Violence

Time travel on a train platform, at the end of an exhausting day - out of nowhere, it is December 1993 and I'm in the corridor at top of one of the stairwells in my old college building, arguing with Anna. We have split up a few days before - nothing new there, we do that all the time. We can split up several times in an evening and we often do: our shouting, late at night, keeps the neighbours awake. There are more fireworks to come, further down the line. There will be cups thrown hard at walls, breaking into jagged, ugly fragments, and there will be nights where I chase her down Catte Street in the cold, undignified in my pyjamas, standing in the path of her bicycle like a man lying in front of a bulldozer and ordering her, begging her, to stick around and finish what she's started. I don't think most people have as many break-ups in their lifetime as I will with Anna, although all that is still in the future in December 1993.

This particular break-up is different, because we don't get back together that night, that week or that month. Instead, I am edging towards getting together with somebody else and Anna somehow knows that, because women always seem to instinctively sense that kind of thing. I do get back together with her eventually, but only when I've done enough damage to give her ammunition for the rest of our time together. Anyway, this particular night has always stayed in my memory because it is the first - though by no means the last - time that she hits me.

Many things, like accidents, blunders and losses, happen in slow motion. You see them unfold more gradually than they could ever actually happen, frame by frame, with the grim inevitability which always comes with regret. You'll have to take my word for it that being hit is nothing like that. One minute her hand is by her side, the next it's across my face, a sharp flash, blink and you'll miss it. It's such an unreal thing to happen that it's easy to feel like it didn't, easy to pretend. Or at least it would be, except that she chips my tooth that night.

The reason it happened, that time, was the same as the reason that it happens every time after that. She was angry - about her childhood, her parents, feeling like she was missing out, not fitting in - and she had no other way to express it. The words didn't come for her the way they did for me, she couldn't drip spite the way I could, so this was the outlet. And after a while, it must have been my fault too because I did drip spite, understanding perfectly well what the consequences were. When you know someone well enough, you can hurt them. They can hurt you. And, as it turns out, you can make them hurt you - a lesson I learned early on. I pressed those buttons of hers knowing what they did. I was complicit. I must have been. When she threw that cup at the wall I was right behind her, guiding her arm.

I learned other things from it apart from the awareness that I could make her hit me if I pushed her far enough, apart from my complicity. I learned that when this sort of thing happens to a man it's funny. It became a running joke with my friends, my regular Monday morning trips to the optician in the city centre, asking them to adjust my spectacles so they sat right on my face again. I had Sundays where I couldn't really leave my room, the lopsided frames too embarrassing to wear down the bar, or to the pub. There are only so many times you can pretend that you sat on your glasses, except that of course when you're a man that isn't true. You can pretend as often as you like, because this sort of thing doesn't happen to a man. You say I'm so clumsy, and you are always believed.

Another time she ambushed me at the foot of the stairs and hit me so hard the plastic nose piece flew off and the metal gouged a cut by the bridge of my nose. Minutes later, I was on the payphone in the basement, dabbing my face with a bright red tissue, talking to my father with the BT chargecard he'd so kindly given me at the start of my university career. I told him what had just happened: he found it hilarious. I laughed along, because I didn't see much alternative. My life was turning into slapstick, and if I didn't join in I'd just be doubly a victim. Besides, if it was that bad I would have left, wouldn't I?

I wouldn't have left. She was my first real girlfriend, and I'd never thought I'd get one, and I never stopped to think about whether it was right or normal. She was so very pretty.

One time she hit me, and I hit her back. Even I knew that wasn't right or normal, but by then I felt responsible for everything - when she hit me it was somehow my fault, when I hit her that was somehow my fault too. I hated the fact that she could press buttons I didn't know existed, that I didn't want to exist. When it happens to a woman it isn't funny, and I couldn't even say that she started it, because what there was between us was a team effort, a horrible collaboration that was both our faults. I never did it again.

All this comes to me, out of nowhere, as I stand on the platform watching the afternoon sun glinting off the glass of the office block, my train late again. There are consequences long after that night, those buttons clicking, that flash and the stunned numbness that followed it. You wouldn't know this about me unless I told you, but I flinch every time my wife raises her hands quickly near my face, even after all this time. It's an involuntary response that has ruined dozens of moments of tenderness. It's a running joke now that I'm like a rescue dog, because I'm still making a joke of it, even now. I can still feel the chip in my tooth with my tongue, twenty years later, if I try. It's a warm muggy day, the first time I haven't worn a coat to work all year, but for a second I feel the kind of cold that no embrace can completely wipe away.

Thirty-nine

(i)

It was my birthday last month: thirty-nine. I suspect I say this every year now, but it feels old in a way that the previous birthday never did. At thirty-eight you can still fool myself that you're in your mid-thirties - and frequently I almost did – but to say so at thirty-nine would be to try and perform a combover with time, and getting old isn’t a bald patch you can conceal. Now I’m in my late thirties, no denying that. If I have my way I’ll remain there until I turn forty-four.

I didn’t do anything special on the day. My wife suggested restaurants, offered to take me out - somewhere fancy if I wanted, somewhere cosy if I didn’t want to make a fuss. I declined, partly because I didn’t see much cause to celebrate and partly because I had a stinking headache and didn’t particularly feel like going anywhere. Instead I got home, we changed into our pyjamas and we reheated something from the freezer. It’s been the longest, nastiest winter I can remember – a dreary smear, cold, grey and dark every evening when you get home, and I just wanted to drop the blinds, shut the world out and hibernate.

So instead we watched movies. The Devil Wears Prada first, for no other reason than that it was on television and my wife liked it. Isn’t it funny how that works? To deliberately go out of your way to watch a film it has to meet a certain standard, but to watch it on the television, when it happens to be on, the bar is set much lower. There are some films that sneak up on you, you have them on in the background and you tell yourself you’ll change the channel but then you get sucked in and you never do. This is why I have a box set of Eric Rohmer films I’ve never seen, and yet I’ve sat in front of Short Circuit, The Goonies, Up Pompeii, Carry On Don’t Lose Your Head dozens of times. Convenience always wins; I’m convinced that we would all be so much better people if it weren’t for that.

Anyway, I didn’t mind. I enjoyed The Devil Wears Prada, with its subversive message that fashion and superficiality are forces for good which make the world a better place, and its cute points about sexual politics that teach us that eventually a dead end boyfriend who disapproves of all your lifestyle choices turns out to be the one for you. Besides, because it was my birthday I was allowed to say exactly what I thought of Emily Blunt, which the other three hundred and sixty-four days of the year is entirely verboten: many happy returns to me.

After that, I got to pick something from the DVD shelves. Because it was my birthday, I was allowed to choose anything I liked, but because I intend to remain married, I appreciated that this offer came with terms and conditions that I didn’t need to read. So we watched Catch-22, because I read the book recently, have always wanted to see the film, bought the DVD a couple of years ago and have never had a good excuse to force my wife to watch it with me. “Thank god.” she said when I returned clutching the DVD. “I thought you were going to pick a Woody Allen film, and I didn’t fancy watching Love And Death again.” (She knows me far too well; my hand hovered over Love And Death for several seconds.)

So we sat on the sofa in our pyjamas, under a blanket and we watched Catch-22, a bleak, funny film of a bleak funny book, full of bureaucracy and senseless death, chaos and indifference. I opened a bottle of Pauillac and it was very nice, but we didn’t drink it all. I wasn’t up to it; not with my headache. There was some chocolate, although that didn’t mark it out as my birthday either because there often is. I’m not sure I’ve ever celebrated less.

The next day, my colleagues asked me how my evening was.

“Where did you go to eat?”

(There is an assumption that I ate out. This is because I do that a lot.)

“Oh, we didn’t go out in the end. We just stayed in, had a bottle of wine, watched a couple of movies.”

“That sounds lovely.” I think some of my colleagues thought it sounded lovely because it was very similar to how they spend most of their evenings, but that’s okay. They have given up on ideas that I’ll join them by having kids, getting pets, moving out to the suburbs, but they probably like knowing that I still visit their world from time to time, even if I’m determined never to set foot in a garden centre.

“Yes, it was actually. It was just what I needed.” I said.

And you know what? It was.

(ii)

I figured out recently that everything that is wrong with me is from the neck up. The neck is where it all begins. Floaters, dancing in front of my eyes, changing my window on the world into a windscreen that can never be wiped clean. Tinnitus, that almost metallic whine that’s neither completely inside my head nor completely external, white noise that can transform the sounds around me into a radio, not quite tuned in right. Headaches, big smudging pressing headaches that blot out everything else.

At the moment, recovering from a cold, I am deaf in one ear. This happens every year and lasts for about a month. I feel like I am shouting to be heard and yet my voice, when it comes out, is quiet and mumbling. My wife is forever asking me to repeat myself, and I am forever asking her to. We have every conversation in triplicate, listen, repeat and finally understand. I have to stand to her right so I have a fighting chance of making out what she says, I have to pick my seats carefully in restaurants and pubs. The frustration is enormous.

“You’ll have to speak up. You keep forgetting that I’m deaf in one ear.”

“Pardon?”

“You’ll have to… Oh. I wish you’d stop doing that joke.”

“It’s always funny though, isn’t it?”

Yes, I have to admit: it’s always funny. Some jokes are always funny, like that one, or like saying “pardon me” after you hear a car horn, or a rumbling noise, or someone moving a chair in a restaurant. Jokes don’t stop being funny just because you are the butt of them, painful though that is. My wife told me she’d researched ear trumpets online in the run-up to my birthday. I pretended I hadn’t heard that even though, for once, I had.

Nighttime has become a parade of pills. One for acid reflux, one for high cholesterol, one for tension headaches. If you shake me I rattle, if you ask me if I’ve been under the weather I rattle on. This must be, I realise, what being properly old is like. Perhaps I should get somebody to hand them to me in a tiny paper cup, get ahead of the game.

Everything that is wrong with me is from the neck up. The latest one is that I grind my teeth. The medical term is bruxism, which I rather like. It is a word begging to be capitalised: finally, an ism I can belong to without all the unpleasant associations most isms have these days. It sounds to me more like an art movement than an illness. Maybe I could become one of Britain’s leading, most influential Bruxists. I could win prizes for my worn down molars, be feted on BBC2 and discussed by dozens of pundits. It’s nice to imagine a glittering career ahead of me.

They don’t fix bruxism with pills, though. The solution is less convenient - they make you wear a mouthguard. But first they have to make it: I went to the hospital at the start of the year and they made me bite into something a little like Blu-Tac for what felt like an age but was probably only a couple of minutes. I sat in the chair, fully aware of how ridiculous I must look, feeling like I was eating ectoplasm in very slow motion.

“All done.” said the specialist when I finally unclenched my jaw. “We’ll make an appointment for you in six weeks to come and have it fitted.”

I said thank you, enjoying the fact that there was finally space in my mouth once more for the words to escape from. On my walk home, I was conscious of the cold air whistling through the gaps between my teeth.

A few months later I returned and I sat on the same chair, waiting for my newest accessory to arrive. I was expecting some ceremony, a grand unveiling, a gift box or presentation case. Instead, out came a ziplock bag. On it was a plaster mould of my top teeth and, resting on that, the clear, colourless mouthguard. It didn’t look like a mouthguard though, not really. It looked like a jellyfish that had been washed up on a clump of rocks that happened to be exactly the same size and shape as my teeth. Looking at it was an odd experience: were my teeth really that small? Did they really tilt in that way? Every little detail was the same – the receding gums, the little dents and chips. In another few years, I thought, they’d probably use a 3D printer. Maybe they could replace the rest of me while they were at it.

“You need to wear this every night for three months.” said the specialist. “Then you can come back and see us again.”

Everything that is wrong with me is from the neck up. The irony of it isn’t lost on me: my head is the only part of my body that I really properly use, and it’s the part with all the problems. The rest is just a convenient vehicle, a car I don’t treat very well and never service. Even the engine is temperamental – some days it won’t start, or it runs too fast, or it overheats. The gears don’t work either, the way I wish they would, and sometimes I can’t change up, or change down. I think about myself, stalling and kangaroo hopping through life. I wonder if all the other drivers can tell.

(iii)

A couple of Saturdays ago, it was the first sunny day of the year and I spent my morning shuttling from pharmacy to pharmacy. The branch of Boots in the station didn’t have my prescription, the drugs that stop my body making so much acid that I can’t function, can’t sleep, feel like I’m burning from the inside out. And I had run out of drugs, so I had to do something I didn’t want to do and ask nicely at the big branch of Boots in the middle of town. I hate transactions which involve asking people to do something out of the ordinary. I hate most transactions in shops which don’t involve exchanging money for goods. I can’t take things back, ask questions, request refunds, say “this isn’t good enough”. I’ve always been like this – so good at finding fault, so bad at expressing dissatisfaction about it. It’s an English disease that eats you up from the inside every bit as much as acid reflux does.

“Can I help you?” said the lady behind the counter. She was one I didn’t recognise, which paradoxically made it easier. One of the women behind the counter at that branch of Boots knows my name without being told, which either means she thinks I’m attractive, or that I go there a lot, and unfortunately have a pretty good idea which one it is: the one that isn’t good news.

“I’m really sorry.” I said, which is my default introduction to any conversation in a shop which doesn’t involve the exchange of money for goods. “But my prescription is held at the branch in the station and they don’t have my medication. Is there anything you can do?”

“What’s the medication?” she said.

“Esomeprazole.”

“Oh. Give me a second.”

She wandered out of view, past the giant rolodex of cardboard boxed, blister packed illness dressed up as medicine. I’ve always been loath to look too hard at it, seeing it as a compendium of all the help I don’t need yet. Walking round hospitals has always had a similar effect on me, the names of all the departments just a giant bingo card of illnesses I’m yet to contract. The woman returned. She was matronly, but with a hint of softness. All my life I’ve sent out signals that I need looking after, conscious and unconscious, and I think she must have picked up on them.

“You’re in luck! We have one box, but we can’t dispense it to you here because your prescription is held at the other branch.”

“Oh.”

“But what I’ll do is I’ll ring the other branch and get them to send someone across to pick it up. They’ll probably be glad of the walk in this weather. Don’t worry,” she said, smiling at me, “I suffer from acid reflux too, I know how bad it can be.”

“That’s really kind of you, thank you.”

“Don’t worry. Give it half an hour and it will be available for you to pick up.”

I still felt awkward, walking into the other pharmacy half an hour later. I expected hard stares, for them to recognise me as the man who made a fuss. I got to the front of the queue, again dreading a conversation which didn’t entirely involve the exchange of money for goods. This woman was younger but, apart from that, pressed from the same mould as the previous one. I suppose the job must attract a certain kind of person.

“I’m really sorry.” I said – that phrase again. “But I’m told you’ve sent someone over to the other branch to pick up my prescription.”

“You’re Mr Evans!”

I felt as if I was being recognised all over again. It’s like the worst kind of fame. You want to be recognised in restaurants, or in the street, or getting out of a limousine at a film premiere, not in a tatty branch of Boots picking up yet more medication.

“Yes, that’s me.”

“It was me who picked it up. I went over and got it for you, in fact I’ve just got back. Give me two minutes.”

“Thank you ever so much.” I said. “I know it must have been an inconvenience, and I normally wouldn’t ask, but I’d run out. Lesson learned for next time.”

“Not at all! It was nice to see the sun, get out of this place.”

That smile again, the same smile as the one in the previous pharmacy. I must really look like I need looking after. She got me to fill out the form – I have a prepaid card for prescriptions now because I seem to need to many, like the Nectar Card of infirmity – and she initialled the label and slipped the box into a bag and I was ready to go on my way.

“I really appreciate you doing this. Have a good rest of your day, I hope there’s some of this sunshine left when you finish.”

One thing many people are surprised by about me is how unfailingly polite I am in real life. I was pondering this as I made my way home from the pharmacy. I say thank you a lot. I say please. I tell people to have a good day, or a good evening, or a good weekend and I always mean it. I say hello to the bus driver. I ask nicely. I can’t stand people who are rude in shops, or in restaurants – especially in restaurants. When I was in the café earlier that morning, I held the door open for the waitress as she struggled through it, plate stacked with salad in one hand, cup full of coffee in the other. She said thank you and I said “it’s nothing”. I smiled at her and she looked back with an expression that said “what a nice man”, or words to that effect. It’s usually women who give me that expression: the women in the pharmacy, the waitress in the café.

I strolled through town, past the crowds of people rejoicing in the first sight of sun in a long time, emerging from the shadows, braving lighter coats and I realised that I am becoming someone else. Slowly, surely, I am morphing into the twinkly, avuncular, unthreatening middle-aged man I never wanted to be. I have a beard. I could do with losing some weight. I am pleasant. I have a card which means that I can have as much prescription medication as I need, without having to pay for it.

I wonder, I wonder, if this is how midlife crises begin.

(iv)

There was time for one last unveiling.

“Come on!” she said from the bedroom. “I want to see.”

Standing in the ensuite, I lifted up the plaster mould. On the bottom, my surname was written in jagged block capitals: EVANS 7/1/13. The mouthguard came away smoothly, the jellyfish prised off the rocks. It wobbled in my fingers. It was disturbing, too, how easily it slipped over my teeth. Opening my mouth, I almost couldn’t see it was there at all, but closing it I could see how my top lip was pushed out slightly. I felt foolish, ashamed. I didn’t want to go back into the other room, but I made myself.

“Oh! You look so cute.”

Cute, another adjective to add to twinkly, avuncular, unthreatening. Another nail in the coffin, another pill in the tiny paper cup.

“Don’t laugh at me.” I said. It didn’t sound like my voice. I wasn’t sure whose voice it did sound like – she told me later it was like my voice but with the edges knocked off, just like my teeth now had the edges protected. It was hard to say certain sounds – the letter T, where your tongue leaps up and high-fives the roof of your mouth, was especially challenging.

“I’m not laughing at you, honestly. You look adorable.”

All my life I’ve sent out signals that I need looking after. I already told you that.

“Really?”

“Yes. You wouldn’t even know it was there unless you were looking.”

“I’m not going to keep it in next time we make sweet love, so don’t even ask.” I said. She gave me a sly grin.

“We’ll see about that.”

“I guess I’m not going to be able to do that Dick Emery impersonation either.” I said. She should have been touched by that – saying that whole sentence was probably the most difficult thing I’d done all day.

“I’ll live. Anyway, stop talking and read your book. It’s bedtime, and you never learn. We always have this conversation around bedtime! You need to learn to switch off.”

I took my adorable face and buried it in a disappointing hardback, and I tried to forget about the discomfort. And I thought that life isn’t all that bad, however old you get, when you find someone who can overlook you having a jellyfish clamped to your teeth.

Anyway, let it pass because I knew there was more to come. She snores, especially when she has a cold, and some nights she comes to bed with a strip taped across the bridge of her nose, flattening it out, like a bone through the nose of a tribeswoman. She hates it, feels embarrassed, but I happen to think it’s sweet beyond words. I just know that one of these days, before too long, we will settle down together, me with my mouthguard in, her with a strip on her nose, me enamoured of her imperfections and her enamoured of mine and we will fall asleep together, me not grinding my teeth and her not snoring. Love’s young dream: no longer young, perhaps, but still dreaming.

Doesn't get

I want to tell the man on the train, peering over his shoulder at his laptop, that his email doesn't look interesting enough to be worth reading at quarter past eight in the morning. The sun hits the back of the Victorian terraces at the perfect angle at the perfect time, piercing through the mist, and everything shimmers, looks fixable. I want to tell him to look up, look out of the window, take it all in because it might only be beautiful now and his inbox will always be dull. I want someone to tell me the same when I am too absorbed in things, and yet I know that my wife does that all the time and I know that I don't like it.

Last night, I wanted to tell the old man in the supermarket that it was okay to just buy a baguette and a big bottle of Breton cider and he shouldn't slouch towards the checkout looking faintly embarrassed. I wanted him to feel the approval of a stranger, in a world so powered by judgements. I wanted, just once, to be on the side of the approvers and not the judgers.

I want to point out to the two men behind me that they aren't as funny as they think they are. Their conversation is pitched just loud enough that it gets in the way and just quiet enough that I can't make it out. I can tell from their tone that hilarity lies therein, albeit not the sort they intended, and I want to tell them to speak up or shut up. As I get off the train, I notice that they are wearing ties and I want to congratulate them on that, as so few people do.

When I walk past the enormous queue of dejected commuters at the station, lined up waiting for their cups of acrid disappointment, I want to tell them to go round the corner to Tutti Frutti, where Paul will remember their names and what they want, will ask them about their day, will fit them into a different, better jigsaw and make them human again. But I also want to get my coffee from him without being behind a queue of other people. I want it my way or not at all, I want it both ways.

I've wanted to say "I love your hat" so many times to so many people. I want to be the kind of person who says that kind of thing.

I want to say No to all the stupid questions and I don't care to all the so-called motivational speeches. I want to hang up on calls and walk out of meetings. I want to go round my office when everybody has left, when the cleaners trundle through the corridors, morose ruminants, and write jokes on all the whiteboards, underneath all the indecipherable flow charts and diagrams, all the brainstorms that never quite generated lightning. I want to leave Post-It notes on random desks.

I want to tell all the fat women that there are men out there who won’t care that they’re fat. I want to tell all the ugly men that there will be women who won’t care that they aren’t handsome, or better still will think that they are, against all evidence to the contrary. I want to tell the unhappy-looking people that somebody will make them happy, even though I am not always happy myself. I burst with secrets everyone should know, and yet I don’t understand anything about my own life.

I want someone to tell me it will all be fine, and make me feel that it’s true, but I also know that the only person who can really do that is me. I want to say it, and I want to believe it, but I’m not there yet.

Better words

Joanne is blasé and glib, and annoying to be in meetings with. She, like all blasé, glib people, does not realise this. She seems to spend much of the year on holiday, and when she’s not on holiday she’s in meeting rooms with people like me, making excuses. Excuses are her thing: nothing ever makes progress and it’s always somebody else’s fault, or nobody’s fault at all. I suppose technically, since she’s almost never there, it could hardly be hers.

She has one verbal tic which, more than the perma-tan and the easy smile which never spreads to her eyes, really gets on my nerves. I’m not saying, she’ll start most sentences. “I’m not saying that we’ll secure the budget for this” she might say, or “I’m not saying this is definitely going to work”. It’s cowardly bet-hedging dressed up as honesty, a fraudulent assault on the English language. I could fill an A4 pad with all the things that Joanne hasn't said over the last couple of years, like the Oxford Dictionary Of Non-Quotations, but why would I? Why would anyone?

I daydream about replying in one of those meetings. “I’m not saying you’re fobbing me off,” I’d say, “But perhaps you could – just this once – tell me what you are saying. I know you would find this challenging. I appreciate that it would involve saying something instead of nothing, but you never know, you might even find it habit-forming. Go on, give it a try. Just for me.”

Of course, I don’t. I leave it unsaid because I, like most people, don’t tell you all the things I’m not saying.

Maxine, who I used to work with, was cheerfully useless. She’d come in once a week, sit at her desk and say she was unable to log in. Even though this involved a two hour drive she never did anything to ensure that her next visit the following week would be any more successful. An untrusting soul might reach the conclusion that Maxine enjoyed both driving and sitting around doing nothing, and as I’m an untrusting soul I did exactly that. She would come to lunch with us and talk about her forthcoming holidays – like Joanne, she seemed to have plenty of these - and pleasant though she was I found myself, like Joanne, coming up with all kinds of things not to say.

Her tic was different. For want of a better word she’d say all the time. “So, I’ve got a reply back from the technical guys,” Maxine would say, “And it’s, for want of a better word, disappointing.” Such a curious space-filler to jam in the middle of a sentence, such an interesting way to advertise how inarticulate you are. I felt like explaining to Maxine that personally I thought “disappointing” was a perfectly acceptable word, although my preference – because I’ve always been plain-speaking – would have been “shit”. I also felt like telling her that next time she had trouble finding a better word, which on past form would be most likely be rather soon, she might consider investing in a thesaurus.

But I didn’t bother, because she was incompetent. That was the perfect word for her; I didn’t need a better one.

I have a long-standing fascination with what people say - at work in particular - and how it tells you all sorts of things about them which they probably don’t intend you to know. My colleague Iain, for instance, says “frankly” a lot. It’s endearing when he does it, because I like him, but I’ve always found this a rather strange word to use in the workplace. I have a sneaking feeling that it should go without saying and it’s bizarre that it doesn’t (you might as well say “and for once I’m not lying”, and see how that goes down).

After a while, though, I realised that wasn’t how Iain was using it. It was a conversational space filler for him just like Maxine’s pointless search for a better word, a search to which she never seemed very committed.

“I had to call them three times to get it done,” Iain would say to me on the way to the kitchen, “Which is an utter disgrace, quite frankly.”

Well, of course it’s a disgrace, and to say so isn’t being particularly frank, but that’s not the point. It’s merely punctuation, just a way to end a sentence, one of those meaningless words we all add to something we say that hitches a ride on all the other words, cheerfully coasting without bringing anything to the party. Unless, of course, you are saying it on purpose in order to cultivate a reputation as someone plain-speaking: how ironic that by doing so, you encourage the opposite impression.

There are other space-fillers too, the words we retreat to without even knowing, as unconsciously as clicking a pen. I was delivering a presentation once with Danny when I realised that he was using the word “basically” at least once per sentence, sometimes even twice. At one point he started and ended a sentence with it. It got so bad that eventually that I wasn’t listening to anything he said except that word, and the rhythm of his speech became an excuse to bang the drum of those four syllables. The rest was just a formless soup of words: Basically we blah blah blah, blah blah basically. Blah blah blah basically blah blah.

I knew it was unprofessional, but I wrote the word on my pad and showed it to Gabi sitting next to me, and we smirked. Then I made a mark on the paper every time Danny said it, and by the end of the presentation the paper was a forest of five bar gates. For days afterwards, Gabi and I included the word “basically” in all our emails to one another. Basically kind regards basically was how I signed one of them off. We stopped while it was still funny, something I don’t often have the sense to do.

Our colleague Ed joined in with all the jokes until it was his turn to do a presentation about a week later. That’s when we all discovered that his word was “obviously” and that he used it every bit as often as Danny said “basically”, even though he was explaining things to people for the first time. We broke it to him gently; it had been obvious to everybody but him.

Before you ask, because I know you will, the answer is yes: I know what some of my stock phrases are.

I know, for instance, that I say “That’s useful” when someone has finally told me what I wanted to know, often after repeated attempts to get them to answer my question. I don’t know how obvious it is that I’m trying to sound gracious when I feel anything but. I know too that I say “I get that” to try and shut people up and move them on when they’ve been talking about something irrelevant, usually because they know I’m not going to like what they have to say further on in the conversation. It’s a kind translation of “get to the point”, and I wonder in turn how many people I say it to get that. Now I think about it, I guess that many of my verbal tics are just the act of eye-rolling shaped into words. But at least I’m aware of those: it’s the others I worry about, the things I say that broadcast who I really am without my realising.

The worst thing of all, though, is the thing I’m most aware of: that I’ll probably never find them out, which bugs me more than I can tell you. I wish a warning bell would light up in my head when I say them, or perhaps a klaxon that only I could hear: something, anything, to alert me to the fact that I’m falling back on the tried and tested.

I’d just like to know, basically. Obviously I’m not saying that I’d change them – that, quite frankly, would be optimistic, for want of a better word.

Drops

When my head is on her lap, it feels like I am in the most peaceful place in the world.

Last thing at night, I lie on the bed and rest my head on her outstretched thigh. Gently, but firmly, she twists my head, repositions it, until it’s exactly where it needs to be. Then I hear the slight squelch of the olive oil being drawn up into the pipette, and a tinkling, like the tiniest of bells, as she knocks it against the inside of the bottle’s neck.

“Stay still.” she says.

We’ve been doing this for over a week, yet still I need that instruction. In that respect it’s like so many instructions I receive even now, years after she first identified the need for them. Stop worrying. Keep the noise down, it’s time for sleep. Couldn’t you shut the cupboard door, just this once?

We do my worst ear first, the one so blocked I can’t really feel much. There’s a gentle drip, drip, drip as the drops go in and then: nothing. A pause, in silence – or, at least, in what’s silence to me. Most people wouldn’t consider the room silent; most people would register the low burble of the radio, or the humming of the extractor in the ensuite bathroom, but then most people don’t need their ears syringed. Next comes the muffled noise of cotton wool being popped into my ear, like someone softly stroking a microphone, then there’s nothing more. All I can make out is my tinnitus, and I think again about how cruel and misleading it is to refer to it as ringing in the ears. That conjures up church bells, suggests wind chimes, when in fact it’s a cold, cruel tuning fork, always there and pitched to go straight through you, impossible to ignore.

She taps my head.

“Turn over.” It’s like she’s talking through a thick blanket. I suppose technically she is.

I shuffle round through a hundred and eighty degrees, face the other way, towards the window. This is my favourite part, what happens next. Again the squelching noise of the dropper being filled – I can hear it more clearly this time, this being my better ear – again the miniature clang against the neck of the bottle. Then comes the drip, drip, drip, but this time it’s followed by a glug, glug, glug, and then a whoosh and then my ear is full and I’m somehow untethered from everything.

It’s as if I am cocooned inside my head, protected from everything outside, in a weightless, soundless world. I find it funny that people pay a fortune to go to spas and lie there motionless in a flotation tank when I get that feeling here, with my head in my wife’s lap, my ear full of olive oil from the kitchen, dispensed from a three pound bottle we bought in Boots. I don’t know exactly how much time passes before I hear that muffled scrunching and the cotton wool goes in, but I know that it could never be long enough.

As I lie there, lost amid my thoughts, locked in the centre of that comforting sphere, she strokes my hair. It brings me back from somewhere else, tethers me again. Such a little thing, such a small way to show care and yet so important. I stretch and strain that unconditional care most days, by worrying about things that will never happen, or asking about things that have not happened, or just by nagging and complaining, and yet there it is: still present, still magical, not exhausted. I think about the combination we are, my wife and I: a motherless man and a woman who will never be a mother herself, nurturing and being nurtured, playing these roles like clothes that nearly suit us but don’t quite fit. And yet, if I could, I think maybe I would stay there forever.

“Right, you’re all done,” she says, not without kindness, “Up you get.”

My appointment’s around six o’clock tonight and I’m almost sorry to have to go to it. It will be a very different experience from what I’ve just described: there will be no lap to lay my head on, no hands through my hair, no tenderness, just a cheery nurse, efficient and gloved, a “thank you very much” at the end and I’ll be on my way again, through the warren of little streets heading back to my flat, able to hear and able to notice. I noticed plenty though, you know, even when I couldn’t hear a thing. When I get home maybe I too can find ways to show that I care, that I’m appreciative, and that I haven’t forgotten what it feels like to have one good thing that tethers you to the world.

Six days

The day our email crashed we didn’t notice it at first. You don’t – well, not to begin with, anyway. All we noticed was that it was an unusually productive day. Nobody was chasing us, and it was blissful. We got through our list, things got crossed off quicker, miles and miles of lines through chores. This is a good day, we thought, if only they could all be like this. We knew no better, despite years of experience which told us that if something seems too good to be true, there’s only one logical explanation.

Working in a big office involves a complicated equilibrium – you do things for others which you don’t much want to do, and in turn other people do things for you which they’d rather not. That sums up most interactions that don’t involve food or hot beverages. The day our email crashed was a day we mistook for that most magical of days, one when we could do all the telling and none of the being told. The radio silence was the thing that was really telling: we could compose all the begging letters or rousing calls to arms we liked, but nobody was replying. Could it be that they were rendered dumb by our elegant phrasing? We tried to fool ourselves that they had, but soon we worked it out. The lines of communication had been cut.

Initially, it was a novelty. We asked around. Instant messenger windows popped up across the company. ’Is your email working?’ ‘Let me check. No, nothing since lunchtime. Yours?’ ‘I’m okay but Steve is having problems.’ By hometime a not very extensive survey had scientifically established that some people had problems and some people didn’t. The people with problems envied the people without them, and the people who didn’t have problems envied the people who did. It wasn’t important, though, because by five-thirty the only problem anyone had was still being at their desk. We got in our cars, on our trains and our buses and we thought Never mind, it will all be fixed by the morning.

On the first day without email our company sent out a notification that we were experiencing email problems. But they did it by email, so lots of people didn’t get it.

On the second day without email we came in, looked at our screens and realised nothing had changed overnight. We thought of all the things we really needed done, and all the people who really needed to do them for us. We bit the bullet and signed into the clunky internet version our company had made available in case of emergencies – emergencies which had never happened, a virtual fallout shelter. Everything was in the wrong place, you couldn’t find anything and you couldn’t track when you sent things. It was like going back to your house to find that all the furniture had been moved, often into different rooms. You knew it was all there somewhere, but you’d never track any of it down.

On the second day without email we looked at our disrupted house, full of boxes of mystery contents we couldn’t bear to unpack, and we sighed.

“How do I access the webmail?” said Patricia, the tall fragrant PA who sits at the cluster of desks behind me.

“Here, you do it like this.” I said, going over to her desk and showing her. She looked at the screen with an expression approximating to despair.

“It’s not good, is it?”

“Not really, no. It reminds me of an ex I once had - it’s not the prettiest, and it never goes down on you.”

One day of limited interaction with people and already I’d forgotten how to behave; Patricia’s appalled grimace told me that.

By lunchtime, the novelty was gone for good. All we could think of was all the emails we hadn’t received, building up, building up, sitting somewhere out there in the ether, a sinister stack of demands waiting to break against our inbox like a tidal wave. If that wasn’t bad enough we also worried about all the things we needed people to do that weren’t getting done. Not that we could even work out what they were – the internet mail made that almost impossible. By the afternoon, you could tell who had a good to do list and who didn’t, who was quietly smug and who was horrified, disorganised, panic-stricken.

The IM windows kept on flashing. ’Mine’s working on my Blackberry but not on my computer.’ ‘Mine’s not working anywhere.’ ‘I don’t have a problem.’ That last group of people was missing the point – when nobody can reply to your mails, however well written they are, you still have a problem, even if you don’t know it. People like that, the complacent, are the worst: no doubt everybody deleted their mails without reading them anyway, even when everything was working fine.

It spread like an illness, and we gossiped like pensioners in a nursing home. ’I hear David’s come down with it now.’ We grumbled like them too. ’It’s been giving me nothing but trouble all day.’

On the second day without email we took to Facebook to complain. “I might as well be sending people things by carrier pigeon,” mine said. “My email wants to work even less than I do.” Soon it had a phalanx of ‘likes’ and comments underneath from people in the same boat. Starved of opportunities to communicate, we used every channel that was left. Time became elastic, stretched out of shape and losing all meaning: the time from nine a.m. to half-five was still the same number of hours as it ever was, but by the time hometime came we felt like we had worked for two solid days.

On the third day without email, we rued the pints and the glasses of wine we hadn’t had the night before. We realised that if there was ever a day you could turn up nursing a hangover, it was the day that our email was hung over too. Not that you could even describe it as that: it was still missing in action, out on a bender. On the third day we all wished we’d brought in board games, like the last day of school, or had the courage to nip out to the pub at lunchtime. We didn’t, though: even though there was nothing we could do, and everything took ages, we still felt Catholic guilt about being away from our desks. So we sat there, hitting refresh, long past the point where any of this was refreshing.

At the end of the third day, we couldn’t have cared less. It was a Friday, and we had better things to do. We went to the pub, we went to the supermarket. We went home, and we checked our emails, watched those bold black lines springing up at the top of the screen and remembered what that felt like. We thought that tomorrow was another day, a day without email, and that it was somebody else’s problem, and that Monday would be fine. Actually, we didn’t think about Monday at all – the unhappy ones not until Saturday afternoon, the normal ones not until Sunday evening and the blessed ones not until 9am, when the screen fired up and we remembered that we’re meant to work for a living.

On the fourth day without email, something we didn’t think possible: it spread. Conversations sprung up everywhere, IM windows popping up, ’What’s it like where you are? It reminded me of the snow, people comparing inches of snowfall, telling people they couldn’t leave their houses, Facebook pictures of driveways, thickly and pristinely carpeted, picture perfect snowmen in the garden. Instead we were virtually snowed in - ironically enough, by the complete absence of white noise.

The fourth day was the longest of all, but had learned some tricks so we made it work in our favour. Everything that was fun took longer: every trip to the kitchen to make tea was a thirty minute round trip, with laughter and complaints and jokes. Everyone had a story, and everyone else wanted to hear it. No Instant Messenger conversation was about work, and all of them were strictly necessary. Ann, who sits in the central bay, told me a bunch of scurrilous stories about the person who used to run our company, and I thanked my lucky stars I had enough time on my hands to make the most of them. I changed my Facebook status to say that if I got much better at inventing work and looking busy without anything to do, a career in senior management beckoned. Nearly all the “likes” were from colleagues I liked enough to have added them as friends.

I changed my Instant Messenger status to say “PETER FINCH DAY” but nobody understood.

“What does that mean?” said Susan, working from home. Susan – prim, kind, churchgoing, even-tempered.

“It’s a reference to a famous speech in a film called Network.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“Oh, he basically rants that he’s had enough.”

“I can understand that – I’m really pissed off.”

On the fourth day, Susan was pissed off with something. I can’t put it more strongly than that.

We got to that point in our To Do lists we never wanted to reach, the “Never Do” list tacked on the bottom, the jobs we left until three o’clock on a Friday afternoon, desperately hoping to get a phone call that would give us an excuse to avoid it. We reached the tidying and rationalisation, the documents we’d been meaning to read, the conversations we’d been avoiding, the timebombs ticking in our intrays, the stones we’d planned never to lift. We got close to the section at the very bottom of the list, with the silent heading saying I pray to God I get a new job before I ever have to do this. We looked at that part of the list, and it scared us, and we went to get another coffee.

We had suppliers in, and my colleague Carla had to walk them over to her desk and show them the screen of her laptop. “Here’s the email you’re going to receive at some point in the future”, she said, “Would you mind trying to do something about it now?” We were beyond the point of being embarrassed, by then, and this was just something people without email did. I remembered my first days in an office, in 1996, when all the power rested with the person who could operate the fax machine, and I wondered if we still had a fax machine somewhere. I remembered the first time I had access to email you could use to contact people who worked for a different company, in Coopers & Lybrand in 1997, and how unbelievable that felt then. From magical to mundane, in only fifteen years.

On the fourth day without email I took the early bus to the station, because there hardly seemed any point staying. Nobody told me off. I’m told the company sent out an email providing an update on their attempts to fix the problem. Everybody who didn’t receive it thought of a creative, richly-worded way not to reply.

On the fifth day without email, none of us could believe that we’d got to a fifth day. The situation was better, but for many of us only half our mails were getting through. Best of all, we proved that we’d learned something: we replied when we wanted to, and pretended not to have received anything when we didn’t. Getting half your emails, we had concluded by lunchtime, was infinitely better than getting none at all and twice as good as getting all of them.

I wrote Question Of The Day on the whiteboard: Barbra Streisand or Neil Diamond? and on the fifth day people talked almost as much about that as they did about email. I went round to Iain’s desk, loaded up YouTube and played him Peter Finch’s speech from Network, and I realised how much I like it when Iain laughs. By then the office felt like a difference place – kinder, more engaged, more of a community. The collective rolling of eyes, the bitching in the queue at the canteen, the conversations while holding open doors and the wry grins as we tried to coax our laptops into life. By the fifth day we were a we, not just a collection of Is, and I should have known then that it wouldn’t last.

At the end of the fifth day, I stopped to pick up a coffee in the station and I told Paul all about it. He frothed the milk and shook the jug and poured it, expertly and elegantly, into the waiting cup.

“It’s been such an odd experience. I swear at my laptop all day, and I go home and the first thing I do is fire up my computer at home. You’re lucky not to have all of this.”

“I know, sir,” said Paul. He always calls me ‘sir’, however often I tell him not to. He’s just old-fashioned like that. One time, I asked him whether he had a jar for tips, because they all do such a good job, and he just smiled at me and said “No, sir, we don’t. Because we’re not American.”

“Presumably you use a computer when you’re not at work, though?”

“Not really, no. Never really been into them. Do you know that in China they actually treat it as an addiction?”

Paul is a rich source of information like this: I’m not sure how someone who doesn’t use a computer has managed to accumulate so much knowledge. Maybe he does it through other, nefarious, means like talking to people. Once, he told me there was a town in Australia that looked almost exactly like Bracknell – even though to my incredible disappointment, I wasn’t able to find any pictures online which backed up his theory.

“I can imagine. But the thing is, there is something compelling about it. It’s like Twitter – you can look at something like Twitter and it’s a river of information. A constant torrent of facts and opinions, whooshing past you, always something different, always something new, and it’s just fascinating. Disposable, yet fascinating. New stories break on Twitter, information passes across the world like a Mexican wave and it’s an amazing thing to watch. So I can understand that being hard to leave, even though you know it doesn’t have any permanence.”

Paul, sage but silent, gave me a little smile which may have been incomprehension but was probably pity, and he handed me my perfect latte. And I realised I was talking to the wrong man about this, because Paul was not interested in rivers. Paul was more about lakes, about books, about deep immersion in something or nothing at all. I was trying to sell Wikipedia to a Britannica man, and I was wasting his time.

“Have a good evening. Hope you enjoys.” he said to me.

Our email came back on the sixth day. Irony of ironies, I was out of the office with my boss when it happened. He drove us to another building, on another industrial estate, to talk to people working for another company. Another set of objectives about to be failed, another office joker, another office jobsworth, another set of in-jokes and customs and coffee mugs. A place just like mine, only with email, or so I thought. On the way back he hared down the motorway, sometimes one-handed, mobile glued to one ear and I looked at the grey dreary road ahead and tried to make personal conversation with him in between his conference calls. Despite a week of practice at that kind of thing, it had become no easier.

I returned to find things subtly different. People were at their desks rather than loitering in kitchens and corridors. They were tapping away, flicking between applications, copying and pasting. The illusion of competence and commitment had been restored almost so completely that you could believe that nothing had changed. But I could sense something else about the atmosphere, too, something new. Everyone was looking at their screens with confusion, metaphorically scratching their heads, catching up, trying to remember how we are all supposed to work. I knew even then that as they did so, they would forget some things in the process, and I thought that was a pity.

I wondered what to compare it to and I realised that the closest thing I could come up with was how people are when they first return to work after a holiday. I suppose, in the end, that’s almost exactly what had happened. Even if nobody quite appreciated it at the time.

Doctors

Today’s GP is a kind I don’t see often. He’s enthusiastic, spells things out; it feels like it’s part consultation, part seminar. I leave with a prescription and an intricate drawing of the outer ear, middle ear, inner ear and nose, a spidery doodle of tubes and lines which makes perfect sense to me. The plug of wax I need to get rid of is a neat blob of biro ink. On the reverse is a little plan of action, all in block capitals – determined to challenge cliché to the very last, the handwriting is perfectly legible. I sit there and watch him type out his notes on the screen (“We have a new system, this is our second day” he tells me at the start. I like it; it makes it harder to see at first glance just how often I go to the doctor.) He reads out the notes as he taps away at his keyboard.

I feel like I’ve seen a lot of doctors over the past year and a half. I’ve sat on the standard issue Robin Day school assembly chair outside the consulting room many, many times, smiling awkwardly at my fellow patients, waiting for the door to open and to be invited inside. I always feel stupid, at that point: on the walk over to the surgery, I know what to say. When I get there, I can still remember how to phrase it. But somewhere in that interminable wait between getting there and being seen, the words evaporate, and often the symptoms do too. I look at the other people there: old ladies; exhausted parents with squawking children; dour convalescents; and I wonder whether I’m a fraud being there at all.

My appointments always take about ten minutes and start with me apologising for coming in. “It’s just a little thing,” I’ll say, “but it’s been worrying me.” Of course, I never tell the doctor how much: that inner voice is only shared with the unlucky ones, like my wife or certain selected friends. I always leave saying “Thank you for clearing that up”, I tell the doctor to have a good day and I walk home through the sidestreets, past the Polish church, and the inner voice tells me all the things I should have said. The doctor is wrong: it’s serious really, and the reason the doctor couldn’t tell me that is because of everything I didn’t mention.

Every doctor I’ve ever seen has been wrong, but I’m not dead yet.

There are lots of different kinds of GPs, in my experience. Many are the most common type – anything you go and see them about, you’ve seen them about too soon. They tell you to come back in a couple of weeks, and in the meantime there’s always paracetamol, aspirin, or their favourite, “plenty of rest”. They think that’s the cheapest and most readily available medicine of all, but in my experience it’s the most difficult to come by. I used to see a mad Greek doctor who was the opposite – he would refer you to the hospital for anything, or tell you to hightail it to Accident & Emergency. I had to stop seeing him; he was the only person I’ve ever met more worried about my health than I am.

The others actually do things, but it’s mechanical. Open your mouth, stick your tongue out, lie on the couch, touch your nose, keep looking at my finger while it moves, let me shine this in your ear, cough, I’m going to feel your stomach, go and wee in this cup, walk in a straight line. Has it been happening long. Is it worse at night. Have you been under a lot of stress. The worst ones are a call centre in human form, a bunch of tests and tables you are walked through. All the time I'm jumping through those hoops and answering those questions I have that friction, because I’m thinking: I’m not really ill but I think I am. You claim to know I’m not, but you won’t convince me.

My attempts to train myself to trust doctors, to be comforted by them and to believe that they know best have not been a success. Despite that, I still quite like them. You get the locums, young, eager, showing concern. A recent one, an upbeat, rosy-cheeked Geordie lady, listened with patience and tried to help and I made a mental note not to ruin a good thing by going in and seeing her again. I was rewarding her, I suppose. A few weeks later I saw her, on a Saturday, walking past Fat Face and I thought that you should never spot doctors off duty. Their role is to be there behind a desk dispensing wisdom, not to be slouching round town in a fleece being human and badly dressed. Why I expect doctors to dress well I have no idea, but for some strange reason I do. I prefer woman doctors, given the choice. My whole life seems to have been spent asking women if there is something wrong with me; the doctors always say no, the others always say yes.

Every now and again, there’s a referral. The specialists are very nice, and friendly, and helpful. They either explain that there’s nothing wrong, or tell me that it’s a grey area where nobody really knows very much. Sometimes things clear up, sometimes they don’t. They can be managed: acupuncture for the RSI, pills for the acid, nasal sprays, bits and pieces. “There’s a lot we don’t understand”, the specialists always say. But you’re the specialists, I never say in response, but I think it as I smile back and thank them for their expensive time. We drive away in the car, my wife looks at me and says “Are you happy now?” and for a few weeks I am, until the voice starts telling me again that the specialist has got it wrong. I have nobody to blame but myself: if I’d explained it perfectly, they would know that I’m dying.

I can’t tell you how little fun it is, being like this. Walking through life with my psychological brittle bones, every headache, every twinge, every minor change the harbinger of something fatal. When I was young I was terrified of that fable, “The Ant And The Grasshopper”, because I hated hard work. I identified with the grasshopper – leaving things until the last minute, never doing enough homework, not getting off my arse – and I knew that one day the winter would come and I would not be prepared. I’d fail exams, not get a job, lose my job, having nothing in reserve to get me through. But now I come to the end of my thirties it’s “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” who haunts me. I think that one day I’ll be really ill and it will be my wife and my friends who have nothing in reserve, because I’ve burned all their care and concern on things that never happened.

My regular doctor, when I can see him, is a smiling, bespectacled, eternally patient man. I’ve seen him about so many things that I’m beginning to wonder what’s left to surprise him with. I stopped seeing him because I got so embarrassed and ashamed, because I knew I was asking about the same things again and again. He has a little twinkle in his eye, as if I’m an entertaining diversion, but I can’t see how he can enjoy this, not really. He’s a neat, precise little man and he delights in telling me there’s nothing wrong with me (“You’re not going to get a cancer referral out of me today” he told me once – he could probably save a lot of time by just saying that at the start of every appointment). At the end of our appointments, he types “PLAN” on the screen and then taps out a list of things we’ll do. I appreciate him doing it while I’m there in the room – but I do wonder if there’s a second screen, a screen I can’t see where he types what he really thinks.

I don’t know much about him. He ran the marathon last year. He doesn’t drink or smoke. His first name is Lionel. And yet I’ve probably seen more of him in the last eighteen months than I have many of my friends.

The last time I saw him was the most difficult of all. I went with a list, and I ran through it in my head all the way to the surgery. I said it to myself again and again as I sat on the school assembly chair, like it was a dream I desperately didn’t want to forget. I saved the hardest bit until the very last, when we’d established that everything else on my list wasn’t serious.

“So what’s the third thing?” he said.

“I think I might, well, I think I might suffer from health anxiety.”

Health anxiety, the acceptable term for it. It used to be called hypochondria, and probably still is by many people. I used to think that a hypochondriac was just someone unlucky enough to get ill more often than most people; it’s only the past few years that has convinced me that that isn’t the case. I know that it’s called health anxiety, because I Googled it. I also know that, because I think I have it, I’m not allowed to Google other symptoms. In my head I’ve caught at least half of the diseases out there, thanks to a combination of internet search engines and an imagination that has never done me any good – meningitis, Meniere’s disease, ulcers and heart attacks and every kind of tumour known to man.

“What makes you say that?”

The hard bit: the speech I’d rehearsed that sounded stupid in my mind and was going to sound even stupider out loud.

“I think – no, I know – that I come here a lot. I worry a lot about my health. Whenever I do, I always feel like it’s going to be something serious, even though I know rationally that it can’t be. And even when I’m told that it isn’t I don’t feel reassured. I get incredibly anxious that I’m going to die.”

If anything, it sounded even stupider out loud, but I knew – however much I wanted to – that I couldn’t pluck all those words out of the air and cram them back in my mouth. I knew, too, that if I hadn’t said them I would have had an angry and disappointed wife to report back to, something infinitely worse than a lot of illnesses. But there, it was out: the reason I’d gone to the doctor so many times, the riddle it had taken me so long to unravel. Had he known that all along?

My doctor paused for a second, and then brought up that screen again. He scrolled back over about the last dozen appointments I’d made and my whole medical history flashed before my eyes. Looking at the text, I relived all the agony, all the shame, all the embarrassment and all the all clears that I never quite believed. Many of the appointments had that word in the note, PLAN; so many plans, going back for years. All that time wasted making those plans, when I could have been making other plans. When I should have been. All that energy that could have been spent on housework, or cooking, or watching movies or reading books, on being a better husband or a better friend.

My doctor looked over his glasses at me and I saw kindness I hadn’t expected. And there it was, that twinkle again.

“I think we have enough here to make a diagnosis of health anxiety, don’t you?”

As he typed the word PLAN onto the screen, I thought about how curious life can be. I’d worried for so long, about so much, for so little in return, and having gone through all that, it turns out there is something wrong with me after all. I thought so, my wife thought so, lots of my friends thought so and the doctor thought so too. Now I just need to find out how to fix it. For the first time in a long time, I think that maybe I will.