The female members of Gordon Brown’s cabinet are singularly un-lovely. I’m not referring to their physical appearance but to their extraordinary arrogance. Humility is not in their vocabulary.

I have begun to use Neuro Linguistic Programming techniques for treating phobias. Perceptions that have haunted and incapacitated people for years can be dispersed in minutes.

“But, Robert, how do you earn your living?” asked a counsellor friend. Richard Bandler, the co-creator of NLP gives the answer “Through charging by results”. I think that is very fair although so far I haven’t charged at all because I still see myself as a student. Anyway, anything that impedes pill-prescribing doctors and crackpot psychotherapists from making their living is reward enough for me.

On Sunday afternoon I was tired and wanted to go home to rest but six families wanted to have conjoint sessions with the individual patient in each case and me. Obviously that is what I had to do: treatment at PROMIS is expensive and the families deserve to be given time and consideration – but after a two hour psychodrama session, a one hour lecture to all the families and patients and a one and half hour EMDR session with one of the patients, I was mashed.

I knew that I was in trouble when the Glyndebourne programme mentioned that the producer of this particular opera had previously put on ten new productions at The Royal Court Theatre in London. Sadly, I didn’t find the opera itself much compensation. It seemed to be like a patchwork quilt of musical pieces, stuck together without much relevance to the plot. The one compensation was the magnificent voices of the Russian singers brought in by Glyndebourne’s Russian musical director. But ultimately I felt that the only things that made it worth over £400 for the evening were Glyndebourne itself and the fact that Meg enjoyed the opera (our tastes are not always the same), even though she did find it a bit (!) bloodthirsty.

When I arrived at the Recovery Centre first thing in the morning, all the patients and staff on duty were on the front lawn and two fire engines were blocking the drive. Fortunately it was all a false alarm but I felt the fireman deserved something rather more than a cup of coffee and I believed I knew the way to brighten them up.

“I just lay on the bed, feeling disgusting. They touched me all over. I remembered him throwing me out of the house and telling me I couldn’t come back unless I came back with money. I remember when he threw dirty crap water over me because I wouldn’t do a job. Different people all over me. He is still in my head telling me to do it. Smoking crack and watching porn and him telling me that I am nothing like them and I can’t do anything like them. Sex with a guy in a graveyard. He was saying horrible things to me. Dragging me around the room, making me do things. I can’t understand why he would make me do them. Just disgusting. Images of horrible men all over me. Even when I was doing it he still made me feel worthless. He spoke to the clients nicer than he spoke to me. Hundreds of men used me. I don’t see what was wrong with me. I don’t understand why it happened. I feel I have done all that for nothing.”

The government is thinking of paying people to lose weight. If they knew anything about the long term ineffectiveness of dieting, they would realise that they would be paying out again and again.

To call it “grass” or “weed” makes it sound harmless. It isn’t. It’s a very dangerous psycho-active drug. It does bad things to the brain in young people, who are most likely to take it.

Meg has been away in Wales for the weekend on a music workshop. She loved it. She would not have enjoyed being at home: I had a battery of night calls. Now we are back together and the telephone is silent. How very considerate of it.

There are times when, out of the blue, things go pear-shaped and I have to hold my nerve. In any treatment centre in the world these times are disturbingly frequent. That’s the nature of the job.