Therapy

permanent draught. I don’t like the catches in the WC compartments designed to hold the toilet seats in an upright position, which are spring-loaded, but often loose or broken, so that when you are in mid-pee, holding on to a grab handle with one hand and aiming your todger with the other, the seat, dislodged from the upright position by the violent motion of the train, will suddenly fall forwards, breaking the stream of urine and causing it to spatter your trousers. I don’t like the way the train always races at top speed along the section of the track that runs beside the M1, overtaking all the cars and lorries in order to advertise the superiority of rail travel, and then a few minutes later comes to a halt in a field near Rugby because of a signalling failure.
     
    Ow! Ouch! Yaroo! Sudden stab of pain in the knee, for no discernible reason.
    Sally said the other day that it was my thorn in the flesh. I wondered where the phrase came from and went to look it up. (I do a lot of looking up — it’s how I compensate for my lousy education. My study is full of reference books, I buy them compulsively.) I discovered that it was from Saint Paul’s Second Epistle to the Corinthians: “And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me... ” I came back into the kitchen with the Bible, rather pleased with myself, and read the verse out to Sally. She stared at me and said, “But that’s what I just told you,” and I realized I’d had one of my absent-minded spells, and while I was wondering where the phrase came from she had been telling me. “Oh, yes, I know you said it was St Paul,” I lied. “But what’s the application to my knee? The text seems a bit obscure.” “That’s the point,” she said. “Nobody knows what Paul’s thorn in the flesh was. It’s a mystery. Like your knee.” She knows a lot about religion, does Sally, much more than I do. Her father was a vicar.
     
    True to form, the train has stopped, for no apparent reason, amid empty fields. In the sudden hush the remarks of a man in shirtsleeves across the aisle speaking into his cellphone about a contract for warehouse shelving are annoyingly intrusive. I would really prefer to drive to London, but the traffic is impossible once you get off the M1, not to mention on the M1, and parking in the West End is such a hassle that it’s really not worth the effort. So I drive the car to Rummidge Expo station, which is only fifteen minutes from home, and leave it in the car park there. I’m always a little bit apprehensive on the return journey in case I find somebody has scratched it, or even nicked it, though it has all the latest alarms and security systems. It’s a wonderful vehicle, with a 24-valve three-litre V6 engine, automatic transmission, power steering, cruise control, air-conditioning, ABS brakes, six-speaker audio system, electric tilt-and-slide sunroof and every other gadget you can imagine. It goes like the wind, smooth and incredibly quiet. It’s the silent effortless power that intoxicates me. I never was one for noisy bmrm brmmm sports cars, and I never did understand the British obsession with manual gear-changing. Is it a substitute for sex, I wonder, that endless fondling of the knob on the end of the gear lever, that perpetual pumping of the clutch pedal? They say that you don’t get the same acceleration in the middle range with an automatic, but there’s quite enough if your engine is as powerful as the one in my car. It’s also incredibly, heartstoppingly beautiful.
    I fell in love with it at first sight, parked outside the showroom, low and streamlined, sculpted out of what looked like mist with the sun shining through it, a very very pale silvery grey, with a pearly lustre. I kept finding reasons to drive past the showroom so that I could look at it again, and each time I felt a pang of desire. I daresay a lot of other people driving past felt the same way, but unlike them I knew I could walk into the showroom and buy the car without even having to think if I could afford it. But I hesitated and hung back. Why? Because, when I couldn’t afford a car like that, I disapproved of cars like that: fast, flash, energy-wasteful — and Japanese. I always said I’d never buy a Japanese car, not so much out of economic patriotism (I used to drive Fords which usually turned out to have been made in Belgium