If symptoms

persist. . .

SHOULD children be taught to speak grammatically? It used to be fashionable to pietend that all ways of speaking were equally flowers in the garden of human expression; but public opinion is now inclining to the view that the power of speech, which distinguishes so many of the human race from animals, is best subjected to some kind of educational discipline.

The parents of England, I am glad to say, are rising to the challenge. Only the other day, I overheard a mother admon- ishing her child in the shop next door to our hospital. She had bought her smudge-faced infant a plastic toy, and the said infant wailed horribly, arms out- stretched, to receive the toy from its mother as quickly as possible. The moth- er withheld the toy in an effort to train her child.

`You don't say Gizzit ere,' she said. `You say Borrow it to me.'

That same day I was consulted by a man who wondered whether he might be `skipsophrenic'. The problem was that he suffered from 'these mood swings, doc- tor'. Ninety-nine per cent of the time he and his wife were perfectly happy togeth- er, but unfortunately the remaining 1 per cent of the time he was trying to strangle her.

`Why do I keep having these fights on her, doctor?' he asked me. In the ward was a young man who had taken an overdose. He was that charac- teristic product of our age and educa- tional system, a man without interests, ambitions, hopes or fears. I asked him why he had tried — rather feebly, I admit — to kill himself.

`I thought, Oh piss it, I can't be bovvered, and took the pills.'

I tried to inquire a little more deeply into his motives by asking his girlfriend, who had called an ambulance when she found the floor strewn with empty medicine bottles.

`There's no pacific reason,' she said.

I visited the prison in the afternoon. My first patient was going through the initial stages of delirium tremens. Both he and his wife were very heavy drinkers, and they used frequently to have quar- rels.

`She started it,' he said. 'She always does. She came up to me with a kitchen knife while I was having a piss' — in the kitchen, I later established — `so I potted her one and that's why I'm in here.'

He had been in prison many times for assaulting his wife, who used to denounce him to the police.

`She only does it for the compensation what the coppers give her,' he said.

My last patient of the day was a man of singularly malign countenance, recently separated from his wife.

`We was just like any other couple; she knew I needed treatment,' he said.

I asked him what his offence was.

`I never done it,' he said vehemently. 'I was too out of my head on drugs to do it.'

'If you were too out of your head on drugs, how do you know you didn't do it?'

`I mean it wasn't the real me what done it. It was the drugs. I jumped straight off the booze on to the speed. I don't want prison, doctor, I need treat- ment, I shouldn't be in here, I should be in hospital.'

I said that voluntary intoxication could just as well be taken as an aggravating circumstance as a mitigating one.

'But I'm telling you the truth, doctor. Can't you give me an injection? You can't tell me that in this day and age there isn't an injection to make me tell the truth.'

'Oh, I don't think there's anything quite as powerful as that,' I murmured.

Theodore Dalrymple