Therapy

it all on studying philosophy and religion. He was engaged to a girl called Regine but broke it off because he decided he wasn’t suited to marriage. He trained to be a minister but never took orders and at the end of his life wrote some controversial essays attacking conventional Christianity. Apart from a couple of spells in Berlin, he never left Copenhagen. His life sounded as dull as it was short. But the article listed some of his books at the end. I can’t describe how I felt as I read the titles. If the hairs on the back of my neck were shorter, they would have lifted.
    Fear and Trembling, The Sickness Unto Death, The Concept of Dread — they didn’t sound like titles of philosophy books, they seemed to name my condition like arrows thudding into a target. Even the ones I couldn’t understand, or guess at the contents of, like Either/Or and Repetition, seemed pregnant with hidden meaning designed especially for me. And, what do you know, Kierkegaard wrote a Journal. I must get hold of it, and some of the other books.
     
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    Friday evening. Acupuncture at the Wellbeing Clinic this afternoon. Miss Wu began, as she always does, by taking my pulse, holding my wrist between her cool damp fingers as delicately as if it were the stem of a fragile and precious flower, and asked me how I was. I was tempted to tell her about my ejaculation problem last night, but chickened out. Miss Wu, who was born in Hong Kong but brought up in Rummidge, is very shy and demure. She always leaves the room while I strip to my underpants and climb on to the high padded couch and cover myself with a cellular blanket; and she always knocks on the door to check that I’m ready before she comes back in. I thought she might be embarrassed if I mentioned my seminal no-show, and to tell you the truth I didn’t fancy the idea of needles being stuck in my scrotum. Not that she normally puts the needles where you might expect, but you never know. So I just mentioned my usual symptoms and she put the needles in my hands and feet, as she usually does. They look a bit like the pins with coloured plastic heads that are used on wall-maps and notice-boards. You feel a kind of tingling jolt when she hits the right spot, sometimes it can be as powerful as a low-voltage electric shock. There’s definitely something to this acupuncture business, though whether it does you any lasting good, I don’t know. I went to Miss Wu originally for my Internal Derangement of the Knee, but she told me frankly that she didn’t think she could do much about it except to assist the healing process by improving my general physical and mental health, so I settled for that. I feel better afterwards for the rest of the day, and maybe the next morning, but after that the effect seems to wear off. There’s a slightly penitential aspect to it — the needles do hurt a little, and you’re not allowed to drink alcohol on the day of the treatment, which is probably why I feel better for it — but I find Miss Wu’s infinitely gentle manner comforting. She always apologizes if a particularly strong reaction to the needle makes me jump; and when (very rarely) she can’t find the spot, and has to have several tries, she gets quite distressed. When she accidentally drew blood one day, I thought she would die of shame.
    While the treatment is going on we chat, usually about my family. She takes a keen interest in the lives of Adam and Jane. Her questions, and my occasional difficulty in answering them, make me guiltily aware how little thought I give to my children these days, but they have their own lives now, independent and self-sufficient, and they know that if they are in serious need of money they only have to ask. Adam works for a computer software company in Cambridge, and his wife Rachel teaches Art History part-time at the University of Suffolk. They have a young baby so they’re completely taken up with the complex logistics of their domestic and professional lives. Jane, who did a degree in archaeology, was lucky enough to get a job at the museum in Dorchester, and lives in Swanage with her boyfriend Gus, a stonemason. They lead a quiet, unambitious, vegetarian life in that dull little resort and seem happy enough in a New Age sort of way. We see them all together these days only at Christmas, when we have them to stay in Hollywell. A tiny shadow of a frown passed across Miss Wu’s face when she realized from my remarks