Solar keratosis (“sometimes unsightly”) will shrink my social life – never extensive – even further. Luckily the twenty-first century has created its own anchorite’s cell and here I am, illuminating a posted MS, aided by a Saitek keyboard and a 22 in. Ilyama monitor.
Initially I applied cortisone cream and requested a second tube when filling in the online prescription for my gout pills. But Dr Jones wasn’t having any. Cortisone is powerful. Used to excess it’s likely to make my facial skin thinner. I’m not vain about my appearance (I’d be delusional if I were) but this brought me up with a jerk. Steve Bell, The Guardian’s malicious cartoonist, sees our prime minister as impossibly smooth and caricatures his face squeezed into a condom. I didn’t like the parallel.
But I did like Dr Jones’ solution. DiproBase contains white soft paraffin and liquid paraffin and is labelled an emollient. Just think, after all those years of being nasty about people in print and there was a cure close at hand.
LOST IN LA MANCHA I’m devoting myself to unread classics. With War and Peace,
A la recherche and Ulysses out of the way I’ve started on Don Quixote. It’s quite entertaining but for one defect: the shortest paragraph is 500 words and I constantly lose my place on the page.
HEALING BUBBLES Surgery - twice-over - for younger daughter discouraged elaborate celebrations for the fiftieth and we reverted to the default state. A 2005 Charmes-Chambertin was too young, sad given the £63 price tag. But a bottle of Krug (drunk before the red burgundy, of course) came close to justifying an expenditure of £110. Accompanied by a somewhat predictable DVD movie about Tolstoy enlivened by stellar performances from Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren.
