Dialogue: Why I've decided to be a doctor

I'm going to become a doctor.

This afternoon, you see, I was fool enough to pick up a ringing phone. I listened for a bit and then I said no.

"Sorry," I said, "I can't, not now, I'm busy."

"Busy?"

"Busy," I said, "I'm going to bed."

"It's two in the afternoon," she said.

"And I'm going to bed."

"Why?" she asked.

"Because I like it," I said, "and because I can."

"So when are you going to write this stuff?" she asked.

"Oh," I said, "sorry. I didn't quite grasp your meaning. You mean I should forgo the siesta that more enlightened societies consider a matter of national duty when the heat squats heavy on the hills and the dogs pant in the shade and when anyone in anything approaching a condition of sanity retreats into the deep cool of a shuttered bedroom.

"I should forgo, you say, that deep and luxurious pleasure and instead should sit sweating before a screen and a desk fan in order to write 500 words for you for some hideous brochure advertising an event which I would attend only with a ring through my nose. Five hundred words, furthermore, for which you are planning to pay me nothing but a thank-you. Have I got that right? Is that what you meant?"

"Yes," she said.

"Fine," I said. "Okay. And then tomorrow when I am good for nothing because of a shortage of sleep, I suppose I am to take sustenance from a few lightly grilled thank-yous with a side salad of insincerity, tossing the remnants to the skeletal dogs. Is that what you rang to tell me?"

"I think you've got an underactive thyroid," she said.

"A what?" I said so fiercely that the dogs momentarily retracted their tongues and lifted their heads in wonder at my expenditure of energy on a sweltering afternoon. "A what?"

"An underactive thyroid," she said, with the smug calm of someone who has read a whole magazine on her own without help and hardly mouthing the words at all as she read. "It's quite common. Unks has got one."

"Unks?"

"Unks. My uncle. It makes him tired in the afternoon and it makes him irritable and it makes him fat."

"I'm not fat," I said.

Silence.

"I'm not very fat," I said.

"Fried food," she said, "beer. I bet you barely touch fruit from one end of a week to the other." I said: "I find fruit hard to fry."

"Your antioxidants," she said, "where you do get them from? And think of the free radicals. You're a time bomb. The big C is lurking round the corner. You treat your body like a dog."

"But I'm nice to my dogs," I said. "I let them sleep of an afternoon."

She hung up. I lay down.

But she had banished sleep. I could sense my thyroid wheezing. I could hear the slow clogging of cholesterol. I could feel the creaking of the arteries like hosepipes left in out the sun. I felt the dangers of a little knowledge bearing down on every side.

And it was there in the hot discomfort of my enseamed bed that I decided to become a doctor.

It must be so easy now. No doctor needs to know a thing. Any patient worth his aspirin comes to the surgery armed with a headful of medical mysticism garnered from that fount of all hocus pocus, the internet.

All the doctor has to do is to agree. That wild yam cream, yes it's just the thing for those phyto-oestrogens. That selenium supplement, a bonzer idea. Zinc for the prostate, absolutely. Ginkgo, you can't go wrong. Your thyroid, as underactive as a dozing Spaniard.

Has there ever been a time when so many lay people have claimed some understanding of medicine? Has there ever been a time when so much simplistic nonsense has been spouted about health and so much credulous attention paid to it?

Have we lost sight of the truth that the body is a hugely complex entity and that most of our tinkering is little more than faith healing?

And have we forgotten that the body is intrinsically robust, and that if we run around a bit and eat a bit and laugh a lot, the body will see us out for an appropriate number of years more or less regardless of what we do to it?

Have we ever been so hypochondriac?

I don't know, but I do know it's a good time to be a doctor. All I'll have to do is roll up for a couple of hours each morning to stamp my official approval on the diagnoses and the nostrums of my patients.

And that will leave the afternoon free for something that actually does me good.