If symptoms persist. .
I WAS ON my way last week to the home of a patient — or perhaps I should say to the home of an alleged patient, for I had been called because he was lunging drunkenly with a knife at his family, and these days, such is the pervasive doctrine of the Real Me that the doctor is called in such situations rather than the police — when I noticed an eight-year-old boy performing powerful and destructive karate kicks on a free-standing street name. Naturally, I blame the council: if they put up street names like that, what can you expect? Equally naturally, I didn't stop to tell him to cease his attacks on defenceless public property, because he was in the company of his dad, who appeared to take some pride in his precocious powers of destruction, and might have been armed. Fortunately, the consultation with the drunken lunger was brief. His house was the only one for some scores of yards with glass in the windows rather than chipboard, and most of the cars in the vicinity were held up by bricks rather than by wheels, properly so-called. All the local grass was strewn with empty tins of drinks, cigarette packets and polystyrene containers of take-away meals; it came as no surprise that the members of his family (all female) were fat slatterns. By the time I arrived, the patient had fallen asleep, emitting Richter-scale snores, his head lolling upon bosoms of which Jane Russell might have been proud. The bread knife had escaped his grip, and lay upon the floor. His family now denied that there was anything wrong and were annoyed at my presence, which they had requested only a few minutes before.
This was just as well, for I was late for the prison and did not wish to be detained long. In the prison I was consulted first by a type which every prison doctor will recognise: the pony-tailed Buddhist.
The P-TB (for short) is always a vegan, because his principles not only do not permit him to eat the flesh of any ani- mal, but consider the theft of eggs and milk from the poor suffering chickens and cows to be utterly reprehensible. The P-TB always speaks in a lowered voice, a kind of pious whisper, in case the unnecessary decibels should disturb the flies. The P-TB believes that even inani- mate objects are suffused with a living spirit, and must therefore be respected.
It comes as a surprise, therefore, to learn that the P-TB is invariably in prison for armed robbery or GBH. Do not his principles apply, then, to the owners of small shops, bank clerks etc.? Apparently not, for the P-TB is inclined to recidivism. Moreover, he usually evinces an unhealthy interest in martial arts, which makes his arrest after his crime contingent upon the presence of at least ten of the boys in blue.
It isn't all grim in prison, though. Sometimes it is fun. My next patient entered my room loudly protesting his innocence.
'I'm not guilty,' he said. 'I've never broke into no houses in Highgate.'
`Oh,' I said. 'Where do you break into houses?'
'Islington,' he replied.
'And now you know, sir,' said the prison officer next to me, sotto voce, 'why they're in here.'
Theodore Dalrymple
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