Tim Bell, Lady Thatcher’s PR guru and a friend of ours since he was the ampersand between the two Saatchis, says that David Cameron has convinced the public that he is different to their normal expectation of a Tory leader but he has not changed the Conservative Party.
An Israeli doctor friend visited the Counselling Centre today and sat in on my psychodrama session. The Lebanese patient we currently have in treatment was out at a hospital appointment. Even if she had been present, I am sure they would have been very respectful of each other as individuals. We talk of civilisation as the development of political and social institutions but, in my view, governments and religions turn individuals into savages.
Drat, I forget to ask my secretary to buy yesterday’s newspaper while I was away in Spain. How shall I know what happened? Perhaps the world stopped and I didn’t know.
He wanted to tell me the story of his life. I shall be happy to hear it when he is sober.
She’s written a book saying that all women do what she does. Well she would think that, in her denial of her own problems, wouldn’t she?
The true measure of a GP is what he or she does without a prescription. That’s what the Department of Health and the National Institute for Clinical Excellence fail to understand. They are obsessed with pharmaceutical drugs as the solution to all life’s problems. There are none so blind as those who will not see.
To take husband and wife into treatment at the same time is unusual but that is what I believe is best for them. Otherwise they will be out of phase in their recovery if we were to take them in one after another. Alternatively, if we took one and the other went somewhere else, they might find themselves arguing over the right way of doing things – such as whether childhood issues should be looked at straight away or, as we believe (because we want patients to focus on their own behaviour rather than that of their parents or other people), at some other time. Anything they don’t want to say in front of each other (and I doubt there is much of that because they were using drugs together) can be said to a counsellor.
I walk between my medical practice and the Counselling Centre in my shirtsleeves. I leave my jacket and even my scarf behind. Even though everybody else is in shirtsleeves, I feel very conspicuous – almost naked, definitely outside my comfort zone.
Arriving back at the cottage at quarter past midnight I had been travelling for just over eight hours since leaving the hotel in Southern Spain. My knowledge of geography is so poor that I had previously imagined that I could pop out and back in a day, just like going to Paris on Eurostar. Back to school, Lefever.
I remember many years ago a former treatment director arranged for one of the staff to collect him by car from the airport. Normally I catch the train from Gatwick or a tube or a taxi from Heathrow. Tonight I am being collected by a staff member (Meg has the car in Cambridge) and it would take hours to go into London from Gatwick and then out again to Kent by train and I have to work in The Recovery Centre tomorrow. I feel very grand. Anyone would think that I own the place.