MOOD SWINGS

The woman running the Chiropractic stall at the Frome Green Fair asked me to wait.  This was disappointing; the stall was advertising free spinal examinations and I could see several people lying on couches while earnest practitioners fingered their tops and their bottoms.

At the adjacent stall I recognised the statuesque herbalist selling preparations in little brown bottles. We had met two years ago when she had led a herbal walk along the Frome river during which she so memorably described the benefits of comfrey for those with sprained ankles that I had immediately procured a root and rushed home to plant it.

I wanted to ask now whether she had anything for backs - but as I had yet to have my free examination that seemed premature. So what should it be? Did I have dark moments? A tincture for the nerves perhaps? A preparation to help me sleep? Something to tone me up?  Eventually we settled on the stomach and she handed over a preparation labelled 'For the Digestion' containing a ferociously revolting mixture of Wormwood, Rosemary and Bay, one teaspoonful to be taken in water ten minutes before eating.

Our conversation about the intricacies of my digestive tract was cut short, however, by a beckoning signal from the Chiropractors. They bid me to sit, upright and sideways, on a small wooden chair, with my head up and spine straight as though I were back in the deportment class.  An elderly gentleman then began to rummage in my hair feeling, he said, for depressions on the sides of my skull.

Now, I can't find any such depressions, but he managed somehow to find holes like eye sockets, as though my head had once been bolted on. “Can you feel” he said, “that these aren't level?”

Well, no, I couldn’t really. And I challenge anyone to judge whether someone else's fingers pressed somewhere behind your skull are level or not. He rummaged in my hair again and massaged my neck.

It was as he thought, he said, shaking his head. My skull, apparently, has a permanent list, for which my top neck vertebra has had to compensate by twisting in the other direction. Then he produced a disturbing replica of a human spine, the bones gleaming in white plastic with rubbery little yellow nerves emerging from every crack.

Did I feel fuzzy in the morning, wake up with a cricked neck, get occasional headaches? he asked.

“Well, yes,” I said. Though if I am honest this is not always unconnected with what I had to eat or drink the night before.

He asked me to lie down and traced his fingers along my spine until he reached my buttocks, which he shook gently. I wondered if he was going to say that they too were listing to port, but he pronounced them straight, but only because my lumbar vertebrae did a sort of ‘Z’ bend on the way down. Had I fallen out of a tree in childhood, had a riding accident; some incapacitating illness perhaps?

I told him that I probably had succumbed to most of these at one time or another. Indeed, I remembered when as children we dared each other to jump out of the high hayloft and recalled the eye-watering thud we made on hitting the ground.

His soothing voice broke through these recollections: all could be corrected by simple manipulation if I would only make an appointment. Not previously having noticed a problem with either a tilting head or listing buttocks, I said I would give the matter careful consideration.

But now as I wandered through the eclectic range of green stalls promoting everything from solar heating to justice for Palestine, I could think only of my head in perpetual tilt and a ‘Z’ bend in my spine. I started to imagine all those muscles pulling against each other to keep me upright and possibly about to cause their cavalier and feckless owner some real gyp.

That evening I went to a party. ‘Just a few friends, a few drinks’ my hostess had said. Everyone was sipping Cava, but I was tired after driving and didn’t feel like drinking. So I found a champagne flute, filled it with straw-coloured apple and elderflower and just pretended; all the while thinking morosely of the happy froth of the green fair. Then someone started a karaoke!

I retreated indoors where a few men had huddled around a small television to watch the World Cup final. But it was no use, I could feel waves of depression mounting, which the football refused to distract. So I put my glass down, found the back door and without a word slipped soundlessly out into the night. Maybe I should have bought something for my nerves, after all.