It’s hard to know which aspect of this little saga contributed most to the boiling skull. In the end it may have been the language. It often is. But let me begin at the beginning and in the beginning was the prostate.
How’s yours, if you are blessed with one? Mine’s the standard item for men of my age, which means that it is getting troublesome and is not going to get any less troublesome as the years accrue. Benign prostatic hyperplasia is the medics’ term and I take pills for it whose commercial name is thick with Os and Xs. The Xs in particular make the pills sound sciency and therefore enhance my belief in them and make them work.
Every three months or so I seek more Oxies from the local health centre and, being a modern sort of chap, I order them via the website. It and I have become quite chummy. It remembers my email address and password and my taste for Oxies and in exchange I overlook the term “health centre”. (Am I alone in pining for the days of a doctor’s surgery or a medical practice? Probably. The world moves on. And how.)
Anyway, this morning, I noted that my Oxy store had dwindled, so I went to the website and found it unrecognisable.
Holden Caulfield, the implausible American teenager, found comfort in his local museum because the exhibits were unchanged from when he’d been a child. But that is not the way of the world. Nothing in this universe stays the same. Everything is in a state of flux, part of the endless onrush of time and events and entropic decay.