Aim the mind
Jeremy Clarke rr he only light came from a reading lamp pointing at the centre of the room. The background music was whale song and randomly plucked harp strings. The room was the top floor of an 18th-century house. The only other floor I've seen that sloped as much as this one is in the Crooked House at Peter Pan's Playground, which is next to Southend pier. On an assortment of chairs three men and a woman were sitting facing each other. They had tiny needles sticking out of their ears and forearms. One of the men also had a needle sticking straight up from the crown of his head. This I subconsciously took to be a mark of leadership, and I asked him, superfluously perhaps, whether I'd come to the right place for the acupuncture session.
It was a drop-in acupuncture session for addicts, the first of a ten-session initiative by our thrusting young local acupuncturist to bring cut-price acupuncture to the toiling masses. Lola was kneeling in the shadows, taking the woman's pulse. She stood up and invited me to take the remaining wicker chair and said she'd be over in a moment.
I'd gone there as part of the latest surge in my Hundred Years War against smoking. The NHS anti-smoking nurse suggested it. I've been seeing her on and off for four years and we've tried everything. She's written me out prescriptions for nicotine gum, lozenges, patches. I've been hypnotised, twice. I've even tried willpower.
When I visited her last week, I'd had enough of failure. I demanded that there and then she write me out a prescription for Champix, the new revolutionary wonder drug, or, failing that, for Zyban, the new revolutionary wonder drug before that. My doctor flatly refused to give me either. Too many potential side effects, he says. But a nurse, I reasoned, might care less about side effects than a doctor. And if all else failed I could appeal to her as one old nurse to another.
I was wrong on both counts. She wasn't authorised to write me out a prescription for Zyban or Champix in the first place, she said. Even if she was, she wouldn't, she said, because she entirely agreed with my doctor that chemicals are not a solution to what is largely a psychological problem. What about acupuncture, she said brightly. Have we tried that? I sat there and looked at her. Acupuncture. She was having a laugh. And if that failed, then what, I said. Leeches? A visit to a Celtic holy well?
I pulled up a wicker chair to complete that evening's intimate little circle of addicts. The sloping floor, the lugubrious whales, the capricious harpist, the melodramatic quality of the light thrown by the reading lamp, and the faces all around bristling with pins made it difficult to know which face to pull. I used to imagine that addicted people in therapeutic circles are deeply contrite, if nothing else, about how much it is costing by the hour. But this woman, in these surroundings, going round sticking pins in everybody, in the belief that by doing so the chemistry of our brains might be fundamentally and permanently altered, and our shackles thrown off, was at the same time sexy, funny and sad. Until I'd worked out what the form was, I assumed the unctuous facial expression that I normally use when I am confronted by the ineffable mystery of transubstantiation.
But Lola's policy was one of demystification and affordability. She didn't ask us to name our addiction. We needn't be solemn, she said. No mental effort was required on our part. The needles did all the work. The points in the ear where she knocked them in (always with two taps of the forefinger) were the same whatever the addiction. We must feel free to chat among ourselves about anything we liked.
A chap looked up with a fatuous, glassy squint and boasted, 'I'm getting images.' `Me too, dude,' said the woman. Her eyes were closed and beads of sweat stood out on her forehead. She wore combat trousers and she looked to me like she was on a major tranquilliser. 'Acupuncture takes people different ways,' said Lola. 'Some people feel nothing at all, some people can become quite disturbed.' I can become quite disturbed,' advised the woman dreamily. 'I go mental. But I don't feel like I'm going to go mental at the moment. Can I have a drink of water?' While Lola was fetching a glass of water from the room underneath, nobody said a word. We just sat there, bristling. It was as though a joint had been passed between us and we'd all retreated inside our own heads. Pling! Plang! Plong! went the harp. More beads of sweat stood out on the woman's forehead.
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