The Heart of the Matter

At the beginning of Three Men in a Boat, published in 1889, the author and narrator (Jerome K Jerome) recounts that he has the symptoms of every disease from ague to zymosis – except housemaid’s knee.  Perhaps he also had hypochondria – I know I do.

Hitherto the blood has coursed round my veins in a perfectly satisfactory manner, occasionally a bit pops out on my chin when I’m shaving, reassuring me that supplies are adequate. Now I have been told that I have high blood pressure I take a reading every day and, golly, the doctor is spot on. The machine some mornings has amber warning lights, which does nothing to alleviate the condition.

Of course I’m now a blood pressure bore. One effect of this, besides not being asked out often, is that a lot of friends tell me they are in the same boat. Most of them are poster boys/girls for clean-living and a healthy lifestyle, so I conclude that it is a condition that develops at a certain age, perhaps triggered genetically. Sarah M was much more informative and here is what she told me.

In 1945, high blood pressure was detectable but there was no treatment for it and essentially doctors advised avoiding salt and stress. It seems amazing that only nine years before I was born that this was so. A high-profile case was President Roosevelt whose condition was diagnosed by a heart specialist and reported to the President’s personal physician, the US Surgeon General. The specialist advised “bed rest”, earning this retort from the US SG:  “You can’t do that. He’s the President of the United States.”

May I digress, I read this in the Lyttleton Hart-Davis letters dated March 1957. From Hart-Davis: “Fleming is back from America, exhausted and with a heavy cold. He reports that Harold Caccia is doing splendidly in Washington, but is increasingly fed up with Dulles, and indeed with Eisenhower, who sees no one except caddies and reads nothing but brief digests of world news. He is, Peter says, now almost completely insulated from the world and its doings – which is pretty terrifying”.

Lyttleton responds: “I am delighted to hear about Harold Caccia – a very good man. What a sinister picture of Eisenhower – at the head of the greatest power in the world. Do you know Winston’s latest – about USA bungling; it wouldn’t have happened if Eisenhower had been alive?”

(Harold Caccia had been appointed British Ambassador the previous year to re-build the “special relationship” after Suez. I remember him as Provost of Eton. Dulles was Secretary of State. Eisenhower died in 1969.)

But back to Roosevelt. Here is a chart of his blood pressure and it is markedly higher than mine.

Does Eisenhower’s presidency perhaps give a foretaste of the incoming US administration? To digress, this quotation may be apt.

And hear the pleasant cuckoo, loud and long – the simple bird that thinks two notes a song.

Will OPEC and Russia cooperate to cut oil production? How will the UK economy fare as the details of Brexit start to emerge? All questions, no answers, except to read more poetry.