I WASN’T feeling so well a while back and couldn’t work out what was wrong. No energy, feeling insecure and anxious, lack of appetite and what have you. Then I stopped drinking. That was the signal something was seriously wrong. Now, I never go to the doctor – like most alpha males – on the basis that if I do go they’ll only find something wrong with me. Then I’ll be ill, see? But if I don’t go, I’ll be fine. And, to be fair, it mostly works out that way.
Our old family doctor was called Dr Yellowlees which I always thought sounded like an exotic infection. Whenever my mum took me along with a perceived ailment, his perennial response was: ‘It’s growing pains.’ He was an old charlatan but he was also right.
But with a pension in the bank, the growing pains argument sounds a bit hollow nowadays. So I got my blood tested, blood pressure checked and symptoms analysed only to be told, a bit like growling Dr Cameron in Doctor Finlay’s Casebook: ‘There’s nothing wrong with you, man.’
Then I was asked if anything was worrying me, anything that might be so dreadful it was making me ill. I blurted out: ‘Does Brexit count?’ Yes, the only thing I could think of that worried me sick was Bloody Brexit.