of "scientific" nonsense, just like so much we read these days after academics have carried out "surveys" or "new research". Things like global warming.

Of course, there is a book about it, which one can no doubt buy - and contribute to the finances of a retired German professor of health science and his GP daughter.

Their theory is that everybody has a limited amount of "life energy", that the speed with which it is consumed determines one's lifespan and that exercise accelerates the process of ageing and makes the body susceptible to illness.

And that's where I switched off, because I have in my lifetime known a number of men and women who have exercised regularly and who have lived well into their 80s and some into their 90s.

In any case, I don't exercise to live longer, I exercise to feel better today.

And I notice that if I miss my daily walk for more than a few days I don't feel so alive. I get tired and lethargic and that tends, among other things, to make me grumpy.

Years ago when I was complaining to my GP about problems of ageing, including a lack of energy, he told me that if I went for a fast walk for 20 minutes three times a week to get the heart pumping and the blood singing "you won't know yourself".

I didn't believe him but decided I had nothing to lose by giving it a go. After two weeks the improvement in my general wellbeing was so marked that I haven't stopped walking since and, in fact, have increased both the duration and the frequency.

And I'm not going to trade away feeling better today in favour of an illusory theory that if I stay in bed every morning for an extra half hour, I'm going to live longer. I know a bunch of people who exercise almost dementedly because they want to live forever. Not me. I want the benefits now, thanks.

There is one point made by these theorists with which I do agree - to a point. They say that laughing is healthier than running. "When you laugh your body produces the hormone serotonin, which makes you feel happy and relaxed. Basically, laughing is a good training session without the negative side effects [of exercise]."

Well, there's nothing new there. King Solomon, who had probably never heard of serotonin, wrote in his Proverbs some 2500 years ago that "A merry heart does good like medicine ... " But how on earth anyone could get up on a weekday morning facing another day at the office and roar with laughter is, quite frankly, way beyond me.

* Meanwhile, I look with some astonishment at the vast outpouring of concern and money in the wake of the tsunami disaster.

Why is it, I wonder, that this particular tragedy has so captured the imagination of the citizens of the world that they will give, even sacrificially, hundreds of millions of dollars to the cause of rescue and rehabilitation?

After all, this disaster has taken the lives of little more than half the number who died in the Bangladesh floods of a few years ago; and today, a year after 60,000 perished in the earthquake in Bam in Iran, most of the survivors are still destitute, homeless and without work.

In parts of Africa children are dying of starvation by the thousands every day and internecine warfare is murdering and raping entire populations.

I suppose the international nature of the tsunami catastrophe has something to do with it. Countries throughout Europe, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific have all lost citizens and that, I guess, makes it much more personal than those disasters that happen to people of one country, which we probably couldn't find on a map without looking up the index.

As far as the ostensibly charitable actions of governments are concerned, I'm rather cynical. There is no doubt that the United States, in a hole in Iraq and still digging, has seized the chance to try to make its marble better in countries with big Muslim populations; and nasty Indonesia has been a thorn in Australia's side for long enough.

I admired Helen Clark's disinclination to order a day of remembrance but in the end she has had to give in to popular sentiment, mandating a memorial day on Sunday and a minute's silence. This is simply emotional claptrap, another indication, perhaps, that too many people have moved from compassion to the verge of hysteria.

Which probably explains, too, the inordinate outpourings of grief and generosity on the part of ordinary citizens, from Invercargill to Oslo. I'd like to think it was something that could restore one's faith in human nature, but I can't manage that - yet. Let's see how it all pans out.

In the meantime, I'll just keep giving to the Auckland City Mission.