The surprising joy of involuntary sobriety 

I have just finished a sojourn with a curious twist. Readers of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain will remember Hans Castorp, who set off to visit a cousin confined to a sanatorium in the Alps. Nothing went according to plan. The cousin fell into a sharp decline and died. Castorp himself was diagnosed as suffering from a lung ailment and spent the next seven years in the sanitorium. This ended only with a social, political and cultural upheaval, followed by a -conflagration.

St Thomas’ Hospital is hardly the Alps. But I spent five weeks there, having expected a three-day sentence. A surgeon told me that it was one of the most complicated wrist fractures he had ever seen. That may have brought him some consolation. It was not ideal to spend Christmas and new year in an invalid bed. Friends were telling stories about proposed banquets, plans to deplete cellars, as well as cases of wine travelling from Berry Bros and the Wine Society.