Low life
Under stress
Jeffrey Bernard
Sick and tired of feeling sick and tired, I took a small overdose of sleeping pills and painkillers last weekend in the hope of rediscovering some of that wonderful obliv- ion that I used to buy in bottles. It was a minuscule overdose — I took six of each instead of the prescribed two — but it did knock me out for most of the weekend, and I eventually came to feeling pretty awful, which I suppose might have been down to all those hours without food or drink.
On the following Monday morning when I went to the Middlesex for dialysis I men- tioned it to a nurse in passing who had asked me how I felt. She immediately asked me did I want counselling. I didn't know whether to laugh at the nonsense of it or to scream with irritation. Just about the only counselling I need these days is from a good sommelier.
The whole ghastly business of pressure and stress — absolute essentials to me makes me realise that the lack of humour germinated in America about 30 years ago is spreading rapidly all over the world, and there will come a time about 20 years hence when there will be no such thing as a joke. Maybe some of us will meet secretly in candlelit cellars and basements to tell the odd joke to remind us of the good old days, but by then anyone caught in the act of smiling or laughing will have their balls cut off by counsellors.
Even I was once called upon to do some counselling and that was four years ago in the Middlesex Hospital. The nurses asked me just three days after my right leg had been amputated to go and cheer up a seemingly ordinary and sensible middle- aged man who had just been brought in and who was going to have a leg amputated the following morning. He was in a fairly bad way and he couldn't stop crying. I uttered what few words of comfort I could and even inserted a couple of jokes about it but it didn't seem to do him much good and I felt a bit of a fool. Anyone putting themselves forward as being able to coun- sel another person has to be something even bigger and more pretentious than a fool.
The last time I saw my daughter, Isabel, she complained to me for a solid little 15 minutes about stress and the enormous amount of it that was on her and flattening her. It was only after that 15 minutes of lending her my sympathetic ears that I realised she was undergoing great stress because she had been in a disco all night dancing until 5 a.m.
One of the things I most disliked about Margaret Thatcher was her idea that nobody, however old or ill, should be allowed to be embraced by death. A good counsellor would be able to tell within two minutes of meeting someone whether or not they needed a helping hand into the grave. But counselling is a misinterpreted word anyway. Every high-rise building in the world should employ counsellors to give hesitant suicides standing on ledges an almighty push into the street beneath where there would be yet more counsellors to negate the stress of the squeamish.
And now, at last, I really am under stress myself for the first time I can remember since I was a schoolboy. I have run out of sleeping pills and I wonder how on earth I am going to sleep tonight. It is inevitable, I suppose, that one day I will try the bottle again, but I fear it might make me feel hor- ribly ill, although a couple of defunct kid- neys will have no objection to it. The renal experts at the hospital tell me nothing. This is a bad sign because, although it can often mean that they know nothing, it usually means that they fear the truth would put you under excessive stress. I met a nurse once who took a man's blood pressure and she couldn't hear a damn thing through the stethoscope, nor did the mercury in the apparatus even move a millimetre. She then realised that the patient was dead. 0 death, where is thy stress?
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