Leith, William by The Hungry Years

Author:The Hungry Years [Years, The Hungry]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-03-05T22:00:00+00:00

Adventures with Carbohydrates

I'm losing more weight and I'm not drinking alcohol and I'm not snorting coke and I'm not taking painkillers, hardly any painkillers, and I find myself smoking cannabis every so often, and then more than every so often. The painkillers were a problem when I was drinking a lot and eating junk food, both of which increase your levels of pain. I would take ibuprofen, two or three or four at a time, several times a day, and sometimes I would take combinations of ibuprofen and

codeine, which made me feel temporarily calmer and steadier, and sometimes I drank a soluble mixture of codeine, paracetemol, and caffeine.

So now, if I've been smoking dope in the evening, I might take a couple of painkillers in the morning. Nothing more. I read a news item somewhere claiming that painkillers, ordinary over-the-counter analgesics, are addictive, that they actually give you headaches. They take away your problem and give you another one. Just like carbs, food that fills you up and makes you hungry again. And just like pornography, cocaine, cigarettes. Addictive products, advertisements for themselves, spreading like viruses in the Darwinian modern marketplace.

I'm preoccupied with painkillers.

This is what I'm thinking on a Sunday in March as I wake up, slightly headachy. I'm thinking about painkillers. I'm thinking that these days, these painful days, painkillers play a different role, a new role. When I was a kid, in the sixties and seventies, the painkillers were kept in a glass bottle in the bathroom medicine cabinet. When you had a headache, you would wait until you got home and then open the dusty bottle and shake out two powdery discs, and you'd swallow them with a glass of water, they'd taste bitter, and you'd put the bottle back in the medicine cabinet, and not open it again for ages. The bottle, which contained fifty pills, would hang around for months, even years.

And these days, when you feel a headache coming on, you pat your pockets or, if you're a woman, check your handbag. The time between pain and treatment has shrunk to almost nothing. These days, painkillers do not come in glass bottles,

but in blister-packs in bright, shiny boxes. I'm thinking of the colourful boxes, of the sensation of popping a pill through the foil sealant, of the pill's sugar coating, which makes it taste like an M&M. This is what I'm thinking as I open my eyes and squeeze them shut against the glare.

I'm not at home. My girlfriend and I are staying with friends, another couple, even though we're not getting on particularly well, not getting on well at all. My girlfriend says she still can't find the right moment to give up smoking, and she's smoking a lot. I've never seen anybody smoke so much. We go into restaurants and sometimes the person at the door, the greeter or whatever, says there's no room in the smoking section, but we can have a choice of tables in non-smoking, and I say yes, that's fine, and my girlfriend says hold on, no, that's not fine.

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