Therapy

chest, under the hair. Roland might have felt it one day, when he was giving me a massage.
    Perhaps I couldn’t come the other night because I’m turning into a hermaphrodite. Internal Derangement of the Hormones.
     
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    Tuesday evening, 23rd Feb. I asked for Dover’s Powder in the biggest Boots in Rummidge today, but the pharmacist said he’d never heard of it, and he couldn’t find it in his book of patent medicines. I said, “I expect it was banned because of the opium,” and he gave me a funny look. I left the shop before he could call the Drug Squad.
    I went into the City Centre primarily to buy some books by Kierkegaard, but didn’t have much joy. Waterstone’s only had the Penguin edition of Fear and Trembling, so I bought that and went along to Dillons. When Dillons proved to have the same book and nothing else, I began to feel my usual symptoms of shopping syndrome, i.e. unreasonable rage and impatience. Low Frustration Tolerance, LFT, it’s called, according to Alexandra. I’m afraid I was very scathing to a harmless assistant who thought “Kierkegaard” was two words and started searching on her microfiche under “Gaard.” Fortunately the Central Library was better supplied. I was able to borrow The Concept of Dread, and a couple of the other titles that had intrigued me, Either/Or and Repetition. The Journals were out.
    It’s quite a while since I used the Library, and I hardly recognized it from the outside. It’s a typical piece of sixties civic architecture, a brutalist construction in untreated concrete, said by the Prince of Wales to resemble a municipal incinerating plant. It’s built in a hollow square around a central courtyard in which there was once a shallow pond and a seldom-functioning fountain, the repository for much unseemly garbage. This gloomy and draughty space was a public thoroughfare, though most people avoided it, especially at night. Recently, however, it’s been converted into a glazed and tiled atrium, festooned with hanging greenery, adorned with neoclassical fibreglass statues, and designated “The Rialto” in pink neon lettering. The floor area is dedicated to a variety of boutiques, stalls and catering outlets of a vaguely Italianate character. Operatic muzak and Neapolitan pop songs ooze from hidden speakers. I sat down at a table “outside” Giuseppe’s café-bar (outside still being indoors in this studio-like setting) and ordered a cappuccino, which seemed designed to be inhaled through the nose rather than drunk, since it consisted mostly of foam.
    Much of the city centre has been given the same kind of face-lift, in a brave attempt to make it attractive to tourists and visiting businessmen. Resigned to the erosion of the region’s traditional industrial base, the city fathers looked to service industries as an alternative source of employment. A vast conference centre and a state-of-the-art concert hall now face the Library from the other end of a tessellated piazza. Hotels, wine bars, nightclubs and restaurants have sprung up in the neighbourhood, almost overnight. The surrounding canals have been cleaned up and their towpaths paved for the exploration of industrial archeology. It was a typical project of the later Thatcher years, that brief flare of prosperity and optimism between the recession of the early eighties and the recession of the early nineties. Now the new buildings, with their stainless steel escalators and glass lifts and piped music, stand expectant and almost empty, like a theme park before opening day, or like some utopian capital city of a third-world country, built for ideological reasons in the middle of the jungle, an object of wonder to the natives but seldom visited by foreigners. The principal patrons of the Rialto in the daytime are unemployed youths, truanting schoolkids, and mothers with infant children, who are grateful for a warm and cheerful place in which to while away the winter afternoons. Plus the occasional privileged wanker like me.
     
    I don’t recall hearing the word “recession” until a few years ago. Where did it come from, and what does it mean exactly? For once the dictionary is not much help: “a temporary depression in economic activity or prosperity. ” How long does a recession have to last before it’s called a depression? Even the Slump of the Thirties was “temporary”, in the long run. Perhaps there’s so much psychological depression about that