The Fix

I have now had my first experience with morphine, at least the first one that I know about.

The natty contraption illustrated is about as complicated as, say, your average central heating controller, but with the additional complication of having a moving part, something which pushes the plunger of a large syringe by a set amount. The sort of something which used to be quite tricky to organise when I was a child; motors were either on or off and were not designed to work in steps. Maybe things get easier if you graduate from Meccano.

Anyway, the point of the thing is pain relief and when you press the (out of picture) button you get a shot of morphine sulphate - which either is or is dissolved in a clear liquid - and the machine both stops you having too much and keeps track of what you have had. But there were side effects.

The first was that although I get on trying to read my Trollope - either Framley Parsonage or Orley Farm, both fairly light fare - I found I was making no progress. I seemed to be able to read the words but they were not sinking in and I found myself reading the same few sentences over and over without any of it sinking in.

The next stage was that the screen on the Kindle started to go a bit funny. Instead of a flat matt screen, the thing acquired depth; a bit like peering into an aquarium. Pages were on what looked like windows opening into the Kindle. One was looking through the screen into some strange Kindle world or other.

This was no good so I put it away and tried shutting my eyes. When thoughts started to wander through the mind, rather in the way that they do ordinarily, but which were nonsense. Nonsense in the sense that the sense of a sentence like 'I will need some clean sheets to make the bed in the morning' depends on the fact that everybody knows that making beds commonly involves sheets. But in my case the sentence might have arrived as 'I will need some sheared sheep to the make the bed in the morning'. Complete garbage, and I knew it, without it having the virtue of being fun, titillating or otherwise pleasant. Luckily I must have fallen asleep soon after and by the time I woke up the effects of the stuff had worn off.

Presumably recreational users make some rather different arrangements.