Give me back my codeine

It’s a long time since I took a powerful drug that wasn’t dispensed by a pharmacist. Last winter, during what has become the annual post-Christmas Covid collapse, I searched in vain for the codeine cough linctus I’d been prescribed when the virus first struck four years ago. 

‘Keep it on the bedside table,’ said my GP at the time, ‘and when you wake up coughing in the night, take a swig and you’ll be able to go back to sleep.’ She was right: it provided blissful relief and precious, life-enhancing sleep. But when I asked my current GP (we’ve since moved out of London), she gazed into the middle distance and made gnomic pronouncements of the ilk, ‘We don’t really do that any more’. 

Eventually, in the fifth or sixth high street chemist I tried, a pharmacist sized me up at length and, finding, on balance, that I was a respectable, if struggling, mother-of-three and not a nascent opioid addict, directed me  – sotto voce – to the children’s pholcodine linctus.