I SEE where cardiac surgeon Maurice Neligan has admitted that he and his colleagues really know very little about the causes of heart disease or how to prevent it. He is, as he says, "only a plumber".

Though a sometime plumber myself, I am not particularly upset by Mr Neligan's comment. I know he doesn't really mean it to sound the way it does. He will probably be eager to explain himself the next time he needs the services of one of my colleagues, perhaps even myself.

Like the heart specialists, we plumbers are modest people, though our expertise naturally puts some clients in awe of us. The truth is we don't actually know everything. I myself am sometimes obliged to tell a client, upset at the imminent collapse of a radiator or boiler or entire heating system, that I am only a surgeon. It helps a little, calling attention to our common humanity and despite vast professional knowledge our weakness in the face of fate and mortality, our status as pawns in a vast uncaring universe.

I might as well tell you too that no one, absolutely no one, knows why sinks go on getting blocked despite decades' of research and development and all the applications of high technology. It is all very well to blame a build up of fat or under usage or kitchen sink abuse, but the historical problems are far worse in the US and a blocked sink there is far less commonplace. Saturated fat intake in Japan is low, yet their blockage problems are commensurate to ours.

I don't care what the Institute of Plumbers and the European Federation of Plughole Engineers think, the truth is there are no effective preventive measures. If your sink is going to get blocked, it is going to get blocked, and there is very little you can do about it. You would be better off playing tennis and not worrying about it.

This is running out of steam.

You are right. I thought I'd get another four or five paragraphs out of it but sure it just died. Ah well.

All right The poor we have always with us, but not usually in the world's casinos. I have to agree with the Sonas Centre crowd, the developers of the new casino complex in the Phoenix Park, that social stratification is a dangerous area and I am not going to get into it anymore than they are.

The poor are going to be excluded from the new casino, of course. Trained bouncers beg pardon, reception staff, will keep the wrong crowd out. The Sonas ("Happiness") people can hardly be blamed for wanting to avoid the embarrassment of swelling their coffers with grubby little welfare cheques.

But lookWhy is it all right to tempt the rich to gamble, and not the poor? Say a rich man comes into the casino and loses everything. He then joins the ranks of the poor, and is duly barred. Is this right? Even a friendly local poker game will usually give a loser a chance to get his winnings back. The whole point of casino life is the reversal of fortune, but casino culture wants it only one way.

I am more concerned however about the advice recently given by a respected sociologist that people should always be ready to "take a gamble" on love this in a paper read by rich and poor. It seems gambling is wrong where money is involved, but quite acceptable in the area of personal emotional growth and development, where you could lose everything right down to your self respect and the last shreds of your character.

This is a dangerous set of priorities. Say you have a very meagre"emotional life. You live on scraps of affection, the odd charitable handout of care or fellowship. You rummage in bins for a used hug or handshake. In the personal area you are a deprived person. You are on emotional welfare, eking out an interior existence of the heart with the odd nixer, the brief relationship with no questions asked or tax applied. Your entire inner life is on a tightrope. Why then should you be encouraged to gamble on love, to indulge in hopeless fantasies of requited affection and a deeply satisfying relationship when the odds against your success are a million times worse than in the National Lottery?

If such people must gamble in this way, and it seems there is no way to stop them doing so, then the whole thing should be properly structured. We are talking of a casino of love, properly licensed, with decent odds on the roulette tables, and plenty of attractive croupiers male and female to keep hopes high.