Across the pond

What I did not get around to writing in my blog yesterday was the good news. On Thursday I went to see my doctor. He listened to my chest and pronounced that he could detect no signs of emphysemnia or chronic bronchitis. Despite the fact that I had smoked more than twenty cigarettes the previous day while struggling to write an external examiner’s report for a Ph D thesis. It does not prove that I have not got it. But since the hourly coughing that my family has had to endure for the past three weeks had already begun to abate, he is probably right.

I was probably suffering from nothing more serious than a version of the common cold rather than anything terminal. So clearly for the present there is no need to waste NHS money on X-rays, etc, or even on a course of anti-biotics. Equally clearly I can expect to suffer increasingly frequent bouts of coughing unless I stop smoking. So, following up the comment of my blog from Svetla I have booked myself a session with an Alexander practioner for next Thursday.

Meanwhile I am smoking over a pack a day meeting an overdue deadline for a book chapter about the journalist, James Cameron, who was, and is, a hero for many of the best British journalists editing and writing the newspapers we read today.

In reseaching for, and writing that chapter, I realised with increasing certainty, that both Cameron, and his best friend, Vicky, the political cartoonist, were manic depressives, although neither was diagnosed as such.

Cameron wrote this about him, in his introduction to the selection of Vicky’s cartoons published by Penguin in 1967, shortly after Vicky’s death.

‘He was a man who carried always with him a mingled charge of delight and despair. He chose with us, his friends, to enchant us with the one and conceal from us the other.’

Lower down in that article Cameron wrote this paragraph.

‘On 20 February 1966 he went where he always went in time of trouble, to the concert hall, to hear Klemperer conducting Beethoven’s Eighth. Three days later he went to bed in Upper Wimpole Street and made provision that this night, at least, he would sleep, and that tomorrow’s papers would bring him no more sadness.’

Cameron’s verdict was that Vicky killed himself because of his despair at the state of the world.

No coroner would have brought in such a verdict. No expert psychiartrist witness would have dared testify that this was even a possibility.

But maybe, just maybe, Cameron knew more about his best friend, than any expert could discover from studying the ‘evidence’.