EDITORIAL – Music to mind, and health to the body

He who has health has hope, and he who has hope has everything. – An Arabian proverb.
 THESE?WORDS?OF?WISDOM may well have consumed COSCAP?Foundation chairman Glyne Murray as he spoke to the well-being of Barbadian artistes on Saturday night.
The special health insurance scheme for musicians, performers and others, as touted by the eager Mr Murray, is most welcome. It can only be the cornerstone of health and hope for COSCAP members. 
As the foundation chairman has indicated, the initiative is the springboard for developing artistes “as persons and as professionals, as well as [for advancing] their well-being as individual citizens”.
Mr Murray has underscored that his foundation will seek whatever way to ensure artistes are as comfortable and rewarded as they should be in the entertainment arena of Barbados – or the cultural industries, as it is more loftily called. 
We support Mr Murray that gone must be the days when the entertainment fraternity has to of necessity pass the hat around when artistes have challenging medical circumstances. 
Of course, it will be incumbent upon artistes to pay more careful attention to their own personal health. It was once said that “the only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not”. The satire might easily have been attributed to our own comic and artiste Mac Fingall, if it hadn’t been said a long time before he was born.
The American author and humorist Mark Twain we have to thank for this nigh cryptic but insightful thought. It reminds us that taking the best route or the most correct steps is not always the very comfortable – but it does a man, or woman, good in the end.
Amidst artistic expression must be that regime of caring for that which houses one’s talents. As one Spanish proverb warns, a man too busy to take care of his health is like a mechanic too busy to take care of his tools.
If you care not enough for the body, the voice will go, as will the lungs, and the fingers – and the rest.
Let our artistes therefore understand clearly the COSCAP?Foundation and Mr Murray’s intentions – and their limitations.
We have every reason to believe the foundation will deliver on the health cover of its artistes and performers. We need only to know that said members will do their utmost to keep the coverage viable.