Therapy

Know.
     
    “So how are you today?” Alexandra said, as she always does at the beginning of our sessions. We sit facing each other across ten feet of deep-pile pale grey carpet in two easy chairs, in her handsome, high-ceilinged office, which, apart from the antique desk by the window, and a tall functional filing cabinet in one corner, is furnished more like a drawing-room. The chairs are placed each side of a fireplace, where a gas fire made of imitation coals bums cheerfully throughout the winter months, and a vase of freshly cut flowers stands in the summer. Alexandra is tall and slim, and wears graceful, flowing clothes: silk shirts and pleated skirts of fine wool long enough to cover her knees demurely when she sits down. She has a narrow, fineboned face on top of a very long, slender neck, and her hair is drawn back in a tight bun, or is it chignon? Imagine a rather beautiful, long-lashed female giraffe drawn by Walt Disney.
    I began by telling her of my pathological indecision over the ties. “Pathological?” she said. “What makes you use that word?” She’s always picking me up on negative words I use about myself.
    “Well, I mean, a tie, for God’s sake! I wasted half an hour of my life anguishing about... I mean, how trivial can you get?”
    Alexandra asked me why I had found it so difficult to decide between the two ties.
    “I thought, if I wore the plain dark blue one you would take it as a sign that I was depressed, or rather as a sign that I was giving in to my depression, instead of fighting it. But when I put on the bright one, I thought you would take it as a sign that I’d got over my depression, but I haven’t. It seemed to me that whichever tie I wore would be a kind of lie.” Alexandra smiled, and I experienced that deceptive lift of the spirits that often comes in therapy when you give a neat answer, like a clever kid in school.
    “You could have dispensed with a tie altogether.”
    “I considered that. But I always wear a tie to these sessions. It’s an old habit. It’s how I was brought up: always dress properly when you’re going to the doctor’s. If I suddenly stopped wearing a tie you might think it signified something — disrespect, dissatisfaction — and I’m not dissatisfied. Well, only with myself.”
     
    A few weeks ago Alexandra got me to write a short description of myself. I found it quite an interesting exercise. I suppose it was what got me going on the idea of writing this... whatever it is. Journal. Diary. Confession. Up till now, I’ve always written exclusively in dramatic form — sketches, scripts, screenplays. Of course, there’s a bit of description in every TV script — stage directions, notes on characters for the casting director (“ JUDY IS A GOOD-LOOKING BOTTLE-BLONDE IN HER TWENTIES” ), but nothing detailed, nothing analytical, apart from the lines. That’s what TV is — all lines. The lines people speak and the lines of the cathode-ray tube that make up the picture. Everything’s either in the picture, which tells you where you are, or in the dialogue, which tells you what the characters are thinking and feeling, and often you don’t even need words for that- a shrug of the shoulders, a widening of the eyes will do it. Whereas if you’re writing a book, you’ve got nothing but words for everything: behaviour, looks, thoughts, feelings, the whole boiling. I take my hat off to book writers, I do honestly.
     

* Laurence Passmore *
    A SELF-DESCRIPTION
     
    I AM FIFTY-EIGHT YEARS OLD, five feet nine-and-a-half inches tall and thirteen stone eight pounds in weight — which is two stone more than it should be according to the table in our dog-eared copy of The Family Book of Health. I didn’t acquire the nickname “Tubby” until I was a National Serviceman in the Army, after which it stuck. But I was always a bit on the heavy side for my height, even when I played football as a youth, with a barrel-shaped torso that curved gently outwards from the chest to the point where shirt met shorts. My stomach was all muscle in those days, and useful for bustling opposing players off the ball, but as I got older, in spite of regular exercise, the muscle turned to flab and then spread to my hips and bum, so now I’m more pear-shaped than barrel-shaped. They say that inside every fat man there’s a thin man struggling to get out, and I hear his stifled groans every time I look into the bathroom mirror. It’s not just the shape of my torso