The napkin was on the floor of the Parisian café. Someone would have picked it up, it didn’t have to be me, but no, down I went and up I came, a different being. A being with back pain.
Now almost everyone I know has back pain and because years ago, a dear man, the Canon Christopher Pilkington who moonlighted as a healer in Ston Easton near Bath, told me I might also have healing abilities, I do spend a fair amount of time waving my tingling hands over my friends’ painful areas. I always feel like a fraud but, it has to be said, sometimes my friends feel better and hey, what have we got to lose, except time, and in the words of Joyce Grenfell: “There is no such thing as Time. Only this very minute. And I’m in it, thank the Lord.”
When I asked the great actress and centenarian Thelma Ruby to sing this in our recent cabaret, she put on a funny “old lady” voice. I told her: “Thelma, You don’t have to do that. You’re a hundred.” She looked astonished, as if to say, “I may be a hundred but I’m not AN OLD LADY!”
I went to see the Canon when I had a benign tumour in my neck and when he came to greet me, he was stooped over and clearly in pain. As he laid his hands inches from my neck, I instinctively laid mine on his back and we stood there for some time, two erstwhile strangers, looking like a Henry Moore sculpture and perfectly in tune. His beautiful wife, Patricia took it all in her stride and we started a conversation about religion and spirituality which lasted until they both died.
“I saw Christopher on the stairs today,” she would tell me blithely, many moons after his demise, “He wants me to write a book about healing with him.” There was never a moment when I did not believe her. The book sits on my shelf. I should reread it.
So now, I’m back from the weekend in Paris where I walked my feet into platters of pain and gorged myself on Hockney, Monet and too many sharing plates, all of them to die for. The 70 stairs up to our borrowed apartment had to be negotiated in the way a giraffe negotiates rising from the splits.
I am home now but I am in a conundrum. Who to consult? My osteopath clicked out into the great unknown, my acupuncturist is abroad or krenk ‘cos I haven’t consulted her since Mafeking was relieved. I do love a shiatsu massage… but only as a treat. I’m not exactly sure what a chiropractor does but I know from the spasms that something by my right hip is “out” so perhaps one of them could put it back again.
My son’s sciatica has been cured by the Alexander technique but doesn’t that take months to sink into your skeletal system via your brain? Then again, what if I just leave it to get better on its own? Rubbing in Voltarol does little or nothing except make me smell like my late mother who was a slave to something called Algipan. In her mind, along with a menthol stick for migraine, a Redoxon tablet before going out, and Andrew’s Liver Salts, it cured everything.
My father’s universal panacea was hot water. “Stick it in hot water” he would shout from behind The Hull Daily Mail, which was fine if you had a “spell’”(Hull for splinter) in your finger but useless when you’d developed tonsillitis or broken an ankle. The doctor in Hull had all the ladies on copious quantities of Valium and the world ticked by nicely from Shabbos to Shabbos, Kalooki to Up-Words and bean and barley to borscht.
I remember a film of 1979 called Starting Over, which starred Burt Reynolds and Jill Murphy about a divorcee and his new partner who moves in with him before they marry. They go to Bergdorf Goodman to buy a new bed and he has a panic attack in the bedding department. A doctor is called as Reynolds lies on the bed hyperventilating and Jill Murphy flaps around. The doctor turns to the large crowd which has gathered around the bed and says: “Does anyone here have a Valium?” And every woman in the crowd dives into her handbag. It caught the zeitgeist perfectly.
Whatever happened to good old Valium I wonder? Or diazepam, its code name? It fell out of fashion because of fear of addiction I assume, and then the likes of Prozac became more popular. Valium works like a beta blocker for anxiety, and don’t we all take them now for first night nerves? I really wish I didn’t have to take anything. I wish I could regulate my blood pressure by mindfulness or essence of dandelion root or listening to the music of bottle-nosed dolphins.
After reading Thyroid Healing by Anthony William, I drank celery juice for a year first thing in the morning. to cure low thyroid. My levels remained low, so I succumbed to thyroxin. “It’s a good hormone,” said the GP, so, with resentment, I take it every day, although I do wonder what a bad hormone is? Cortisol is detrimental for weight gain and blood pressure, but it’s beneficial for stress. Magnesium is as necessary as sodium, I read, but does it have to come in five different kinds? One for sleep, one for constipation, one for cardiovascular health, pregnancy issues and one for luck – that’s a lot of bottles down the health store and a bill the size of two shiatsu massages.
We all lack vitamin B12 I‘m told but our bodies can only absorb it by injection. At the Old Vic in the 1970s a doctor used to come around in between matinee and evening, and make stinging holes in me and most of my colleagues, and boy, was it a good show that night!
It all reminds me of the old joke about three men running in the desert, a Protestant, a Catholic and a Jew: “Oh dear oh dear,” moans the Protestant, “I’m so thirsty I must have water, I must have water.”
The Catholic winces and moans: “I’m so thirsty, so thirsty, I must have whisky, I must have whisky.”
The Jewish runner gasps and says: “I’m so thirsty, I’m so thirsty… I must have diabetes.”
To get more from opinion, click here to sign up for our free Editor's Picks newsletter.