If symptoms persist..

`WHY ARE you so angry?' I asked.

`It was prison, doctor,' interposed his girlfriend, 'what made him like this. Before that, he was soft. Prison made him hard.'

`Why were you in prison?' I asked him.

`He's easily led,' interposed his girl- friend again. 'This friend of his, Jim, said let's do a burglary and he went along with it.'

Was that the only time you were in prison?' I asked.

`I once gave a copper seven stitches in the head,' he replied.

`What happened then?'

`I got six months.'

`He was drunk at the time, doctor,' said his girlfriend.

Further questioning soon established that he drank heavily.

`It's the boredom,' he said.

`What are you interested in?' I asked. `Nothing.'

`How do you spend your time?' `I watch telly all day.' I asked him what he would like in life. `I'd like to have money, to live in comfort.'

`What do you call comfort?'

`No niggers in the street.'

I was taken aback by the vehemence, the concentrated malignity of his reply.

`I hate them. They're all muggers and rapists.'

This seemed to be a case of the pot calling the kettle Afro-Caribbean.

`In prison they're all robbers. And have you ever seen a nigger with springs in his feet? Then why do they walk along like that, bouncing up and down, all arrogant like?' He walked round the room in imitation, hatred seething from every pore.

`And the Pakis,' he said. 'They come over here and stick together, breeding like rabbits, getting grants, taking jobs. Look at the coal mines, they're all closed down. Great Britain's not Britain any more, it's just a mish-mash.'

It is not for doctors to alter the politi- cal convictions of their patients, of course, but I did get him to concede that the closure of our mines was not caused directly by an influx of miners from India.

`Take the Romans,' he continued. `They were great. They built straight roads, and they didn't have no Paid shops on the corner.'

`And look what happened to the Roman Empire,' I said.

I told him to look inward. He couldn't change the country, but he could stop drinking.

`Yes,' he said, leaving my room a little calmer. 'Drink is the ruin of all evil.'

`And the price of wisdom,' I added, 'is above robbery.'

Theodore Dalrymple