sister act

A few months ago, a 10 year old child was brought in with unexplained muscular weakness, to the point where a wheelchair had been organised by her parents. Although there are many possible and ominous explanations for something like this; polio, some sort of muscular dystrophy and so on, the facts are that exhaustive hospital testing had gradually excluded one after another of these possibilities, until we were left with the only viable conclusion: that it was some sort of psychological phenomenon. The parents, as we might have expected, have steadfastly refused to accept this.

Now her 8 year old sister is brought in, sporting her own wheelchair, for she has, alarmingly, developed the very same condition. I try to explain my belief that this must be some sort of "transference" situation, what used to be called hysterical conversion and what is now called primary attention seeking phenomena. She "caught" the "disease" from her sister, and by obtaining a wheelchair for her the parents have unwittingly bought into the extremely unhelpful idea that there really is something physical wrong with her. But they don't want to hear this: they stalk off in disgust, threatening to change their doctor and put in an official complaint to "the highest authority"

Who says the weather isn't interesting? This morning a plume of volcanic ash from Iceland is bearing down on the British Isles, causing numerous flights to be cancelled for fear of their engines failing as the intakes get clogged by the microscopic glass fragments. (though apparently it's too high in the atmosphere to be injurious to health) The question for me is: will this eruption spoil our summer, as has happened so often in the past? Just 18 years ago an Icelandic volcano put paid to our summer, while in 1982, Mexico's El Chicon put out so much ash it spoiled the summer for huge swathes of the northern hemisphere. Please God it will only be a small one this time around. We've endured 3 appalling summers in a row. We REALLY need a good one this year.