A Bang on the Head

Sitting unhappily on the floor because something drastic had happened, although I couldn’t quite understand what. Had the chair broken under the body’s weight? Or was a loose chair leg being swung by somebody, one of those bawdy girls perhaps in the tavern, or somebody else on a street corner, as we like to put it, somebody in authority. Either way the end result was a painful bang on the head, so that we are forced to think about the work of understanding and judgement.

One gets the feeling somebody is trying to knock some sense into us. Elsewhere in the latest LRB there is a review of Julian Barnes’s latest work, which refers to the characteristic “stupidly intelligent” nature of the English. I doubt it is a peculiarly English characteristic myself. The whole world is stupidly intelligent in my opinion, meaning this oxymoron aspect of human nature is universal. A trap we all fall into, only we English have our own perverse ways of engaging in the work understanding and judgement. Or of misunderstanding and non-judgement for that matter. Stupidly intelligent.

Take the NHS. These days, for want of giving a longer explanation, I sometimes call myself a semi-retired doctor; an English way of apologizing for the fact that I am no longer working for the NHS, but equally making it clear that I have not sold out to taking the private medical shilling. I am trying in a rather shifty sounding way to suggest something else, that I am still in work, but that I am not in gainful employment. I could call myself a writer by the same definition, but I lack the essential qualification of having been published. Except of course here. Semi-retired writer then – would that work just as well as semi-retired doctor?.

I am ashamed at this moment how poorly I am expressing both my understanding and judgement. It is that old customary habit of us English, an excitement and that sense of shame of course. Bend over boy, this will hurt me more than it will hurt you. And so on. Punishments for your (or even our) own good that make us cringe, and other corrective measures (indifferent whether these are right wing or left wing corrective measures). Like treatments, as I recall when I was a working properly as a doctor, which I was and still remain ashamed of. Not the science of course (the treatments sometimes worked!). The science was always persuasive (stupidly intelligent).

But ashamed of the one level of morality I had for life, and the other for the bedside. They used to call me a caring doctor, and I think I was, but that only made it worse. So eventually (and prematurely… officially they call it early retirement these days and the pension – albeit reduced – is offered at 65… or maybe it is 66… or 67), the white coat had to come off: a sort of public self-outing.

The shadow of his equipage. Once, a fear pierced him? Welcome under the shade of my kiosk.


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