Second opinion

I OPENED my Guardian the other day and saw a photograph of a man who

looked like a Standard British Thug, a veritable shaven-headed tattooed monster. He was the kind of man one might expect to see in any club or pub with a reputation for violence, and whom any civilised person would go to some lengths to avoid. This shaven-headed tattooed monster, however, had written a play about to be performed at the National Theatre.

It came as no surprise to me to read that his first play had concerned the awful moral dilemma about whether sharp objects should be inserted up rectums: for there is no subject that preoccupies the British intelligentsia, the finest flower of our educational system, more. For those of us who have occasionally to deal with real sharp objects inserted up real rectums, however, there is no subject more distasteful or tedious.

But let us, as the French say, return to our sheep: that is to say, the population of Great Britain as instantiated in my hospital. There, on the same day as the Guardian article appeared, I saw a woman with more tattoos up her arm than I had stamps in my album as a child. The tattoos were of the names of her various children (the oldest of them now 17,

and in a young offenders' institute) by equally various fathers.

I asked her why she had taken the overdose that led to her admission to hospital.

'My boyfriend left me for another woman.'

'Who?'

'My best friend's daughter.'

'And how old is your ex-boyfriend?' 'Twenty-one.'

'You must hate him now.'

'No, we're still friends, like.'

I went to the prison. There my first patient had tattoos as the Netherlands has towns and cities: that is to say, everywhere you look. He was also shavenheaded, of course.

On his right forearm was a tattooed portrait of Hitler; on the left, one of Goebbels. If one needed proof that skill is not the same as art, here it was. There were various other traditional motifs tattooed on his body, such as cannabis leaves, a policeman hanging from a lamp-post and a heart with the name of his girlfriend on it. Around his navel were the utterly supererogatory words `Made in England', for no one, I suspect, would have doubted it for a moment. Upon the crown of his shaven scalp, he had taken the trouble to have the words 'All Coppers Are Bastards' indelibly inscribed.

'That must stand you in good stead down the station,' I said.

`I'm not a troublemaker, doctor,' he said.

Even I, who am inured to the absurd, let out an explosive little laugh.

'You'll forgive me for saying so,' I said, `but your appearance rather belies it.'

'I don't go looking for trouble, if that's what you mean.'

'I'd be surprised if you didn't,' I said. 'On the whole, people who have Hitler and Goebbels tattooed on their skin do not have the temperament or outlook of Mother Teresa.'

`If there was a race riot in Bradford,' interposed a prison officer, 'would you go to it?'

'Of course,' he replied.

'But why, if you don't look for trouble?' I asked.

'It's what I believe in,' he said.

Theodore Dalrymple