From Cocktails to Counselling.

In this very troubled world one of my favourite forms of escapism is listening to old radio drama and I’m particularly fond of the Paul Temple mysteries.   Paul Temple was the archetypal hero, he was a rich and successful author and an amateur sleuth who was consulted regularly by the head of Scotland Yard, Sir Graham Forbes, who was extremely obliging by providing Paul with any amount of police assistance.   Paul and Steve – this was before the days of Adam and Steve – Steve was his wife and was a woman.   She had apparently been a successful journalist when she married Paul, whereupon she gave it all up for a lifetime of luxury and shopping.   She spends a lot of time trying on hats and drinking cocktails.   I presume that these radio plays were meant to be taken seriously but it is impossible to listen to them today without a smile.   They all have cut glass accents – unless they don’t.  There is usually a loveable cockney and an evil foreign villain.   Most episodes include a high speed car chase, frequently late at night after an evening spent drinking in a nightclub.   When they come across an accident, as they invariably do, Paul rushes to scene.   ‘Is he all right?’ Steve will enquire about the driver.   ‘No, afraid not, he’s been shot.’   ‘Should we try and find a telephone?’ ‘No, it’s too late for that.   He’s trying to say something….’   Sometimes a few incomprehensible words are muttered and the wretched man dies.   ‘I think you need a drink Steve, here’s some cognac and a cigarette.   He must have been on his way to coast.  We’ll go there now.’   And off they set, without a backward glance not feeling it necessary to let anyone know about the unfortunate man’s demise.   All shock and trauma is dealt with in the same way, a stiff drink and a cigarette.  Almost all of the villains’ sidekicks end up the same way, although occasionally they live to be apprehended by the doughty Sir Graham and his henchmen.   Paul himself survives car crashes, shootings and bombs without a scratch.   Sometimes he loses his usual sang froid and brings out his favourite expression, ‘By Timothy’ – no idea where that came from but it certainly makes a change from the endless use of the F word that peppers all drama today.  Even when Steve is in danger with threats of kidnapping she soon calms down after a cocktail and the ubiquitous cigarette.  The denouement usually takes place with the thief or murderer and Sir Graham meeting, together with other ancillary characters, in Paul and Steve’s flat where cocktails (what else?) are served by their faithful manservant Charlie.   Oh, weren’t those the days!!!! Of course, I understand that life wasn’t really like that even when this was written, but it is refreshing and entertaining.  

I heard the other day about a child who had been traumatised by Humpty Dumpty – it certainly is upsetting to think that All the King’s Horses and All the King’s Men couldn’t put him together again – but should that lead to trauma?   I have say that I believe the parents must be to blame – how have they let their child imagine that a giant egg is a sentient being and not a fictional character?  What will happen to this poor little mite at Easter?

Mental health issues are, of course, serious, but not everything is a syndrome, or a disorder.   Sometimes people are just different and are we right to try and change them?  For example, Albert Einstein’s brain was significantly different from that of most other people.   If you Google Enstein’s brain and put a wet towel over your head you may be able to understand all the information about cortical sulci, the ascending ramus of Sylvian fissure and postcentral gyri!! Things that were found on examining his brain after his death!   If you know what all that means please don’t email me!   However, I do know that he was very late to talk and had dyslexia – so if he been born today he would have undoubtedly have been in therapy and we would never had had the theory of relativity.  Although what difference that would have made, I have no idea.   Being different doesn’t mean being wrong and doesn’t always have to be cured.  What a boring place the world would be without artists like Salvador Dali and writers like Oscar Wilde.  Not to mention the countless aristocrats – just google the 5^th Duke of Portland.   And in my search for eccentrics I read about John Christie and his wife who are best known for starting the Glyndeborne Opera Festival but John was also a famed British eccentric. One evening while sitting next to the Queen during the opera, he removed his glass eye, cleaned it, put it back in its socket and asked the queen whether it was in straight. If he got too hot, he would cut the arms off his formal jacket – which he would often wear with a pair of old tennis shoes. He owned 180 handkerchiefs, 110 shirts, and despite paying tens of thousands of pounds on an opera production, would travel third class and carry his own luggage to avoid tipping. For a while, Christie would wear nothing but lederhosen and in 1933, he expected all guests of the opera to do the same.   I wonder what he would have been diagnosed with today.   You have to love eccentrics even if you might not want to live with them.  

It is a very stressful world and we have to find ways of coping so I think I’d better have a cocktail and a cigarette and pull myself together!