If symptoms persist.. .

ONCE you've been on the sick long enough, you can't really afford to get well again. This is for two reasons: the first and less important is that, if you recover, they stop your money. The sec- ond and more important is that, if you recover, you may begin to realise that you weren't really that ill to begin with, and hence you are a scheming villain.

One such patient, a regular, came to see me last week. He is 54 years old, and his 27 years on the sick have turned him into a permanent wreck. He can't really describe the original illness any more, so long ago was it, but he does remember that, at the urging of his sister-in-law, he consulted an itinerant faith healer.

Did it do you any good?' I ask.

`Well, I felt relieved that I'd tried everythink.'

Now, of course, he has new symptoms every time I see him. He thinks that unless he comes up with the goods I might pronounce him cured: this, despite my assurances that, after more than a quarter of a century of what sociologists (with their infallible ear for a barbarous locution) call 'illness behaviour', I con- sider him a bona fide chronic.

`I get these needles in the back of my head, doctor, just behind my ears.'

I peer behind his ears to satisfy him that I, too, am worried about the needles.

`They're only momentarial, doctor,' he says, as if to explain their absence now.

As is well-known, at least to patients, there is no clear dividing line between medical and non-medical problems. Or, to put it another way, all problems are medical.

`I'm having trouble with my money, doctor,' says my patient.

`What kind of trouble?' I ask.

`Well, when you've been on the sick as long as I have, you're entitled to more money. They told me so at the Social.'

`So what's the problem?' I ask.

`Well, they say they've got to change the day they pay my money from a Tues- day to a Wednesday.'

Why have they got to change it? Who said so? Is it really and absolutely neces- sary to pay the extra £5 a week on Wednesdays rather than on Tuesdays? `I haven't had no money for more than three weeks now, doctor,' continues my patient. 'They say the computer's broke down.'

There you have it in a nutshell: this is the way British bureaucracy mangles those whom it catches in its capacious maw. How any sane person could imag- ine that our society would be rendered more humane — more just, even — by extending the powers and increasing the funds at the disposal of these heartless incompetents defeats me utterly.

The British people, alas, are ovine in their passivity. Indeed, an average lamb has a better chance of escape from the slaughterhouse than a British recipient of sickness benefit has of receiving satis- faction down the Social.

`Three weeks,' I say to my patient. `That's a long time.'

`I know, doctor. Me and the wife, we had to ask our son to borrow us some money to tide us over. But we didn't really like doing it.'

`Why not?' I ask. 'Is he hard up?'

`Oh no, doctor, he's got a very good job. It's just that me and the wife — well, we like to be independent.'

Theodore Dalrymple