One hundred years ago, the world was gripped by the puzzle of “sleepy sickness”. The encephalitis lethargica epidemic began with a rash of sore throats and ended with 300,000 dead and half a million paralysed. Doctors could not fathom why people appeared to freeze, sometimes while eating.
Sleepy sickness appeared from nowhere in 1915 and then disappeared, just as mysteriously, in 1926. The condition is probably an exaggerated reaction to the bacteria that cause a simple sore throat. It could come back; we don’t know.
Cut to an English doctor in New York who, after too many hallucinogenic drugs in California and spells as a Hell’s Angel and a champion weightlifter on Muscle Beach, was convinced that he would die young. He sent a package to his illustrious friend from school, Jonathan Miller, in which he enclosed assorted scripts with the instruction to “retrieve anything you think fit”. He included a draft of Awakenings, the book that in 1973 made Oliver Sacks famous.
At the Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, Sacks discovered that the drug L-DOPA brought patients out of their sleep. In Awakenings, the film of the book, Robert de Niro plays a patient who gradually unfolds under the effect of the drug.
It’s a virtuoso display of Oliver Sacks’s humanity. It’s like watching a statue come to life.
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Labour cove
Desperate to escape the dismal Labour leadership contest, I contemplate the Andaman Islands. They look promising until I discover that the capital is a former penal colony called Port Blair where the main sight is a jail for political prisoners. I read about the Sentinelese, one of the few people left on the planet who eschew contact with the modern world. Anthropological expeditions mounted in 1967 were abandoned as pointless in 1996. It is with a sense of wonder that I discover that the resort is called Corbyn’s Cove. Crocodiles are occasionally spotted in the area. They will be more common than Labour voters soon enough.
TV’s hot number
Carol Vorderman made the news for falling, naked, off a running machine. What she was doing naked on a running machine we shall leave to the imagination. None would be more fevered, were he still here to savour the image, than my mum’s second husband, Frank, the world’s biggest Countdown fan. And not just for the conundrum, either.
I was once on The Andrew Marr Show with Carol Vorderman, chatting on the sofa to the political guest of the day. A week later I had a drink with Frank in the Lancashire Fusiliers Club. My time with Carol on the sofa was the talk of the town.
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Every one of the old boys was a big fan, and so were most of the women. I talked about nothing else all night. Not one of them at any point, not one, so much as mentioned the fact that the other person on the show had been the prime minister, David Cameron.
Something in the water
William Davies’s sceptical new book, The Happiness Industry, confirms my distrust of any shaman telling me to cheer up.
I once had a public argument with Professor Richard Layard, the author of Happiness, about whether, in pursuit of happiness, it was ethical to put a joy-inducing substrate in the water supply. Recalling the soma that anaesthetises the population in Huxley’s Brave New World, I said that this was monstrous. Professor Layard, bravely accepting his own logic, confessed that he would.
The clappy-happy gurus lost me right there. Anyone prepared to use drugs for public policy needs watching.