Mister Duffy Changes Trains

Things Fall Apart Our book group’s choice this month was The Catcher in the Rye , by JD Salinger. A large number of us had read the book as teenagers, and it was interesting to note how our reactions had changed when rereading it as old geezers. Just in case you haven’t read it, it is about a privileged but severely troubled 16-year-old American male, Holden Caulfield, going AWOL for 48 hours in New York City. Substantial passages reflect a typical teenager’s negative attitude to almost all of the values of the previous generation, as ‘phoney’. When I first read it, I felt some sympathy with the narrator, although he was the ultimate cynic and I was a nerdy swot. Now when I read it, I notice three things: first, Holden Caulfield is a monumental pain in the neck; second, he must be a terrible worry to his poor parents; and third, he exhibits some of the classic symptoms of bipolarity. Digression: besides Catcher in the Rye , there are some brilliant descriptions of mental illness in lit...

  Doctor, Doctor Around a year ago I got a phone call from the pharmacist attached to the general practice at which I am registered. He wanted to review my repeat prescription and indeed tried to talk me out of having it any more, to no avail. He then completely overstepped the mark, in my view, and asked me a lot of offensive and impertinent questions about my drinking. He subsequently confounded this social faux pas by exhorting me to cut down on my alcohol consumption, his position being that I would laugh the other side of my face when I got a cardiovascular or cerebrovascular event. As someone who was responsible for a substantial tranche of the research on alcohol and chronic disease risk, I told him, albeit in more diplomatic terms, to go and take a running jump to himself. Who the **** did he think he was, telling me what to do, jumped up little punk bastard? Anyway, a few days later, one of the doctors rang me up and gave me a telling off. I was humble and conciliatory...

  Interior Dialogue We all have to make decisions, so we all have internal arguments with ourselves. Sometimes, such arguments are open-ended, a process of iteration towards a choice of various options of action. On other occasions, they are simple dichotomies with a devil on your left shoulder saying, ‘Go on, go on,’ and an angel on your right saying, ‘No, Stephen, be a good boy, don’t make me ashamed of you.’ I don’t know if you have read any of the Don Camillo books, by Giovanni Guareschi. These are set in a small town in the Po valley in northern Italy in the nineteen-fifties, and tell stories of the perennial feuding between the parish priest, Don Camillo, and the communist mayor Peppone. They are very amusing and each chapter is accompanied by little drawings involving angels and devils. When the devil-on-the-left-shoulder-angel-on-the-right situation arises, I always have a mental picture of Guareschi’s charming illustrations. More of these ethical dichotomies later. A...

                                                             Sea  tractor, Burgh Island What I Did on my Holidays We returned from our holiday on Sunday. We had a lovely time and indeed I felt quite tearful at coming back to routine life. We had two days in Bath, two days in Burgh Island, Devon, a night at my sister Kath’s in Bognor and then three days in Chichester, with both sons joining us. You couldn’t ask for more. I won’t bore you with a diary of our activities, but I will say that Burgh Island is quite an experience. The Burgh Island Hotel is a small and luxurious place with impressive 1920’s Art Deco fittings. It is situated on a lump of land which can be reached by walking across the sand when the tide is low, but is an island when the tide is high. During the latter periods, the hotel provid...