ENDPAPERS

Another Part of the Forest

By STRIX `Lucy,' I said when I came in for luncheon, 'have we got a thermometer in the house?'

'Yes,' said my daughter. 'It's hanging up on the wall by the game-larder.'

I explained it wasn't that sort I wanted, it was the sort you put in your mouth.

'Are you feeling ill, or something?' asked the intelligent child.

`Not I said testily. 'I just want to take my temperature.'

`Do you know how to?' she asked dubiously. Ours is not (touch wood) a household where Pestilence strikes with any regularity. It took her some time to find the thermometer.

`You have to put it underneath your tongue,' she explained.

Afterwards we decided—the instrument was extraordinarily difficult to read—that I had a temperature of 100. This derisory figure made it pretty clear that I was not suffering from what is known in our family as the Old Assegai Wound, a mysterious fever which once every few Years prostrates me for a day or two with a tem- perature of 105; it has so far defied diagnosis. (I got it once while driving a car to the Crimea. In Moscow, as I lay with convulsively chattering teeth in my hotel bedroom, a very courteous Russian came in with a machine on which he wanted me to record some pointless broadcast. I always remember his opening words, 'Pardon me for interrupting your disease,' he said.) Meanwhile, Back in the Sickroom . . .

My indisposition—a grander, more horrific name than it deserved—did not interfere with the various things I had to do that afternoon; and by the time I went to bed I, had more or less for- gotten about it. But sleep, which is usually lucky if it eludes me for five minutes, went on doing so for two hours. This virtually unprecedented situation got in the end on my nerves, and I de- cided that perhaps I had better take an aspirin or something of the sort.

In any well-regulated household this should be an easy decision to implement; I am indeed often amazed by the extensive pharmacopoeia which other people maintain in their bedrooms or bath- rooms. The Strix menage is not entirely destitute of medicaments, but most of them have been there for a very long time and few of them are in- tended to cure human ailments. 'Car-sickness cap- sules for spaniel. POISON' was the first thing Yielded up by the small cache in a drawer of my dressing-table; next came a plastic phial labelled `CIPtocol: Ophthalmic and Topical Dressing. .4131)1Y evenly over eyeball or wound surface,' and Lvaguely connected in my mind with one of the

horses.

Rather more promising, despite a patina of age ntch would have been more congruous to a 'uttle of one's choicest port, was a small bottle whose Yellowing superscription identified its con- en ts as 'The Tablets' and enjoined me, by name,

to take two every four hours; but for the life of me I could not remember what suffering the tablets had been designed to alleviate, and I returned them to store.

The Wonder-Drug I was on the point of deciding, reluCiantly, that if I really wanted medication I should have to wake my wife up and see if she had got an aspirin when I came across a tube containing several large pink lozenges, about the circum- ference of a threepenny bit but three times as thick; they were called Tyrozets, an impressive name. I instantly connected these lozenges with a flying visit to Muscat and Oman about ten years ago (someone, surely, had thrust them upon me at Bahrein, saying that they were a panacea for all minor ills?) and I realised that they were what I had been subconsciously in search of all the time. Without hesitation—though not, on account of their size, without difficulty-1 swallowed a brace of them, went back to bed, fell fast asleep and awoke next morning in robust health.

While I was shaving I had the curiosity to read the small print on the Tyrozets label. There I learnt that their function was to relieve minor throat irritations; the method of taking; for an adult, was to dissolve one tablet slowly in the mouth.

I wouldn't be surprised if they were pretty efficacious for car-sickness in dogs, as well.