Theodore Dalrymple

To a hammer everything is a nail, and to a doctor everything is a symptom. I was recently in a supermarket in a handsome and as yet unspoilt town in the west of England where, as my wife observed (being French and therefore a close observer of the English in all their guises), every woman over the age of 50 looked and spoke as if she had stepped from the pages of a novel by Barbara Pym. I looked at the purchases of the man in front of me. The man himself, clearly not of the lowest social echelon, dressed in green country tweedery, was only in his late thirties, but his face was already somewhat ravaged. His hand trembled slightly and he was jocular in a slightly guilty way.

The other day, the 9.56 bus to the nearest train station was late and the people at the stop — of whom I was by far the youngest — began to grumble a little. Then, looming out of the mist, appeared the driver. The other day, the 9.56 bus to the nearest train station was late and the people at the stop — of whom I was by far the youngest — began to grumble a little. Then, looming out of the mist, appeared the driver. ‘I’m sorry, the brakes have failed,’ he said. ‘I’m not prepared to risk your lives and they won’t be repaired until the next bus.’ The next bus — they are all decrepit round here, resuscitated from scrap heaps — was in an hour’s time.

Anyone who doubts that, at least from the cultural point of view, the Soviet Union won the Cold War in Britain hands down should attend a conference organised for doctors about impending organisational changes in the National Health Service (and organisational changes are always impending in the NHS). There he will be convinced that every doctor will soon have a political commissar working alongside him to remind him of his wider responsibilities to government and party. Doctors in Britain are now roughly in the position of Tsarist generals, scientists and ‘specialists’ in the first phase of the Russian Revolution: necessary but distrusted, hated and feared, and to be eliminated altogether as soon as possible.

Staying recently on the Herengracht in Amsterdam, I found myself trying to solve a psychological puzzle. How could anyone have thought for a moment, how could any mind have entertained even for an infinitesimal fraction of an instant, that 17th- and 18th-century Dutch domestic architecture — as elegant as any in the whole history of the world — should be pulled down to make room for buildings in the Novosibirsk style? But that, at one time, was the idea of Joop den Uyl, former prime minister of the Netherlands, whose bust is still to be seen in the city hall of Amsterdam.

All old Africa hands have a story of their narrow escape from charging elephants to tell. I have one myself, but I know from experience that such stories are usually more interesting to the teller than to the told. They are not quite as bad as big game hunting stories, however: they are the real conversation killers. I knew an African re-tread (as expatriates who cannot forget their time in Africa are sometimes called) who used to bore dinner parties with his claim to have shot 50 zebra in an afternoon. ‘What did you use?’ asked an incredulous guest (I had heard the story several times before). ‘A machine gun?’ The only creature I shot on my one big game hunting expedition in Africa was a little green snake.

My one regret at having retired from the National Health Service is that I no longer receive official circulars. I used for a time to derive a small secondary income from publishing them; and such was their idiocy that very little commentary on my part was required. They spoke for themselves; it was money for old rope. I am glad to say, however, that old friends keep me in touch with Gogolio-Kafkaesque-Orwellian developments in Europe’s biggest employer (now that the Gulag is no more).

I think I should abandon the world: I am too easily irritated by it. I should follow the example of Xavier de Maistre, brother of the brilliantly reactionary philosopher, Joseph, and stick henceforth to my room. In his Voyage autour de ma chambre, de Maistre tells us that by describing his journey he is offering an infinite number of unhappy persons a perfect antidote to boredom, and that the pleasure of such a journey is proof also against the ceaseless envy of men. Moreover it is cheap, an advantage not to be sneezed at in time of rising prices. No sooner do I leave my house than I meet, or at least pass, people who chew gum. This vile habit makes them look like vicious and ruthless but stupid ruminant carnivores, chewing endlessly on the gristle of a corpse.

Recently while travelling on the London Underground, the opening words of Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte ran through my mind like a refrain: ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic events and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’ Why, you might ask, did this passage insinuate itself into my brain on the District Line between West Brompton and Earl’s Court? Standing opposite me was a young man badly dressed in black, on whose baseball cap was inscribed the word ‘Victim’. On his black T-shirt were the words, ‘I wish I could be you’, which implied self-pity on an industrial scale.

These things are sent to try us: I’m speaking now of circular letters from the General Medical Council. I recently received a second such letter about the Council’s Ethnicity Census from the president of the Council: Toward the end of 2007, I wrote asking for your help with an important project designed to help us to understand better the diversity of doctors registered with the GMC. We were hugely encouraged by the response we received and now have ethnicity data for over 60% of all registered doctors in the UK. To complete the picture we still need your support and I would be grateful if you would provide the information we seek. What is the purpose of the GMC’s racialist project?

No doubt a Martian arriving on earth for the first time would perceive little difference between an inhabitant of Great Britain and an inhabitant of New Britain (off the coast of New Guinea), except perhaps that the former showed a greater propensity than the latter to get drunk and scream in public. Similarity and difference are what G.E. Moore would have called non-natural qualities, and are in the eye of the beholder: as a woman was overheard to remark in a Dublin bus, now that the Emerald Isle has become an El Dorado, ‘Russians, Nigerians, Chinese, they all look the same to me.’   It was Freud who remarked on the narcissism of small differences: but what, exactly, are small differences?

The last time I played rugby, I was sent off for reading on the field. It was my small satirical protest against the supposition that my character would be much improved by having my knees dragged along icy ground, or my hand trodden into the mud by boys who, by dint of no effort of their own, were twice as large as I. Now I am not so sure. It appears to me that every soul should be tempered a little in the fire of humiliation and suffering: though the precise dose of laudably character-forming humiliation and suffering is, I admit, difficult to estimate and dole out. In fact, it is impossible, which is why human beings usually turn out badly. Unfortunately, all roads lead to resentment.

The image of women in Victorian times veered between that of madonna and whore, but nowadays in Britain it veers between harridan and slut. This is only natural in a country where vulgarity is not only triumphant, but militant and deeply ideological. The men, of course, are just as bad. Recently, I flew to an Aegean resort now much favoured by our permanently bronzed proletarians. I was going to a conference of intellectuals there. The pudgy tattooed women en route to paradise had diamonds in their navels; the shaven-headed men, lager made flesh, had skimpy vests stretched painfully over their beer bellies, gold chains and an earring to prove their indelible individuality.

Staying recently in a handsome French provincial city, I could not help thinking, as I walked down its silent cobbled streets at night, what it would have been like if it had been in England. How restful is that deep, urban silence, which the young English so hate for fear of having to attend to their own thoughts! The same streets in England would have been alive with the sound of screaming: down them would have staggered shivering, drunken, scantily clad sluts with bared pudgy midriffs of pasty flesh and bejewelled navels, tattoos on one of their fat shoulders or above the beginning of the cleft in their buttocks. As for the young men, better not to describe them at all, lest they should accuse you of looking at them and smash a glass in your face.

Life has taught me very little, but one thing I have learned is that the only employee of local councils with a genuine vocation is the rat-catcher. He always loves his rats, eliminating them with the deepest respect, and is extremely knowledgeable and interesting about their habits — which are, indeed, very interesting. The last time I had to call a rat-catcher out, I smelt a rat under my dining room floorboards where it had died. The rat-catcher confirmed my diagnosis and told me that I had two choices: I could lift up the floorboards and remove the rat, or I could wait six weeks, after which the smell would go. Because I knew that rat-catchers are always competent, I trusted him and decided to wait; and lo, the smell disappeared after exactly six weeks.

Theodore Dalrymple delivers a Global Warning It is when you see the English enjoying themselves that you realise the futility of life. Perhaps I should say trying to enjoy themselves: for in the attempt, rarely successful, they turn either glum or public nuisance. The occasion of these melancholy reflections was a rainy weekend in Torquay, whither I had gone to attend a medical conference. It took place in the English equivalent of a grand hotel: a mixture of pomposity and grubbiness, whose management had managed to find the last waitresses in Eastern Europe trained in the Soviet school of hostelry. During a break in the proceedings, I took a ride into the centre of the town.

I realised that the town was a true community as soon as I heard a rumour that an old lady, a herbalist, had poisoned one of her neighbours. That is what community means: caring enough to poison people. In cities, contact with neighbours is so fleeting and impersonal that antagonism can be expressed only with baseball bats, a crude method requiring little cunning. If Marx were alive today, he would speak of the idiocy of urban life. In a small town, the rest of the world hardly exists. One soon finds what happens there to be more interesting than what happens in the wide world beyond.

Death and taxes: these, according to Benjamin Franklin, are the two immovables of human existence. In modern life, however, there is a third: drivel, from which, try as one might, it is now impossible to escape. I concede, of course, that it is possible that it’s my sensitivity to drivel rather than its incidence or prevalence (to borrow two terms from epidemiology) that has increased over the years. But I don’t think so: I can’t go further than a few yards from my front door without encountering some. That wasn’t true always. Personally, I blame broadcasting. It insinuates itself everywhere almost without human agency, or none at any rate that dare acknowledge itself, and rots the brain utterly.