Sorry to see some old friends have fallen out.

Ultimate drug crazed rock guitarist Keith Richard has written a biography - Life, which has been described as a “vivid and utterly charming autobiography - far better written and more coherent than anyone could have hoped”.

The Stones evolved in Richmond, England, just up the road from where I grew up, so I always felt in some fanciful way they were “my mates”. Keith was a choirboy and scout and bullied at school - a bit of a different image to the “Prince of Darkness” and scallywag he became. And along with it, in England, is considered a “national treasure” but who is “refusing to keel over and die despite years of epic drug use”.

There are a lot of reminiscences about doing drugs and “slabs of hash the size of skateboards”. But Keith has some harsh things to say about Mick - referring him to him as “Her Majesty”, and, for all his supposed sexual prowess, accusing him of having “a tiny todger” (a cute euphemism I have not heard before).

That’s kind of the ultimate insult to impute somebody’s manhood. They must be badly fallen out.

 Here’s an ethical issue to wrangle with. Is it wrong for an ex-waitress named Barbara Harris to bribe drug addicts to get sterilized?

The story is that Ms Harris adopted a baby that was born addicted to crack and heroin to an addict mother who already had four children in care. Four months later, Harris was asked to adopt another baby from the same mother, then two more. 

At which point she set up ‘Project Prevention’ that pays addicts $300 to get sterilized - which has been criticized as “creepy” and “exploitive”.

Addicted babies are born “quivering and anguished” and cost some $750,000 to treat.

It is another of these knotty issues where you pit morality against expense. Just another policy issues that our faltering and unaffordable healthcare system has to wrestle with - which seems to me is along the same lines as death squads.

 It’s been widely reported that a study done at Stanford University found love to be a natural anesthetic. And this has been acclaimed as an honorable thing - but distraction is just as good it seems.

The study used thermal stimulators on the hand, and involved 15 undergraduates (of course, who else would be daft enough to consent to having their hands burned).

All students were in the first blush of a loving relationship. When they were shown a picture of their loved one to drool over, they felt less pain.

But another part of the study was less romantic. A word game was used to distract the students, who then got a similar degree of analgesia, but functional MRI scan showed it was by a different pathway - involving a less primitive part of the brain.

Maybe undergraduates function on a primitive level naturally? But I suppose the lesson is that love is one of those primordial emotions, that overrides the more evolved parts of our brain - which is probably why if makes people appear to regress into a state of fawning imbecility.

Or is that just the curmudgeonly view of someone who’s not a great romantic?