One always wants to be loved, especially at one’s club – only natural, one supposes. However I feel I have entered the nirvana of being needed. Word has for some time circulated that mems with a problem can look forward to my 10 o’clock “advice” chats in the senior reading room every Wednesday. These days the lineup is so long it is colloquially referred to as the queue.
Category: Major’s Corner (Page 10 of 32)
I recall from my Shakespeare at school these words from Hamlet when Polonius says farewell to his son: “To thine own self be true.” Perhaps one of William’s most famous lines; however I was reminded the other day that the second part of the goodbye is equally important but not as well remembered. It goes “And it must then follow, as the night the day, thou canst not be false to any man.”
A friend of mine who is always sending me articles floating around the internet swears this one is true: Two-thirds of all civil servants on long term disability (LTD) are there because of stress issues.
Is it not enough that I must pass every morning by Pericles, hunched like a hen, hatching further malevolence? Must I also be made to avoid the other frightful cat hanging from the upstairs bannister, stretching down in an effort to scratch my salty pate? This is my morning ritual as I make a dash for my club to medicate my shattered nerves with an early martini after a breakfast fraught with indigestion.
It is always a difficult moment for me when someone at the club points out that it is my birthday, which unfortunately it will be in a few short days. I ask you, who wants to be reminded that one is staring at the precipice, or as my late father put it, the coal chute to oblivion?