If symptoms

persist. .

LAST WEEK, I made the cardinal error (forgivable in a young doctor, but inex- cusable in one as long in the tooth as I) of apologising to a patient. I was running a quarter of an hour late with my appointments, and I said I was sorry that she had had to wait.

'My appointment was for half past two,' she snarled. It was a quarter to three. One might have supposed from her reply that the patient was an extremely busy person — a doctor, for example. In fact, she was unemployed, and had been idle more or less since adulthood. She was now in early middle age. Later in the consultation, she con- fessed that her main problem in life was that she was bored.

'What are you interested in?' I asked. 'Nothing,' she replied.

'And have you ever been interested in anything?' I continued.

'No, never.'

I cleared my throat nervously.

'I hope you will forgive me for saying so,' I said, 'but it's hardly surprising, in the light of what you tell me, that you're bored.'

'Life's boring,' she said, through grit- ted dentures.

'I don't agree,' I said. 'I find life quite interesting.' 'You've got the money,' she said.

'I think you have it the wrong way round,' I replied sententiously. have money because I'm not bored.'

'Life's tough and then you die,' she said. 'Most people are bored, but they pretend not to be.'

`Do you like to read?' I asked, trying to lighten the gloom a little.

'No,' she said. 'Reading's boring. I only read when I has to.'

'And when do you have to?' I asked.

She raised a roll of papers which she held like the baton of a marshal of France, and shook it.

'I reads pamphlets about claiming ben- efits,' she said.

I didn't progress very far in persuading her that the world was inexhaustibly fas- cinating, and of course I could hardly tell her that one of my interests was precisely in people like her.

The consultation was brought to a timely end by a telephone call from the hospital ward. It was about a 16-year- old girl who had been admitted after having swallowed some shoe polish. She had run away from home because she didn't like her stepfather, who had insist- ed that she was home by 10 o'clock, and had taken refuge in a municipal hostel for homeless girls. There, she had fallen out with her room-mate, who had threat- ened to stab her (but only after she had smashed a mirror over her head).

'Did you truant from school?' I'd asked her earlier in the day.

'Of course,' she replied.

'Why of course?'

'Everyone does it.'

'And why did you truant?'

'School's boring, isn't it?'

'And what's not boring?'

She thought for a moment.

'Television and video,' she replied.

Now I had a message to say that, hav- ing been informed that she would be dis- charged from hospital back to the hostel, she was running up and down the ward brandishing scissors with which she threatened to cut her wrists.

'What shall I do, doctor?' the ward sis- ter gasped down the telephone. 'Ask her whether she wouldn't mind cutting her wrists somewhere else.' It usually works.

Theodore Dalrymple