A good few decades ago, I’m having time off work; my more attuned friends describe it as ‘having a rest from his mind’. Friends have come to visit. Some kind of coincidence, the four of them – all psychologists – sitting around the table on the back veranda. I’m wearing the top half of a pair of pyjamas, a Sulu (Fijian garment) and slippers. I’m doped to the eyeballs – diaze-something, a blobby sponge soaking…
This may seem an odd way to approach an essay about bipolar disorder, but I had forgotten that lithium was at one time prescribed for gout. Not that I’ve ever had gout, but a couple of relatives who do have it tell me it is not something you would wish upon your worst enemy – or even Donald Trump. Gout is a painful inflammation of joints caused by an excess of uric acid which forms…
As I have just returned from 10 days in New Zealand on sorry business, today I’m reposting a piece from 2018 when my best half broke her wrist and I became chief cook and bottlewasher. Normal transmission will resume next week. This topic would not have raised an eyelash in my Dad’s era, a generation of men who did not cook or do housework. Many men of my vintage grew up in households where duties…
So I’m visiting John in hospital and it’s just as well I didn’t come the day before, he says, because he was in a world of pain. Knee operations are like that. Hospital rooms evoke all kinds of memories, most of them not very pleasant, even a private room with a TV, telephone and a view of the painless world. John was telling how his daughter phoned on his world of pain day to see…