Grumpy Oldie Man
Matthew Norman
‘Do you find yourself getting angry more often than you should?’ the doctor finally intoned
If the GP’S initial silence was less than golden, his first words after taking my blood pressure had no more of that 24-carat glister.
The test concluded, at first he said nothing. He turned the digital monitor towards me, and raised his eyebrows. You needn’t be as highly world-ranked a hypochondriac as me to appreciate, instantly, that on neither the systolic nor diastolic fronts were these numbers textbook. Unless of course that teaching manual is entitled ‘How to have a stroke’.
‘Do you find yourself getting angry more often than you should?’ the doctor finally intoned. That surprised me. Isn’t it enough to be a portly, middleaged schlub whose idea of a strenuous workout is lifting the remote to change channels more than twice within an hour?
It might be, he said, but he was sensing a certain mercury-hoiking irascibility.
If so, I thought, maybe that’s because, after 19 phone calls spread over 17 months, the only way I could get to see you was by turning up at the surgery and staking a claim for an emergency appointment that seems less false now than it did at the time.
But it was my turn to say nothing while elevating the brows.
‘Well,’ I eventually murmured, ‘I suppose I might tend slightly towards the irritable. But I don’t know what you mean by “more often than you should”. Is there a quota?’
For the alarmingly hypertensive, apparently there is. ‘We don’t rely on one test, and this might be an extreme case of white-coat hypertension. Do you have a testing kit at home?’
Of course I do. What man who has thrice presented with classic preeclampsia symptoms would not? ‘Test yourself morning and night for a fortnight, and email me the results.’
‘Still, this is a pretty high reading,’ he went on (‘pretty high’ plainly standing proxy for ‘If your mouth droops by a nanometer, you’re in an ambulance’).
Obviously, he said, a reduction in food, drink and sedentariness was indicated. ‘But if you are prone to getting cross, you need to get on top of that. Have you ever considered meditation?’
I’ve more than considered. About 15 years ago, I went to a transcendental school. But every time I emptied the mind, the void was filled by white rage about Tony Blair.
‘Then my advice is to avoid anything that might make you cross. Do you think you’d be able to do that?’
I didn’t say anything. What is there to be said about guidance predicated on the capacity to slip through a tear in the space-time vortex, and into an alternate reality?
In that parallel universe, there might well be tube stations you can walk through without hearing a recorded message about the need to take care in this wet weather – just to dissuade you from raising both heels and skidding across the concourse. As Marge Simpson said about her Baby On Board! sticker, ‘Look what I got. Now people will stop intentionally ramming our car.’
Even if College Green exists in that mystical realm, there might be an even-money chance of surviving 30 minutes without the insights of Jacob Rees-mogg’s drolly surnamed if semilobotomised lapdog, Mark Francois.
In that utopian realm, the pest controller to whom you paid £700 in advance would deploy the rat poison on the first of three visits, and not as a future, revenue-generating afterthought on the last.
There, pedestrians walk in straight lines. They don’t make exquisitely timed interceptions by veering wildly as if the pavement is the giant slalom run at Val d’isère. Cyclists stop at red lights, and motorists check their wing mirrors for cyclists.
In that chilled-out paradise, presenters of radio news shows never invite the listener’s opinion. They’d rather come round from an alcoholic coma sandwiched between Eric Pickles and the late King of Tonga than request an email on the grounds that ‘We really want to know what you think about this.’ If I couldn’t be less interested in what I think (and I couldn’t), what concern of some 5 Live pinhead can it imaginably be?
The GP’S request for an email is another matter. God love him, he did seem genuinely interested in receiving that. And being at least as interested in his opinion as he is in my hard statistics, I’ve taken most of his counsel to threatened heart.
The eating and drinking are reduced and, while the new exercise regime may not be conventional, a several-yard walk to the blood pressure monitor adds up to a decent mileage when you make it every three minutes from dawn till dusk.
As for the last tranche of his advice, however, there has been no early progress there. In this reality, the only effective prescription for eradicating the rage is one of those Brompton cocktails (equal parts brandy and morphine) the private physicians of Knightsbridge mercifully gave late-stage terminal patients before Dr Harold Shipman put an end to that.