Helmintholog

It was Joan’s funeral yesterday, and an old friend came down from Scotland for the wake. The three of us were all wearing ties simultaneously and in the same room probably for the first time since 1970, when I left Marlborough. The other two were thrown out in the following two years. Ah, youth. We had for a while shared a cottage in the Scottish borders, attempting to make money from various cottage industries. Talk rambled.
“Do you remember?”, said someone, “When we were going to rescue our finances by selling a quarter pound of dope, but then the two of us decided to smoke it all instead, and we did it in ten days?”
“I have no memory of that.”

George, down from Scotland, has given up cigarettes, which means that he smokes a lot of small cigars. My son Felix, who is Julian’s godson, was more or less chain smoking rollups made from tobacco brought in from Germany by his girlfriend. I haven’t smoked properly for fifteen years and have been fighting off a rotten cold for the last fortnight, but this was a wake, so I bummed four roll-ups off Felix and smoked them with huge pleasure, and without inhaling much. This morning I woke to discover the tobacco had done its stuff. Every last bacterium or virus in my throat has been exterminated. Even my cough has gone. Felix, however, complained all the way into London of a pain in his stomach brought on by laughing excessively at these stories of his father’s (and godfather’s) youth. I’m sure there must be some culture where tobacco is treated properly as a medicine.

About ten years ago, when email was new and fine, I wanted an address that would make slightly less boring the business of reading it out down a phone (“at, that’s the funny little sign that looks like …”). Since one of the things you always had to say in these conversations was “all one word”, a moment of bored inspiration at the Independent one afternoon supplied me with the perfect address for witless computer industry PRs. alloneword@dial.pipex.com I became. the joke gave me small flutters of amusement for years. It’s over now.

For years I have only used the address for mailing lists. That makes spam filtering easier. If it’s not from one of a short, defined list of mass mailers, it goes inot the spam bin. But it’s not infallible. Some real people write to me at that address, so I do have to scan it, and the sheer weight of spam has got absurd. Mail to these domains, which I own, goes through spamassassin, and I never see most of it at all. But the alloneword address was picking up 100 messages everyday, and it’s not funy any more. So I vaped it this morning, and replaced it with a new, mailing-list-only address, “ingenstans”, which is the Swedish for “nowhere”. It’s the only place left where email works as it should.

Joan, whom I wrote about three weeks ago, is still breathing. The noise of it, relayed down a 50p a minute hospital phone line, is like machinery dying.
I am off to see her at any moment, though I have been putting off this particular moment almost all morning.

In the meantime, a thought bubbled up. True atheism is like celibacy. It may be good for the character. But it’s not a common grace.