The Big Read: Oh to be in bed with Archie

17 March 2014 - 02:01 By Darrel Bristow-Bovey
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REMEMBRANCE OF SICK DAYS PAST: Marcel Proust used his hypochondria to crate the time to write a very long novel
REMEMBRANCE OF SICK DAYS PAST: Marcel Proust used his hypochondria to crate the time to write a very long novel
Image: Culture club

As a student of nominative determinism, I was very interested to learn this week that Mr and Mrs Nightingale, parents of the more famous Florence, were the Mr and Mrs Beckham of their time: globe-wandering socialites who named their children after the city in which they were born.

Florence was lucky enough to be born in Florence; her sister was born in Naples. Does "Naples Nightingale" have a snappy ring to it? It didn't to her parents, so they gave her the Greek name for Naples, and while Florence Nightingale went on to be a famous hospital administrator - nay, perhaps the most famous hospital administrator of all! - the unfortunate Parthenope Nightingale spent most of her life helping her mother arrange flowers.

Florence, while we're on the subject, was by all accounts a very bad nurse. She staunchly denied the existence of germs, thought most sick people were faking it, and after she returned from the Crimean War spent most of the next 54 years in bed, complaining of various maladies that came and went at her convenience. Florence Nightingale, in short, was an incurable hypochondriac.

I know all this about Florence Nightingale because I have spent the last several days doing very little but lying on my sofa, sighing and coughing and reading improving literature. I haven't mentioned it because I didn't want to alarm anyone, but I have the flu. Well, I say "flu", but that's an altogether inadequate word. What I have is something more properly recorded in the Book of Revelations. It's been a while since I read the Bible and not even the phlegmy apocalypse of this flu drove me back to it so I'm speaking from memory here, but if I tell you that what menaces me has the head of a dragon, the body of Khulubuse Zuma and the fearful wings of a Kulula flight, and tramps with fiery footprints over the ravaged face of an abandoned Earth, I think you'll get the general feel of the thing.

When I was a young fellow and sick in bed I would spend the happy dappled day watching sunlight move across my bedspread and listening to the serials on Springbok Radio while I waited for my mom to come home with treats and Lucozade. My mother was a teacher so I had to be very sick to stay at home, so being very sick became good news. She brought me those round jars of barley sweets and tricorn humbugs, and also Archie comics. To this day when I am sick I wish, oh how I wish, and sometimes aloud, that someone would bring me an Archie comic.

This week my own household Florence Nightingale brought me a book about hypochondriacs. It seemed a strange treat to bring a person languishing with a potentially world-ending ailment - perhaps she hadn't looked sufficiently closely at the teacup of my own sputum that I'd proudly collected for her inspection - but I suppose we aren't all natural nurses.

The book was interesting enough. Did you know that the poet Shelley was a hypochondriac, and once became convinced that he had contracted elephantiasis from a woman with suspiciously thick legs on a crowded stagecoach. He would suddenly throw himself to the floor in social gatherings and wriggle around like a Romantic termite, crying out: "Pardon me please! I have the elephantiasis!"

His enthusiasm for this self-diagnosis was not diminished by repeated actual diagnoses that he did not, in fact, have elephantiasis. He would obsessively draw parts of his skin tight and search for signs of oddness then turn on whoever was sitting beside him and search their corresponding body parts to compare. For a while he specifically feared elephantiasis of the scrotum, which must have been especially annoying to the people sitting beside him.

Marcel Proust was another one. He suffered from asthma and was so afraid of pollen from the chestnut trees that lined the Boulevard Haussmann outside his apartment that he kept his windows shut for 20 years and lined his bedroom with cork. I pondered that while I called for another Corenza.

"Hypochondriacs," muttered my partner darkly, "are the worst."

"Although," I said thoughtfully, "he did actually die of a chest complaint in the end, so maybe he had the last laugh."

"He spent his hypochondria writing 3000 pages of the greatest novel of the 20th century," she said, with some inscrutable meaning. "What have you done this week?"

"I have discovered," I said with dignity, "that if I hold my laptop against the wall I can pick up the neighbour's Wi-Fi."

"Have you at least," she said, "managed to think of a topic for your column this week, so we don't have the usual scenes again on Thursday?"

I wheezed reflectively.

"No," I said. "Not yet."

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