21 AUGUST 2004, Page 19

THEODORE DALRYMPLE

However terrible the state of the world might be today, there is one infallible consolation to be had: that it will be much worse tomorrow. This means that each day is a golden age by comparison with its successor, And how is it possible to be miserable when living in a perpetual golden age?

Some people might accuse me of exaggeration, of course. I can only say that such people have never walked down the corridor of my hospital and observed the youth that is to be seen there, and that, like the meek, will one day inherit the earth.

The trouble with these particular legatees, however, is that they are very far from being meek. Vicious-looking and resentful would be more like it, One averts one's gaze from them, for both aesthetic and prudential reasons.

One of these youths was in a bed in our ward last week. He complained of headaches. They were at the back of his head and were shooting in nature. Sometimes they radiated down his neck. In fact, they travelled pretty much all over his body, 'Do you think they could be anything to do with my injury?' he asked.

'What injury?'

He pointed to something below the back of his baseball cap.

'I was stabbed in the back of the head.' 'What with?'

'A scalpel.'

'By a surgeon?' I asked, incredulously. 'No, by my girlfriend's ex.'

Needless to say, his girlfriend's ex was not a surgeon but a drug dealer.

Just as each day is worse than the next, so — in our ward — the next patient is worse than the last. And the next patient was a young man who wore gold rings that were more weaponry than ornamentation. He said that his best friend had made him take some pills in the pub, and they hadn't agreed with him.

'How did he make you?' I asked. 'Did he hold you down and force them down your throat?'

Round here, such things are possible. Best friends are always chopping one another up with machetes as a sign of their deep mutual affection. 'No, he told me they were Viagra, so I took them.'

They turned out to be ecstasy. or Es as they are known round here, and they nearly killed him.

Out of curiosity, I asked him about himself. Few people can resist this most alluring of subjects, and he told me all about himself. Then I asked him what his ambition was, and he became demure, like a young lady of a bygone age.

'I can't really tell you,' he said.

'Why not?' I asked.

'Because you wouldn't like it,' he said.

It's rare that anyone is sensitive to my feelings, and I told him not to worry, that whatever he said I should almost certainly have heard worse. I imagined that he harboured a guilty secret, like wanting to be a university professor or a missionary.

'I want to be a thug,' he said.

I glanced at his rings and almost said, 'You already are one.'

'I want to own a business and make lots of money,' he said.

'But that's being a businessman, not a thug.' I said.

'Same thing,' he said.

Where are we, for God's sake? Russia? Azerbaijan?