By knowing Barlow, I walk hand in hand with genius

A REPORT out the other day suggested that warm-air hand-driers were not as hygienic as people liked to think. Admittedly, the report was sponsored by people who make towels and soft tissues and paper napkins and things, so you wouldn't expect it to say that warm-air hand-driers are the best things ever, but the evidence about the amount of germs left on your hands after they have been blown dry did seem pretty convincing.

'So my friend Barlow was right after all]' I exclaimed out loud, waking up the man in the seat opposite, who had nodded off over his new Jeffrey Archer.

This is not the reaction that most people would have. They would say something like, 'Thank God, I can leave my hands wet in future', or, 'Hold on - if warm- air hand-driers leave germs all over your hands, what do warm-air hair-driers leave in your hair?' Most people, however, do not know my friend Barlow. And he spotted years ago that this new-fangled warm-air hand-drier had some basic flaws.

'Mark my words, Kington,' he said, 'in four or five years' time there will be a report out to tell us that warm-air hand-driers are not the miracles we now think they are. The obvious flaws are apparent already. You can't dry your face with most of then, and those that can dry your face tend to blow the water up your nostrils. With hands, they tend to blow the water up your sleeves, and I should hate to see what they are blowing under our fingernails. But do you know what the main point is, Kington?'

Barlow occasionally treats me like the classes of students he often has to address, partly because I tend to take notes when he is talking, as so much of what he says can be turned into articles later.

'Main point?' I muttered, going on to a fresh page and making a new heading. 'No. What is it?'

'The main point is that when you use a towel or napkin to wipe your hand, or even a tablecloth, if you are stuck at a posh dinner, you leave behind on the towel a dirty mark, no matter how well you have washed your hands. Don't you?'

'Yes. I didn't know you did, too.'

'We all do. Now, that mark is dirt from your hands which you transfer to the towel. But if you dry your hands under a warm-air hand-drier, where does the dirt go? It must go somewhere. But where?'

I didn't know.

'Still on the hands, Kington. Shall I tell you another thing?'

'Yes, please.'

'Perhaps the most germ-ridden spot in Britain is the centre of the knob you press to activate some kinds of warm-air hand-drier. Everyone presses that knob, with hands which, though just washed, still have all those germs on them. The germs gratefully cling to that knob like a life raft. Then you come along and pick them up. Strangers' germs. Germs floating around the country, from service area to service area, bringing people down with strange illnesses so that their doctor will say, 'Funny, you have come down with a germ I have never seen outside Walsall.' '

Barlow did not look displeased at the idea, but he is a medical man, and doctors are never saddened by the spread of illness. It was Barlow, by the way, who came up with the most revolutionary medical theory I have ever seen take shape before my eyes. I was once late to meet him, and gave as my excuse the fact that I had just spent a penny and lingered to wash my hands.

'Why?' he asked.

'I was always taught to.'

'But why were you so taught?'

'Well, it's because, er, it's a good thing to wash your hands after you have touched . . . I mean . . . .'

Odd, isn't it, how you tend to go all coy with doctors, as if trying to shield them from the facts of life? Barlow would have none of it.

'Has it ever occurred to you, Kington, that your genitals are probably the cleanest part of your body? They are washed and bathed and then put away for the rest of the day, wrapped inside your clothing. But the dirtiest bit of your body, the bit that is always touching other things, what is that? Your hand] Precisely. Your hands spread disease. And that is why I have always said you should wash your hands before you go to the lavatory, not afterwards. Think about it.'

I could see he was right. And that is why so often now I find myself in a washroom, with dripping hands, unable to go to the loo because I have just washed my hands and can find neither a towel nor a warm-air hand-drier. But it is a small price to pay for mixing with a genius like my friend Barlow.