Pain Relief

A friend of mine who had been ill for a while used to refer to paracetamol tablets as Snowballs. At first hearing, it seemed to make sense. They were, after all, white and round. But they were round in the two dimensional sense of ‘circular’, rather than the three dimensional sense of ‘spherical’. Since my friend was a man who normally employed great precision in his choice of words, it began to nag at me. Eventually I asked him why he nominated them in that way. “Because”, he replied mournfully, “trying to treat pain with paracetamol is like trying to cool the sun by throwing snowballs at it.”

I recently visited the doctor with a pain in my hip. Nothing serious having shown up on the x-ray, he advised me to take pain killers and rest it in a good position. I enquired what constituted a good position. Wearily, as though explaining the use of a comma for the fiftieth time to a particularly stupid child, he said that a good position was one in which the hip didn’t hurt. “But if I’m taking pain killers, surely I won’t know if it would be hurting?” He said nothing, and concentrated on typing something onto my computerised notes. I guess that patients’ rights under the Data Protection Act prevented him from writing what he really wanted to, in case I should ever demand to see a copy; but as children we all knew the story that gypsy peg-sellers had secret marks which they could leave on your gatepost, invisible to the gorgio world, but unmistakably encouraging other Romanies to come in and try their luck with the Soft Touch who lived there, or alternatively miss out that house and its Baskerville-like hound. I have no doubt that somewhere in my notes now is a coded word such as ‘empained’ which will warn the rest of the medical profession ‘Has found out the truth that painkillers do not relieve pain. May need to be taken out by a hit-man if he starts to blab.’

I had in fact long suspected the true nature of analgaesics. I was once given a gastroscopy, which was preceded by some kind of semi-anaesthetic painkiller which they said would, whilst keeping me technically conscious, render me so woozy that I would barely realize what was going on. The instant that they removed the apparatus from my mouth I pointed out that I had been fully conscious the whole time and felt everything. They made the sympathetic clucking noises which they obviously saved for patients who were not merely woozy, but positively hallucinating. Only when they came back a couple of minutes later and found me sitting up reading a book on advanced Bridge defence problems did they begin to look a little sheepish. Nothing was said.

There are of course stronger painkillers. No doubt if you are lying at the scene of a road traffic accident with both arms positioned some distance from your body, and a lorry’s gearstick inserted into your kidney they will offer you one. But anything less than that and you will have to qualify by working your way up from paracetamol; perhaps even further down the list than that, since I am near to being convinced that the first round of paracetamol consists in fact of placebos.

Likewise with dosages. Once when suffering from a suspected exploding appendix (that may not be the correct medical term; since it fortunately transpired to be something else I never really found out) I broke the habit of a lifetime and asked for a painkiller. They obliged. I clearly had made a mistake by not screaming like a banshee as I made the request, because as they administered it they told me it was “just a small dose”. They were not lying. The dose was clearly so small that it had no effect whatsoever. After an hour or so of continuing pain, I resummoned a nurse and asked if I could have a large dose this time: in fact, if one were available I would be happy to try out the elephantine dose. I was reassured that I would of course be allowed a large dose, but since I had had the small dose only an hour previously I would have to wait another three hours. By the time that came round I was better; or perhaps I had simply become inured to the pain; or possibly I had died and gone into a parallel universe where the hospital décor was identical, but the pain thresholds were different.

Despite the wonders of the electronic age allowing hospitals to link up instantly, every hospital starts again. No matter that in another similar building twenty miles down the road you yesterday proved entirely immune to any effect from anything below the level of intravenous morphine, today in Building Two, should you request it, you will be told, “Well, let’s just try you with paracetamol first.”

All of this may imply that I relish the idea of stuffing myself with strong analgaesics. Nothing could be further from the truth. I believe, as I always have, that pain is a communication from your body, and you should no more tell it to shut up every time it speaks than you should a child doing the same. But as with your child who begins to sing ‘Dan Dan The Lavatory Man’ in a posh restaurant, there are times when you not merely want it to shut up, but to shut up immediately. How one longs for the day when Ronseal break into the drugs market and begin selling ‘Pain Killers – they do exactly what it says on the packet’.

If shortly after reading this you hear that my body has been found near Harley Street with a bullet through the back of the head – check my old medical notes for the word ‘empained’!

Mayonnaise

Until the day that she left her house to live with my parents, my grandmother kept in the cupboard under her stairs a stock of toilet rolls which would have been the envy of many a moderate sized supermarket. The reason was simple; a rumour had gone round that there was going to be a shortage of them. My grandmother’s reaction to the word shortage was one of instant and total panic. Shortage of baked beans? In a twinkling she would visit every shop in the neighbourhood and be the proud possessor of enough tins of baked beans to cause a flatulent explosion with the power of a small nuclear bomb. Admittedly it had to be something she herself used. It was pointless suggesting to her that there didn’t seem to be as many Ferraris around as there used to be, or that the burning down of a factory which made chocolate ice cream might destabilise the market.

In just the same way (or, I suppose, in just the opposite way) she would react to any health scare by removing from her house every last trace of the tainted objects. As I grew up I learnt to ignore these things, but as a child I assumed that adults knew best. So when, as the result of a typhoid scare in South America, my grandmother declared that the very smell of a slice of corned beef could wipe out the entire village, I went along with her and resolutely refused to touch it. All logic suggests that it should soon have worn off, but for the next twenty five years, until I became a vegetarian, thus making the whole issue immaterial, no blandishment of Mr Fray or Mr Bentos could persuade me to let a morsel of it pass my lips.

In adult life I discovered that, when it came to health scares, there were many more like my grandmother. One foodstuff after another was declared carcinogenic, an enemy of the cardio-vascular system, a source of BSE or liable to cause an almost instant weight gain of 10 kilos. There was so much to believe that I ended up believing none of it.

Then came that wonderful day when it was announced that raw eggs were a source of salmonella poisoning. Of course all too soon some organisation such as the British Egg Production League (which disappointingly turned out to be composed of humans rather than poultry) magiced up a bevy of tame scientists who declared first that raw eggs were only dangerous to pregnant women over the age of 60, then that they were not dangerous at all, and ultimately even that in some mysterious way they could be said to protect you against salmonella.

But in between, there were those few glorious sun-filled weeks when people stopped filling every sandwich they could find with mayonnaise.

I don’t like mayonnaise. I could not say that I hate it. I eat it regularly. However I eat it regularly not because I enjoy it, but because it is regularly so difficult to get a ready-made sandwich without it.

I suppose I could claim it is all a matter of patriotism – that I refuse to countenance a foodstuff which commemorates a British naval defeat. Mayonnaise is named after Port Mahon, where in 1756 the French Duc de Richlieu asked his chef to produce a celebration meal at which they could all stuff their faces after stuffing the British navy. The chef soon had everything ready except a sauce, at which point he found there was no cream left. So he used olive oil instead, and hoped no one would notice. They did, but still for some inscrutable Gallic reason liked it.

However patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, not the mere disliker of mayo; so I will confine myself to asking: why is it always assumed that we want this emulsified gunk in our sandwiches? Why is there no one prepared to risk niche marketing plain simple food?

I dimly remember as a child a local department store having a sign which appeared to say “See Percy Thrower [the Alan Titchmarsh of his day] in our gardening department” but when examined carefully actually read “See a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Percy Thrower in our gardening department”. I should have remembered this when I allowed my careless heart to skip a beat after I recently saw a range of sandwiches called something along the lines of Plain Simple Foods. One of them advertised ‘Just Cheese’. Or as I saw when I actually picked it up and examined it: Just Cheese and mayo.

Buying a Drink

I cannot speak for the private sector, but it is no longer possible to buy anyone in the public sector a drink. Before some tax official sees me in a pub and shouts out, “Yes you can. Mine’s a pint of heavy with a Manhattan chaser!” let me point out that I am using the phrase in a slightly technical way.

I recently witnessed an act of kindness performed by a worker for the NHS, who, on her day off, left a family barbeque and rushed into Hospital to sort out a problem for an elderly patient rather than leave him worrying for another twenty four hours until she came in legitimately. As she was about to leave him, he reached down and pulled something out of his trousers. Both she and the nurse on duty literally squealed: “No! No! You mustn’t do that!” and leapt back five yards to distance themselves from the obscene object he was now holding in his hand. It was a five pound note.

Except that to him it was not a five pound note. It was a way for someone who was awkward with words to express his gratitude for a favour. It was something which in his younger days (though the actual sum of money would have been very much less) would have been regarded as required politeness.

And except that to her it was her P45. To touch it was instant death to her career.

When did we lose the right to thank people in a financial way? When I was young, at least in the area where I lived, the phrase was “get yourself a drink on me”. There was no compulsion on the recipient to spend it in this way. It could be given to a teetotaler without any offence being taken and without any variation in the formula. The full meaning of the phrase was: “I know you will not get paid for doing this. I understand that if you were to charge me what you ought to be paid for doing it I probably wouldn’t be able to afford it. And I am confident that if I did offer you the going rate you would refuse to take it. So instead I offer this as an acknowledgement that you could legitimately have charged me, and as a token of my gratitude.”

How much you gave was up to you, but it had to be at least the price of a pint of beer rounded up; to give less would be insulting; to give the exact amount would make it appear too literal. The top limit would be controlled by your financial position, but also by the need not to embarrass the recipient by tendering enough to buy a firkin rather than a pint. Provided the money tendered was within those limits, the recipient could if they wished refuse once to appear polite but would then be obliged to accept when it was reoffered with an insistence.

It was, I suppose, a working-class ritual, comparable to what one finds in those books of upper-class etiquette which we now laugh at so heartily – where to seat an Irish peer relative to the Bishop of London, or which fork to use to eat mixed prunes and oysters. And perhaps it is just as laughable: but I still believe pressing a florin into someone’s hand ‘for a drink’ beats the current approved response of trying to find the name and address of the Good Samaritan’s Line Manager and sending them a laudatory letter, especially since it would probably transpire that she should not have done the deed and you have dropped her right in the prunes and oysters.

Hello and Welcome to all Practising or Aspiring Whingers

Whingeing has a long history. Some believe that it goes back to Adam and Eve, though given that they had no money, no clothes, no house, and only one apple between them, yet still thought they were in Paradise, they were possibly amongst the least whiney of our forebears. Surely in fact it was God who began the whingeing, and continued it through most of the Old Testament?

The English have been inclined to hwinsian and the Scots to quhinge since the earliest stages of their language, stretching back almost to the time of the Conqueror (who, I admit, to anticipate any Caledonian whingeing,  arrived in 1066 in England, 1072 in Scotland); even in fact before the English were called Whingeing Poms. (I note that the dictionary defines a Pom as British, but has any Scot - with the possible exception of Mike Denness - ever been referred to as a Pom?)

Joyce, Beckett and Synge all used the term, but in 1983 it finally rose above the world of mere literary giants by appearing in the Times, and much of the nation has whinged ever since.

One of my favourite stories is of the shop steward who called a mass meeting of members and announced what he considered a well negotiated and advantageous settlement in that wages were doubled, holidays trebled, daily hours halved and they would only have to work on Fridays. From the back came the response, “What? Every bloody Friday?” Good man!

This ability to find something wrong in everything is the mark of the Advanced Whinger. Whilst you may aspire to such heights, no inexperienced whinger should attempt this kind of thing until having mastered the basics.

This blog-based beginner’s guide is not a practical do-it-yourself step-by-step instruction manual. As even the most inexperienced whinger knows these never accord with reality, whether they are of the written type which seem to be created by running a computer translation programme on the Serbo-Croat weather forecast, or the wordless illustration type which seem to be recycling the storyboards for 1950s Hungarian cartoons. Instead it will be an anthology of my personal whinges which you may use as templates to create your own.

An examination of quotations about whingeing (which for Googling purposes may need to be spelt ‘complaining’) will find a large number which advise against the practice; but I prefer to take my stand with the character in Princess Ida:

Whene'er I spoke sarcastic joke replete with malice spiteful,
This people mild politely smil'd, and voted me delightful!
Ah! Oh, don't the days seem lank and long when all goes right and nothing goes wrong,
And isn't your life extremely flat with nothing whatever to grumble at.