How Eggwina transformed me into a lifelong cynic

On December 3 1988, Edwina Currie – then a junior health minister – went on television to warn the British public not to eat soft-boiled eggs. “Cook them and they will be safe,” she counselled. “But soft-boiled eggs can be very dangerous … Most of the egg production in this country, sadly, is now affected with salmonella.”

I was 17 and wholly uninterested in politics. But the furore unleashed by Currie’s remarks permeated even my thick shell of adolescent self-absorption. Egg sales plummeted by 50 per cent. Almost four million healthy hens were culled. Farmers denounced Currie as an ignorant scaremonger and a “bloody nuisance”. Even her fellow Tory MPS turned on “Eggwina”, and within two weeks she had been forced to resign.

While all that was going on, my family went down with salmonella. Not just us, actually: we had some neighbours over for supper and they helped us put away my mum’s chocolate mousse, made with uncooked eggs. Nothing has ever made me sicker. For days, our entire family was draped in convulsions over the furniture, half-naked and spewing from both ends, like a gastric interpretation of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. Our neighbours, similarly incapacitated, were unable even to answer the phone. When their grandmother called to report that she was having a heart attack, the answer machine clicked on and she died alone.

I lost two stone in two weeks. Back at school my friends gaped at me in astonishment, as if I had unzipped a fat suit and stepped out, reborn. But it wasn’t just cheekbones I had acquired. Being on the inside of a news story, witnessing for myself the surreal disjunction between the furore and the truth, left me with a lifelong instinct towards doubt.

Currie had been absolutely right about salmonella. Everything she said was later vindicated by a Whitehall report, which found the bacterial infection to be rife among Britain’s egg-laying hens. (It has since been almost entirely eliminated.) But because the truth was so unpalatable – and because Currie was a bumptious attention-seeker, easy to dislike – both the message and the messenger went down in flames.

Reading this newspaper’s recent obituary of Paul Marland, the Tory MP and “gentleman farmer” who led the charge against Currie, I was struck by his trustworthy face and upright posture. No doubt he believed he was in the right at the time. Nice people always do. But in these polarised times it’s worth remembering that the truth can hide in unlikely places. Even the self-serving, the unpopular and the tiresome may one day be proved right.

An NHS trust is running trials of a musical algorithm that curates playlists for patients in order to reduce stress. It has already been tested on Alzheimer’s sufferers, whose heart rates slowed by up to 22 per cent.

Music is such strange sorcery. Only a gifted few have the power to cast its spell, yet almost everyone is susceptible to it. Even those who are beyond all other forms of communication – the severely demented and the dying – will swoon with pleasure at the opening notes of their favourite song.

Being musically illiterate myself, I cannot begin to understand how it is done: the marshalling of harmonies and rhythms in such a way that they access the most inarticulate parts of the soul. It’s the closest thing to magic that humans can perform.