SECOND OPINION
THEODORE DALRYMPLE
Faith, hope and charity these days are redundant; what we need are health and safety. We safeguard them more carefully than good girls ever safeguarded their chastity. We are enjoined to do so everywhere, even on trains from Bristol to Bath. I was on one such train last weekend. A man called the Train Manager exhorted us over the public address system to be careful of the luggage in the racks above our heads, lest it should descend upon us, and advised us very strongly to 'make ourselves familiar with' (he didn't want to offend those of us who could not read, or inadvertently lessen their self-esteem by using the word 'read') the safety information in the passenger saloon.
Saloon? Was this the Orient Express, in which passengers in dinner dress, in a wood-panelled coach, are served by attendants in jackets as white as the plumage of the fairy tern or the snowy owl? No, there were two carriages, standing room only, and not much of that either; in fact, if the train had crashed, we should have been slaughtered like bacteria in a Petri dish.
But at least being squashed together allowed me to overhear the mobile telephone conversations of my fellow passengers. For example, I was next to a tall, willowy young woman with the rich, wavy, red-brown hair so favoured by the PreRaphaelites. In another age, she would have been a model for Burne-Jones; which proves that there has been some progress after all.
She had those loose-jointed movements that occur between adolescent awkwardness and arthritic middle age, but in her right nostril were two small rings that pinched her flesh and looked painful. She had black-painted fingernails and a ring on her thumb, and no doubt a tattoo on her shoulder, though she was dressed in clothes of a length that would have pleased even the Ayatollah Khomeini, albeit that they were of denim, the devil's cloth.
Her phone rang, and she managed to insinuate it to her ear. She clearly didn't mind being overheard; she was a wellbrought up girl, who had difficulty remembering her glottal stops.
'I'm not working for Cath the psycho any more,' she said. 'There's this grocery that's all about Fair Trading. I mean it's not like it's a morally dubious company, or anything like that.'
Then she explained why she was going to Bath. 'I'm doing some voluntary work at the theatre. It's worth it 'cause I get to hang out with the director, so I might get some design work.' Whether the proposed hanging-out with the director was morally dubious, I cannot of course positively say.
But at least the next day a man consulted me who was unequivocally beyond moral reproach. He had slit his girlfriend's throat, or rather, the knife in his pocket had done so.
'The blade came out and everything just went downhill from there.'
Well, you can't really oppose gravity, try as you might. It wasn't, as he put it, 'down to him'.
The telephone rang. It was Mrs H. 'Hello, doctor, it's Mrs H. Do you remember me?'
'Of course. How could I forget?'
Mrs H. rings me whenever she is in a state of distress.
'Doctor,' she said. 'I don't think my mind's as stable as it should be.' Then she considered for a moment, and added, 'But I don't think anyone's is.'
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