To a hammer everything is a nail, and to a doctor everything is a symptom.
I was recently in a supermarket in a handsome and as yet unspoilt town in the west of England where, as my wife observed (being French and therefore a close observer of the English in all their guises), every woman over the age of 50 looked and spoke as if she had stepped from the pages of a novel by Barbara Pym. I looked at the purchases of the man in front of me. The man himself, clearly not of the lowest social echelon, dressed in green country tweedery, was only in his late thirties, but his face was already somewhat ravaged. His hand trembled slightly and he was jocular in a slightly guilty way. His purchases were as follows: a bottle of Irish whiskey, a bottle of dry sherry, a bottle of claret, two packets of crisps and some coffee. Not a vitamin in sight, let alone any health-giving roughage. I saw it all: the kitchen in the 17th- or 18th-century farmhouse, in disorderly squalor ever since his wife left with the children in tow because of his drinking. The washing-up hadn’t been done since: not, of course, that he ate anything that could properly be called a meal.
Then I looked down at my own purchases: a pot of organic yogurt and the Guardian newspaper. What diagnosis would the person behind me make, if he were diagnostically inclined? Would he not jump rapidly to conclusions about my way of life and my opinions, especially as I was wearing corduroy trousers, conclusions that would nevertheless have been erroneous?
He might have been saved from error by observing the book I had with me.
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