My colleague is a funny old stick. He’ll be 50 in a couple
of months and he’s one of the most engineery men I know (and given my
employment background that’s no mean feat). He is logical and methodical and he
likes a scientifically reliable fact.
Just recently he had been quite poorly and was been
bemoaning the aches and pains and general inconvenience of it all. A couple of
his desk neighbours had been badgering him to go to the doctor (a thing he
seemed singularly unwilling to do). All the persuading and cajoling and
pressuring came to an abrupt halt however, when he recently announced that he’d
been made well overnight.
He explained that he’d gone to bed as normal in the evening
and the following morning had suddenly felt entirely better. Nothing too
unusual so far, until we got to his view of the reason for this sudden
recovery.
The spirits did it in the night.
We asked how he’d arrived at this slightly leftfield reason
for feeling better and he explained that when he’d gone to bed he’d been
wearing his socks (with his pyjamas tucked in to them, mind you), but when he’d
woken up in the morning HE NO LONGER HAD SOCKS ON (pause for dramatic music).
Now I know very little about either spirituality or
medicine, but a sockectomy seems to be a pretty unusual activity for spooks or
doctors to be involved in whilst working on curing a bit of a cough.
However, just to be on the safe side, he went to see the
doctor anyway. I asked how it’d gone and he told me that the doc had said it
was just a virus that his immune systems had sorted out and he just had to take
things easy for a while.
He also told me that he’d asked the doctor if it might have
been spirits that took the illness away. Apparently the doctor thought it quite
unlikely.
Sometimes I worry that I’m just imagining these people.
