Nocturnal ruminations

The lights will be going out shortly – not all over the world, but here at St Botolphs. And I am left alone with my medicated thoughts. Am I just a chemical factory on legs?

My last interview with Freddie has left me somewhat disturbed. You may say, well you have been disturbed for a long time – but I mean especially disturbed. Do I really have an unstable self-image? If so, how did I come by it? And, more importantly, what can I do about it?

Freddie seems to be relying on the medication. Of course, he is a pills-man. I haven’t had any proper therapy since Amanda went off sick. And that’s another puzzle: what’s wrong with her? And what did Freddie mean by his last cryptic remark.
So many questions, so few answers.

My solicitor is coming to see me tomorrow, about the divorce. It’s not the family solicitor: old Wilfred Brown, of Brown, Brown, Smith & Brown. The lesbian was quick off the mark and engaged his services weeks ago (it was his firm that drew up the divorce petition). I got my chap out of the phone book. I looked under ‘Lawyers’ and there was a whole raft of them. I chose one at random. Well, not exactly at random – I liked the name: Randolph Beresford-Smythe. If in doubt always go for the old double-barrelled name. England is supposed to be a classless society now - don’t you believe it: a posh sounding name and a Home Counties accent will get you further than any amount of degrees and diplomas.

Well, I am away to my lonely bed in this great, gabled, Victorian edifice. Samuel Beckett said ‘We are all born mad. Some remain so.’ (Waiting for Godot). Where were the mad treated before the rise of the asylums in the nineteenth century? Did you know that asylums came before psychiatrists? You’d think it would be the other way round. But no – it was only after the confinement of large numbers of the mad in asylums that a new profession came into being: that of the mad doctor, alienist or today the psychiatrist.

But I must get some sleep. I shall need all my wits about me when Randolph Beresford-Smythe arrives in the morning.