Snorting the white stuff...

I guess it was inevitable. A new baby, work stress and the Awards was enough to just tip me over the edge.

By Sunday night, I was starting to cough and splutter and feel feverish. By Wednesday night is was all over. Now I'm not much of one to see a doctor but this was one of the very rare occasions that I was forced to by the ferocity of my symptoms. Little did I know that they would also tell me that I am highly over stressed and should have a week off work to relax before my blood pressure boils over. Then the usual happened. They prescribed antibiotics and I smiled submissively and left the room. I think I've still got the prescription somewhere...

Instead, I call my homeopath. He never lets me down. Now I have a very real love/ hate relationship with these natural remedies. I don't understand how they work and the explanations always given defy any logical science. This angers my rational self immensley.

But in a powerful tension with this anger is the indisputable truth of personal experience which rudely interjects everytime my rational self attempts to lay judgment down upon it. Homeopathy cured me of my arthritis 4 years ago after every rheumatologist in the land had examined and drugged me. And they have worked on my infant kids astoundingly well for the last decade.

So in these moments of weakness when the doctor can't prescribe anything more potent than tyrozet throat lozenges or more imaginative than antibiotics, I turn to my homeopath.

After explaining the symptoms, he is sure that what I need is 'Hepar Sulph' - whatever that is. But alas, I have run out! So I call back and ask if there is an alternative...'Just sniff the empty bottle like you were doing crack, into each nostril, as hard as you can' was the reply.

Amazingly - it worked. After a coughing fit lasting the whole day that regularly ended in retching and mock vomiting, it just stopped. I lay down and finally got some sleep.

I just sat there the following day sucking up the white powder as if my life depended on it. Just have to hope that when the kids grow up and learn about drugs, they don't think back to some distant memory when they saw their father snorting mysterious white stuff whilst shaking uncontrollably from cold sweats and fevers.

I think I will have some explaining to do.

By which time of course, Birmingham's Muslim community has either descended into guns, gangs and perpetual violence as the drug capital of the western world, or more optimistically, has risen up successfully to reject tribalism and all its associated poisons to realise its vast creative, political and economic might.

Neither future, like my illness, is inevitable. I betrayed the rights that my body has over me. It was my choice to do that and so I paid the inevitable price of illness. We still have a chance to honour the rights that our young people have over us, before we pay an inevitable and deadly price...