We were watching a program on TV last night about pleasure and pain. Unsurprisingly, the thing that gives most people the most pleasure is their loved ones, something which I can certainly say rings true. But the thing that caught my eye the most was a section where they did an experiment to see which minority could take the most pain. They had a group of people, subdivided into gender, one group swore, one group all had ginger hair, and so on. They all had to dunk their hands into freezing water for as long as possible. I forget the result, and I don’t think it matters that much anyway, but it occurred to me: what if they had a group of disabled people. By and large – although this is a huge generalization – we tend to take more pain than more than others. Those with CP fall and knock themselves; those with other conditions put up with huge amounts of pain. I’d have been very interested to se weather we differ from the ‘norms’ in any statistically significant way in our tolerance to pain.