The only light came from a reading lamp pointing at the centre of the room. The background music was whale song and randomly plucked harp strings. The room was the top floor of an 18th-century house. The only other floor I’ve seen that sloped as much as this one is in the Crooked House at Peter Pan’s Playground, which is next to Southend pier. On an assortment of chairs three men and a woman were sitting facing each other. They had tiny needles sticking out of their ears and forearms. One of the men also had a needle sticking straight up from the crown of his head. This I subconsciously took to be a mark of leadership, and I asked him, superfluously perhaps, whether I’d come to the right place for the acupuncture session.
It was a drop-in acupuncture session for addicts, the first of a ten-session initiative by our thrusting young local acupuncturist to bring cut-price acupuncture to the toiling masses.
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