Second opinion

I TRY to live on an elevated moral, intellectual and aesthetic plane, but I am continually dragged down into the mire of modernity by everyone around me.

For example, last week, on a balmy night, I was walking my dog round the church when a Golf GTi screeched to a halt by the kerbside. It was the kind of car used by lower-rank drug-dealers, from which always emanates the deep bass throbbing of rap music that lets you know from behind — through the seismic vibrations in the pavement — of the car's approach.

'Excuse me, mate,' said the goldchained driver. In the dark, I could only make out the gleaming gold and white teeth of the three black men in the car.

'Do you know where the prostitutes are round here?'

By the politeness of his first address, I had expected him to ask the whereabouts of Acacia Avenue.

'Well,' I said, 'I think if you turn left and drive a few yards, it is unlikely that you'll miss them.'

Were they going to patronise them, kill them, entice them away from their present pimps? I shall never know, but the episode plunged me back into the world of my professional life. My first patient that day, a man built like a battleship, told me he was sup posed to be in court.

'On what charge?' I asked.

He narrowed his eyes and squinted at the ceiling.

'I dunno,' he said. 'I can't remember.'

'Go on,' I said. 'Have a guess.'

He tried again, but shook his head more in sorrow than in anger.

'I really can't remember.'

'Have you been in prison before?' I asked. A change of tack often jogs memories.

'Six or seven times.'

'Do you think this charge might have involved violence?'

'Yeah, probably.'

'Do you think you might be found guilty?'

'It depends on the evidence.'

And the evidence, of course, depended on intimidation. Oddly enough, one never forgets which witnesses to intimidate.

My next patient injected himself . All the veins in his arms had been destroyed, as had those in his feet and legs, and now he injected himself in the groin. I have known people even inject themselves in the eye.

'Why do you do it?' I asked.

'I been on the brown since I was 12, doctor. But I didn't get on the pins till my girlfriend left me.'

In the next bed was a man of 25 who had tried to hang himself after his girlfriend — the 35-year-old mother of his eight stepchildren and grandmother of his two grand-stepchildren, his own two children by two other women being looked after by, respectively, their maternal grandmother and social services — had left him because of his amphetamine addiction, which caused him to accuse her of being 'an old slag'.

That afternoon I went to the prison. There I saw a prisoner who was extremely good-humoured and studiously polite. He was seven feet tall and nearly as wide. We exchanged pleasantries, and I asked him whether he had ever been in prison before.

'No,' he said. `I'm a gentle giant, really.'

'And what are you in prison for?'

'Armed robbery.'

Theodore Dalrymple