Second opinion

SOMETIMES, though not very often, I wish my patients were the upstanding, God-fearing, law-abiding, hard-working people I tell them they ought to be. I hold myself up as what they might have been if they'd tried a little harder, but I do so with a guilty conscience. Deep inside my conventionally suited, thor- oughly respectable exterior, there is an earringed lazy rebel trying to get out (I draw the line at tattoos, though). If I stopped working for a day, I fear that my natural sloth might get the better of me. Only terror of falling into the cold clutches of what my patients call 'the Social' (better termed, in my experience, the Antisocial) keeps me going.

Then again, if my patients were the paragons I advise them to be, they would cease to say the wonderful things which they do say, and my life would be much duller. For by comparison with foolish- ness, the language of wisdom is deeply impoverished. Perhaps one day a literary critic will publish an article — or even a book — in praise of the poetry of folly.

I'm thinking of a patient of mine who, on his own admission, could talk until the dogs come home.

`A lot of people don't believe I'm not well,' he said. 'I don't believe it myself, doctor, but I'm not well. They don't have to put up with my kidneys and my arthri- tis, or my tempers like my wife does.'

`You're bad-tempered, then?'

`No, but I'm having memory losses. They make me very disgrumpled. Usual- ly I'm the nicest person anyone could meet — and I don't mean that in the bad sense, doctor.'

The problem, it appeared, was his wife. She was a very demanding and extravagant woman.

`I took her to the cinema, doctor. Nor- mally I'd try to sneak in for free, through the fire escape, but with her I had to pay. And she's not like me, I just want to watch the film and leave. With my wife, doctor, she wants to eat and drink, like all women do.'

Troubles, alas, don't come singly. Not only had he had to pay for the cinema, but he had recently had a letter from the Department of Social Security. This made him angry.

`I keep getting letters from these gov- ernment pigs, Blair and Major. I don't want no more letters from the Social Security, and if they send me any more I'll take an overdose. Then I'll have to go to hospital and I won't have to fill in no more forms. Do you hear, no more let- ters from the Social Security!'

Next in my consulting room was a young man with multiple earrings. He asked me why he always ends up beating his girlfriends.

`You enjoy it, I expect.'

'Oh,' he said, looking relieved. 'I thought it was my head playing games with me.'

He also took drugs and drank to excess.

`They say it's easier to get me off the drugs than the drink. Is that true, doc- tor?'

His latest court case was about a bur- glary.

`When I did it, doctor, I was under the influence.'

`What of?'

`Other people.'

Theodore Dalrymple