Spectator Life

Snus is a smokeless nicotine product that you insert between your gum and your upper lip. Your saliva soaks into the pouch which in turn releases nicotine, entering the bloodstream without a million tiny pesky tar particulates. In the UK, it is illegal to sell tobacco-based snus, though the non-tobacco variant, also known as nicotine pouches, is legal and widely accessible. The industry is worth something like £250 million and is growing rapidly. It’s a discreet way for smokers to opt for a safer hit of nicotine – so, inevitably, Labour is looking to ban it. I think part of the charm of snus is its subtlety. A vape can be garish and obnoxious Labour’s authoritarian approach to nicotine products is a confusing one.

My wife had already been given morphine and they had just topped her up with ketamine. She was now so high she didn’t seem even to know where she was. And this was probably a good thing, given she was strapped to a stretcher on the rear deck of a ferry in the Bay of Biscay, 100 miles off the French coast, and about to be hoisted some 75 feet into the night sky to a helicopter that was struggling in an increasingly stiff wind. I asked her what the flight had been like. She said she had been so out of it she thought she was appearing in a remake of Apocalypse Now The reason for all this drama was that she had abruptly dislocated her hip as we sailed from Portsmouth to Santander. Before I relate what happened next, though, some background.

I used to think a lot about Switzerland and how to accrue enough morphine to top myself when the time comes. But yay, at last, an assisted dying law seems likely and I can stop plotting. No one talks about death. But oldies think about it all the time, not deliberately – it just inserts itself into everything. I’d like to write another trilogy, but will I finish it? Doubt if I’ll last through novel 1, never mind 2 and 3. When the garden centre chap tells me to buy tiny saplings and avoid 15-foot trees which will likely die, I know I’ll be dead before the three-footers look anything like a copse. But he quotes the ancient Greek proverb, ‘Society thrives where wise men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit’.

Every few weeks, an attention seeker – er, truth seeker – raves to a media outlet about what they experienced when they were ‘clinically dead’. In last week’s Daily Mail, it was the turn of Julia Poole, a 61-year-old ‘spiritualist’ from Cornwall, who suffered an overdose at the age of 21. Poole, who describes her job as ‘spiritual and personal empowerment coach, psychic, channeller, energy healer, hypnotherapist, law of attraction teacher and author’, states that she was ‘clinically dead’ for three days and was ‘taken to Higher Realms’ by angels, who told her it was not yet her time to die.

Michael Vaughan has been through hell, twice. The first time was well publicised. On thin grounds, the former England cricket captain was accused of racism and was then subjected to a brutal investigation by cricket’s overlords. Defending himself valiantly, he was exonerated. The second circle of awfulness, though, was just as bad – he became seriously ill. Last week, he talked to the Telegraph about the horrific symptoms that suddenly reared up, and of his search for a cure.

Like many Brits, I never had perfect teeth. Even when I was young they weren’t gleaming white and the two front ones had a gap between them. I grew to quite like my gap – ‘diastema’ to give it the correct name – and found out all kinds of interesting facts about it. In The Canterbury Tales, the ‘gap-toothed Wife of Bath’ symbolised the supposedly lustful nature of diastemata types, who include Madonna and Brigitte Bardot. In some African countries, the condition is considered so attractive that there is a roaring trade in cosmetic dentistry to create it.

If you have been to the cinema recently and arrived in time for the adverts, you may already know what I am talking about. Somewhere between promotions for mega-burgers in glorious technicolour and exotic holiday destinations, you are plunged into what seems an endless, but is actually only a two-minute, horror flick, entitled ‘Sicker than the patients’.  The fitness of at least half  the nursing and support staff I encountered left a lot to be desired It is two minutes of unrelieved gloom and despair, book-ended by a family rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’ around a sick patient (Daddy), who – lucky guy – appears to have a room to himself, not just a curtained bay where the sounds and smells penetrate from all around.

Gen Z is often described as a sexless generation. We are having less sex than previous generations did at the same age. We are less likely to have been on a date. More of us identify as asexual. In fact, according to this Stonewall report, more Gen Z Brits identify as asexual (5 per cent) than gay (2 per cent) or lesbian (3 per cent). All kinds of cultural and social influences could explain this. Early exposure and addiction to online porn might be one. I’ve written about risk-aversion and fear of rejection as another. Increased awareness of asexuality too. But there is also, I think, a medical explanation. More specifically: the widespread use of SSRIs and their sexual side-effects. This is more than just low libido.

A year or so ago my mum, 90, took her cat to the vet. She left an hour later, relieved of nearly £800. Her aged cat it appeared needed tests, a scan and various medicines. My mum lives in a poor area of London and is on a state pension. She has little spare money, but she loves that cat and when a vet says he needs tests, who was she to say no? Most of the other people using that vet are in similar circumstances. I was outraged so rang the HQ of the firm and got through to the medical director who told me he made no apologies for his company offering a ‘Rolls-Royce service’. I wonder in what world do regular moggies need an annual checkup? And there we have the problem with vets. Across the country, sole-trader vets have been swallowed up by a number of very big firms.

Lonely children often grow up to be lonely, not to mention anxious and depressed. In one study, after factoring in profession, parenting style and relationship, sleep patterns, and dietary habits, only children were more likely to display symptoms associated with anxiety and depression than those with siblings. One, it seems, really is the loneliest number. Friendships come and go, and chances are our parents will leave this earth long before we do but, through it all, siblings are there by our sides The western world is already consumed by a loneliness epidemic. Our falling birth rate and the rise in single-child households likely makes this worse.

There is no clearer demonstration of the difference between America and Britain than their attitudes towards teeth. In America, you fix them. Doesn’t matter if they’re nearly straight. You subject yourself to years of semi-torture to achieve the American dream – a white picket fence of perfectly uniform teeth. Most perfect teeth are artificial – some so artificial that they’ve entirely replaced the real ones When I was about 11, I was taken to the orthodontist to straighten out my slightly overlapping front teeth. I dreaded those appointments. Our orthodontist was a tall, overly friendly man with large hairy fingers which he would shove into my tiny mouth without gloves. Surely that broke protocol even back then.

There is much to bemoan about the NHS, from the cruel entitlement of its junior doctors to its zest for hiring diversity and inclusion staff when many people can’t even see a GP. I have been a harsh and consistent critic for years. I don’t like the cultish, Big Brother vibes, the gawping black hole for funds that seem mismanaged, and I don’t like the socialism.  I had a caesarian section less than a fortnight ago. I’d have one again just for fun I still don’t like those things, but I have now seen the charm of the rackety NHS. Having a baby, I discovered the it’s generosity. I had a caesarian section less than a fortnight ago at UCLH in central London. I’d have one again just for fun.

It’s a long time since I took a powerful drug that wasn’t dispensed by a pharmacist. Last winter, during what has become the annual post-Christmas Covid collapse, I searched in vain for the codeine cough linctus I’d been prescribed when the virus first struck four years ago.  Why must we suffer because a few scrotes misuse it? ‘Keep it on the bedside table,’ said my GP at the time, ‘and when you wake up coughing in the night, take a swig and you’ll be able to go back to sleep.’ She was right: it provided blissful relief and precious, life-enhancing sleep. But when I asked my current GP (we’ve since moved out of London), she gazed into the middle distance and made gnomic pronouncements of the ilk, ‘We don’t really do that any more’.

They’re everywhere, it seems: in the oceans, the fish, the soil, our drinking water, our vegetables, our grains and cereals, our meat – even in us. Microplastics and smaller nanoplastics are tiny particles of plastic flubbage measuring half a centimetre or less that result from the degradation of plastic refuse, and according to recent news coverage the world is simply crawling with the stuff. Anxiety might turn out to be the biggest health problem caused by microplastics It’s getting everyone in a tizzy. On the one hand you can’t possibly avoid it, since it’s already more or less everywhere. But you must do something, the reports insist, or risk a plethora of terrifying health consequences: cancer, hormonal imbalance, diabetes, reproductive problems, and more.

I’m sleeping with the actor Richard E. Grant at the minute and can highly recommend the experience. He’s reading Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage to me and has the perfect voice for it, faintly lascivious but not disturbingly so. As for the content, it’s just what’s wanted – engaging but not too stimulating. Like so many of us, I’m nodding off to the sound of an audiobook. Crime novels work well, as long as they are not overly gruesome or suspenseful I was already enamoured of Richard E. Grant who’d, on other late nights, read me Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea. The plot unfolds at a gentle pace and nothing unduly dramatic or loud happens – there are no car chases or football chants.

Several years ago, I went for a swim after I’d been for a job interview. I’d just finished my lengths, had my shower, and as I wrestled my knickers back on, a voice from behind me said ‘It’s Ettie, isn’t it?’ Quite how she recognised my bare bottom I don’t know, but the woman who’d interviewed me earlier in the day was certainly keen to continue our conversation, up close, personal and starkers. And for those of you who’ve never tried, I can assure you that trying to juggle one’s bosom into a bra in a flustered hurry when one is still slightly damp to protect what shreds of self-respect remain is inelegant at best.

How very nice that the King is now out of hospital, back home and, will, we are told, soon be back in business with his red boxes. Is it too much to hope that we can be spared further updates on his condition?  ‘All Hail the King’s Prostate Honesty’. Oh yuck. Can we stop? We have, I think, heard enough about his enlarged prostate. Charles has been praised for being so open about his diagnosis in the hope that it will encourage other men to investigate this important organ. NHS England declared that the ‘enlarged prostate’ page on its website was read every five seconds on the day of the King’s diagnosis, which is terrifically gratifying. The Telegraph was terrifically upbeat about Charles ensuring that men ‘do not die of embarrassment’.

Senior management was recently walking down the street and took a funny turn. With her habitual stoicism she ignored the swelling in her foot for two weeks until I finally persuaded her to go to the urgences (emergency room) at the local Polyclinique Pasteur, a mini-hospital in Pézenas, the town four miles from our village.  Nobody here seems to be waiting 84 hours in an emergency room, as one NHS patient recently did in Scotland There wasn’t much they could do about the annoying bone in her foot, that was shown to be broken after a wait-free visit to the on-site radiology suite. But the diagnosis was rapid. The advice on what to do and not to do is proving effective. As encounters with the medical milieu go, I’d give it five stars.

It shames me to admit this, but I haven’t been near a public swimming pool for many a year. Hotel pools, yes; the sea – occasionally, in parts of the world with predictable warmth. But I have resisted the new wave of ‘wild’ swimming and was never a regular – to be honest even an irregular – at the Hampstead Ladies’ Pond. Nor have I frequented health clubs or spas, though I did go to enquire about one that had opened nearby; then came the pandemic.    As a one-time regular pool user, I am taking another look. This is because I have just completed my four-session NHS allocation of hydrotherapy (for a broken ankle).

A team of nurses was trying to ascertain whether my wife was pregnant. It didn’t seem very likely. She’ll be 57 in a couple of months, went through the menopause over a decade ago and has been on HRT for several years. And she hasn’t had IVF. Insofar as one can be certain about such matters, I believe I have been her only sexual partner for two decades – and I’ve had a vasectomy. Furthermore, were she to be pregnant and go on to give birth she would leap straight into the global top 100 oldest mothers of all time list. So, no, it didn’t seem likely.   A team of three assembled to put screens around her so that she could urinate on her trolley.