I brace myself for the bad news. We both know the routine. “Give it to me
straight, Doc.”

But he’s chuckling. Surely that’s not in the script?

“Hmm. Stabbing pains in the groin when cycling? Perfectly common at your time
of life. Nothing to worry about—just be more careful what you carry in
your hip pocket.”

Maybe he has a point. A quick audit of my trousers reveals in the left pocket
keys, banknotes and loose change, and in the right one a huge and misshapen
wallet bulging with (I am NOT making this bit up) 21 separate plastic cards.
These identify me as a member of various useful organisations and allow me to
spend my own money, borrow other people’s, pay in advance for phone calls and
photocopies and (when I remember) collect air miles. And this is the card
collection of someone who eschews supermarket loyalty cards and doesn’t need a
travel pass. No wonder I live in danger of emasculation. All this means that I
am well disposed to the idea of the multifunction smartcard—a single card
which can be programmed to do many different jobs.

The idea has been around for years. But now the people who make money
predicting the Next Big Thing say that its time has come. One reason for this is
electronic commerce. Naively, I thought I was on top of this trend because I buy
my CDs through the Internet rather than in the high street record shop. But
apparently there’s a lot more to it.

“We are going to create new industries,” says Tonnies von Donop of Andersen
Consulting. He can’t predict what they are yet—but they all seem to
involve people walking around with electronically charged plastic cards in their
pockets.

Recently I went to Spain to see multifunction smartcards in action. The
province of Andalusia is mounting the kind of IT project that makes management
consultants reach for the champagne bottles and civil libertarians reach for
their megaphones. The state has issued every citizen with a neat orange and gold
smartcard to replace the scruffy old social security benefit card. Every Spanish
citizen will soon get one.

The clever bit is that two government ministries have been persuaded to use
the same smartcard. This is roughly the equivalent of persuading Bill Gates of
Microsoft and Larry Ellison of Oracle simultaneously to adopt Linux, the free
operating system that threatens to topple them both. The snag is that, for the
Spanish smartcards to work, their owners must identify themselves by sticking
their forefinger into a hole in the terminal for their fingerprints to be read.
That might go down well in Andalusia, but elsewhere in Europe the acceptability
of fingerprinting is, as I have found, close to zero. Someone should tell the
management consultants that.

In France, which for years has been promoting smartcards as an IT force
de frappe, there is another snag. Here, the government is handing out
medical smartcards to every citizen. This is supposed to save money by
discouraging the French habit of consulting a series of doctors until one comes
up with an agreeable diagnosis. But nobody asked the French GPs if they objected
to losing a chunk of their income. Now they’re boycotting the whole system.

At the annual smartcard conference and exhibition in London, the hot news is
that banks have decided to issue smartcards and—even better—that the
card makers are adopting standard operating systems. This is the real key to
multifunctionality. We will soon be able to buy a blank “white” smartcard to
which we can add as many functions as we like.

The trouble lies with those responsible for developing this
standard—the computer companies. At least three rival standards are
fighting it out. And can we really believe that Europe’s banks, currently
bombarding us with gold and platinum “privilege” cards offering every incentive
short of eternal life, will agree to share their plastic? No. Despite all the
efforts of the smartcard industry, I foresee more damage to my nether regions.
And I’m damned if I’m buying a handbag.

If you’re over 40 and honest, the answer is probably yes. And your doctor is
not going to be much help: “Snap out of it, old man, perfectly normal at your
time of life, just get more exercise and go easy on the booze, eh?”

Luckily, for the publishing industry at any rate, this approach is going out
of fashion. These days it’s OK for well-nourished and affluent middle-aged men
to have anxieties about their bodies. Women have long had an industry devoted to
keeping their nether regions functioning. Now, it seems, it’s the blokes’
turn.

Even if you feel good for your age, Malcolm Carruthers’s Male
Menopause (Thorsons, ÂŁ12.99 ISBN 07225 3208 3), will give you
something to worry about. He maintains that the “andropause” can strike as early
as the thirties and from then on it is downhill all the way. He provides a
classic “are you at risk?” checklist: I scored 26, giving me an andropause
rating of “probable”. But Dr Carruthers did not quite persuade me to pop down to
his Harley Street clinic for a testosterone top-up.

Prostate cancer, on the other hand, does seem worth getting worked up about.
It is the latest illness to earn the title “the silent killer”, a thoroughly
tired cliché. (What disease, apart from Tourette syndrome, is noisy?)
Michael Korda, novelist and publisher, says it is the male equivalent of breast
cancer, killing the same number of people, but receiving far less attention.
“Women talk to each other about their bodies, men do not.” Korda’s Man to
Man (Little, Brown, ÂŁ18.99, ISBN 0 316 88297 6), fills the gap and
more, with an account of a brush with the big P. As the subtitle “Surviving
Prostate Cancer” gives away, Korda pulls through. But this is a lot more than a
standard “never give up” tract. I plan to keep it on my shelves, just in
case.

One health issue that gives men cause for smugness is smoking. This is now
largely a female problem, in the rich world, at least. For male smokers who
still have doubts, Kristine Napier’s Cigarettes: What the Warning Label
Doesn’t Tell You (American Council on Science and Health, $19.95),
gives a stack of lesser-known reasons to quit. “Smoking just two cigarettes
causes acute vasospasm of the penile arteries.” Makes your eyes water, in more
ways than one.

But if you are going to get seriously ill, it helps to be famous and have a
rare disease. At least you can then write a book about it. Ben Watt of
Everything But The Girl (a popular music group, m’Lud) collapsed at the age of
29 with the impressively named Churg-Strauss syndrome. It is a complication of
asthma and caused 90 per cent of his gut to rot away. Patient: The True
Story of a Rare Illness (Viking, ÂŁ12.50, ISBN 0 670 87041 2), is a
hospital diary, interspersed with autobiographical anecdotes that might be of
interest to his fans.

The book makes one understated, yet heartfelt, point. Watt was treated on the
British National Health Service, in a public ward with its bizarre social mix
and inedible breakfasts. The NHS is the last great unifying strand in British
society, and we are terribly close to throwing it away.

Churg-Strauss syndrome does not appear in The Royal Society of Medicine’s
Dictionary of Symptoms (Bloomsbury, ÂŁ15.99, ISBN 0 7475 2720 2).
Which is probably just as well, because like most officially sponsored
publications for the “lay readership”, its main aim is to persuade us not to
waste the profession’s time. Accordingly, it suffers from the “A Doctor Writes”
syndrome: almost everything is “a common and harmless complaint, but if symptoms
persist, you should seek medical advice”. Still, worth keeping in the home, even
if its advice is sometimes comically banal: “The normal penis will commonly
shrink, especially in the cold, to surprisingly small dimensions.”

Much better is my old favourite, The Ship Captain’s Medical Guide
(Department of Transport, ÂŁ24, ISBN 0 11 550684 5), the 21st edition of
which comes complete with colour photos of infected penises and two suggested
forms of words for conducting the ceremony of burial at sea.

It’s the unreconstructed, real man’s medical handbook. And not a hormone in
sight.