Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
for groceries, not by one woman alone but by a group of women, a coven, who then decided
to follow me around the shop just in case of further parental lapses.
Fortunately we were spared the amateur medical opinion in this instance when the dermato-
logist rang back with an immediate appointment, which I think was down to the doctor who
had probably rung her and explained how bad the situation had become. It was, she said,
a very bad case of champignon - a skin fungus basically - but was certainly treatable and
shouldn't leave any scarring. The question is, she mused, how did he get it? Do we have any
animals?
It is fair to say that Thérence is quite feral; the way he insists on playing with the cats and
dogs, climbing into their beds, even eating their food when our backs are turned makes him
seem more Mowgli than the ModPadawan I had him marked down as - he loves his pets. But
as we listed the volume of animals that we have the dermatologist's face went ashen, not be-
cause it's particularly unusual in the countryside but because we had to try and narrow down
which animal, if any, was carrying the fungus. My chief suspect was Pierrot - whose insa-
tiable appetite for pleasing himself on furniture was surely just asking for bacterial trouble.
Then there's Vespa who briefly had ringworm; Toby takes himself off to places of an after-
noon, so who knows what he's up to; Flame of course; the horses shedding their winter coats
as they had been, that can't be healthy... it could have been any one of them.
Or, because it's the countryside it could have been none of them, just something poor
Thérence had picked up in the air, like germ warfare. We arranged for the vet to come out the
following week and begin an investigation, but in the meantime Thérence had some 'scrap-
ings' taken from his cheeks to see if they could determine the cause. Apparently they do this
by seeing what cultures grow from the scrapings, in other words what vegetation can be cul-
tivated from my lad's face! As Marlon Brando said in
The Godfather
, 'Look what they did to
my beautiful boy.'
The course of treatment he was prescribed was also quite harsh. Firstly tablets, which are
250 milligrams but of which he can only take 200 milligrams, which meant us crushing the
tablets in a pestle and mortar and then in rather dubious fashion, chopping the powder into
lines and placing it in wraps. He was also given some cream which was so strong he wasn't
to be allowed out into the sunlight! For two months! A situation which got Natalie especially
quite angry about the whole misdiagnosis thing, but what do you do? This is a very small,
rural community and the doctor is a very powerful figure here, it's not a case of simply chan-
ging your doctor; that would be a very public insult and a decision not to be taken lightly. It's
not wise to upset local bigwigs; I've seen
Jean de Florette.
Despite her frustration with the doctor and the logistical difficulty in keeping an adventurous
toddler locked indoors on a sunny day, Natalie's mood is always lifted in the spring and at
last it was here in all its glory. Like the popular bloke who turns up deliberately late at a
party, spring had sneaked in, been forgiven for its tardiness and was being worshipped by all.
