GRIFFITHS' AFFLICTION

I was surprised when I heard that Griffiths was studying medicine. With his occasional bouts of narcolepsy, which caused him to conk out completely for no apparent reason at crucial times, I didn’t think he was the man for the scalpel. I remember one lunch-time in the office, one minute he was sitting eating a bowl of pea soup, the next he was face down in it, looking like a recumbent Martian. He was badly scalded and when he came back from the hospital, his face was swathed in bandages, like the Invisible Man’s. He explained his affliction by saying, proudly, ‘It’s something about a genome. I’ve a thousand too few, or too many.’ Doctors tried to control it with mescaline, until Prentice grew wildly addicted to it and started writing poetry in Urdu, a language of which he’d had no previous experience. Finally, partial control was exerted by the ingestion of a daily vitamin C tablet and a regimen of unexciting food such as celery. I never thought that Griffiths was cerebral enough for the doctoring. One night we were out for a drink and chatting about the war. I asked him to name the source of the famous quote: ‘Dictators ride to and fro on tigers that they dare not dismount.’ He thought for a moment and said, triumphantly, ‘Gandhi.’ ‘Gandhi was a pacifist,’ I said. ‘It was Churchill. What on Earth made you think it was Gandhi?’ ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘Gandhi was Indian and they have tigers in India, don’t they?’ A few months later, I ran into Griffiths at the sports centre. He had been working on the weights and was in the foyer, in the process of sniffing his left armpit. ‘Do I smell?’ he asked. ‘Everybody smells,’ I replied, ‘that’s why we’ve got noses. If you mean do you smell bad, then the answer, fortunately, is no.’ I asked him how he was getting on with his medical studies. ‘To tell you the truth,’ he said, ‘not too well.’ I asked him to elaborate.
‘I’ve made a couple of errors,’ he remarked. ‘They asked me to begin a treatment of depilation on a patient and I though that meant giving him suppositories. I nearly managed it, too, until the doctor asked what the hell was I doing cutting the chap’s hair at the wrong end.’ ‘An easy mistake to make,’ I admitted.
‘Then there was the time they brought someone in who had bad frostbite and I diagnosed athlete’s foot before giving him a shot of ether to dull the pain. He ended up losing four toes and I was reported to the Medical Council. I gave it up after that.’ The last I heard of him was that he’d taken up as a parliamentary sketch-writer. He fell asleep regularly, but so did his colleagues, especially after they had given the old liver a pounding in the Flying Pheasant on Old Queen Street the evening before. It could be said that finally there was one job where Griffiths’ affliction was a positive advantage to him.