Second opinion

WHAT a glorious thing it is to be a British taxpayer! And how reassuring to know that the half of one's life one devotes to earning taxes is used to bring a little succour to those less well-placed than oneself.

For example, only last week a young Man was admitted to my ward having taken an overdose after hitting his moth- er in the course of an argument with her. He took the overdose before her very eyes, no doubt to rekindle the dying embers of her maternal instinct.

He was an unemployed heroin addict, and his mother had wanted to know what he had done with the money in her purse. llow much do you spend on your heroin?' I asked him. 7-30 a day.' 'How do you get it?' From a dealer.' `No, the money, not the heroin.' 'My Job Seeker's Allowance.' What imagination our bureaucracy dis- plays in devising pleasant euphemisms. 'lob seekers, indeed: the phrase conjures P a reassuring image of industrious ants, temporarily idle, who busily scour the land for something constructive to do. Heroin Seeker's Allowance would be More like it. You get what you pay for. If you sub- sidise bad behaviour, then bad behaviour is what you get. However, honesty com- pels me to admit that not everything can be attributed to social security, the wel- fare state, etc. We must never forget that man is the root of all evil, the being who does evil for the sheer joy of it unless prevented from doing so.

The patient next to the mother-beating heroin addict was a young woman with a black eye and a broken arm. You wouldn't have to be Sherlock Holmes to suspect an affair of the heart as the cause of these injuries.

`How did you get your broken arm?' I asked.

`My boyfriend twisted it.'

`Why?'

`When you don't give him sex, you get a slap.'

It takes little imagination to under- stand with what exultation in his power over his beloved he heard her screams of agony, her pleas to be let go and the crunching snap of her bone. And what joy to intimidate her into dropping charges against him, a joy far removed from the merely utilitarian purpose of avoiding jail! Round here, humiliation of others for its own sake is a Kantian cate- gorical imperative.

The woman with the black eye and a broken arm was a drinker, of course.

`You drink too much,' I said.

`They shouldn't sell it, should they?' she replied.

`You could try not buying it,' I suggest- ed helpfully. But as with all my best sug- gestions, it fell on deaf ears.

`But it's everywhere, doctor.'

I felt an urgent need to retreat from the world, and therefore went to the prison, that great monastery of the slums. I felt a deep spiritual relief as I passed through its portals.

Not that I should like to pretend that all is well in the prison, that there are no problems there, that peace of mind is always to be achieved there. My first patient, a burglar, looked unhappy.

`The trouble with prison, doctor,' he said, 'is that everyone talks shop all the time.'

Theodore Dalrymple