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On Travel by Train (1922)

J.B. Priestley

Remove an  Englishman from his hearth and home, his centre of corporal  Life , and he becomes a very different creature, one capable of sudden furies and roaring passions, a deep sea of strong emotions churning beneath his frozen exterior. I can pass, at all times, for a quiet, neighbourly fellow, yet I have sat, more than once, in a railway carriage with black murder in my heart. At the mere sight of some probably inoffensive fellow-passenger my whole being will be invaded by a million devils of wrath, and I “could do such bitter business as the day would quake to look on”. There is one type of traveller that never fails to rouse my quick hatred. She is a large, middle-aged woman, with a rasping voice and a face of brass. Above all things, she loves to invade smoking compartments that are already comfortably filled with a quiet company of smokers; she will come bustling in, shouting over her shoulder at her last victim, a prostrate porter, and, laden with packages of maddening shapes and sizes, she will glare defiantly about her until some unfortunate has given up his seat. She is often accompanied by some sort of contemptible, whining cur that is only one degree less offensive than its mistress. From the moment that she has wedged herself in, there will be no more peace in the carriage, but simmering hatred, and everywhere dark looks and muttered threats. But everyone knows her. Courtesy and modesty perished in the world of travel on the day when she took her first journey; but it will not be long before she is in hourly danger of extinction, for there are strong men in our midst.There are other types of railway travellers, not so offensive as the above,which combines all the bad qualities, but still annoying in a varying degree to most of us; and of these others I will enumerate one or two of the commonest.

First, there are those who, when they would go on a journey, take all their odd chattels and household utensils and parcel them up in brown paper, disdaining such things as boxes and trunks; furthermore,when such eccentrics have loaded themselves up with queer-shaped packages, they will cast about for baskets of fruit and bunches of flowers to add to their own and other people’s misery. Then there are the simple folk who are for ever eating and drinking in railway carriages. No sooner are they settled in their seats but they are passing each other tattered sandwiches and mournful scraps of pastry, and talking with their mouths full, and scattering crumbs over the trousers of fastidious old gentlemen. Sometimes they will peel and eat bananas with such rapidity that nervous onlookers are compelled to seek another compartment. Some children do not make good traveling companions, for they will do nothing but whimper or howl throughout a journey, or they will spend all their time daubing their faces with chocolate or trying to climb out of the window. And the cranks are always with us; on the bleakest day, they it is who insist on all the windows being open, but in the sultriest season they go about in mortal fear of draughts,and will not allow a window to be touched.

More to my taste are the innocents who always find themselves in the wrong train. They have not the understanding necessary to fathom the time-tables, nor will they ask the railway officials for advice, so they climb into the first train that comes, and trust to luck. When they are being hurtled towards Edinburgh, they will suddenly look round the carriage and ask, with a mild touch of pathos, if they are in the right train for Bristol. And then, puzzled and disillusioned, they have to be bundled out at the next station, and we see them no more. I have often wondered if these simple voyagers ever reach their destinations, for it is not outside probability that they may be shot from station to station, line to line, until there is nothing mortal left of them.Above all other railway travellers,I envy the mighty sleepers, descendantsof the Seven of Ephesus. How often, on a long, uninteresting journey, haveI envied them their sweet oblivion. With Lethe at their command, no dull,empty train journey, by day or night, has any terrors for them. Knowing the length of time they have to spend in the train, they compose themselvesand are off to sleep in a moment, probably enjoying the gorgeous adventures of dream while the rest of us are looking blankly out of the windowor counting our fingers. Two minutes from their destination they stir, rub their eyes, stretch themselves, collect their baggage, and, peering out of the window, murmur: “My station, I think”. A moment later they go out, alert and refreshed. Lords of Travel, leaving us to our boredom.

Seafaring men make good companions on a railway journey. They are always ready for a pipe and a crack with any man, and there is usuallysome entertaining matter in their talk. But they are not often met with away from the coast towns. Nor do we often come across the confidentialstranger in an English railway carriage, though his company is inevitable on the Continent and,I believe, in America. When the confidential stranger does make an appearance here, he is usually a very dull dog, who compels us to yawn through the interminable story of his life, and rides some wretched old hobbyhorse to death.There is one more type of traveller that must be mentioned here, If only for the guidance of the young and simple. He is usually an elderly man, neatly dressed, but a little tobacco-stained, always seated in a corner, and he opens the conversation by pulling out a gold hunter and remarking that the train is at least three minutes behind time. Then, with the slightest encouragement, he will begin to talk, and his talk will be all of trains. As some men discuss their acquaintances, or others speak of violins or roses, so he talks of trains, their history, their quality, their destiny. All his days and nights seem to have been passed in railway carriages, all reading seems to have been in time-tables. He will tell you of the 12:35 from this place and the 3:49 from the other place, and how the 10:18 ran from So-and-so to So-and-so in such a time, and how the 8:26 was taken off and the 5:10 was put on; and the greatness of Ms subject moves him to eloquence, and there is passion and mastery in Ms voice, now wailing over a missed connection or a departed hero of trains, now exultantly proclaiming the glories of a non-stop express or a wonderful run to time. However dead you were to the passion, the splendour, the pathos, in this matter of trains, before he has done with you you will be ready to weep over the 7:37 and cry out in ecstasy at the sight of the 2:52. Beware of the elderly man who sits in the comer of the carriage and says that the train is two minutes behind time, for he is the Ancient Mariner of railway travellers and will hold you with his glittering eye.

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IN MEMORIAM

MACDONALD CRITCHLEY born Bristol 2nd January 1900 –died Nether Stowey 15th October 1997

Ascetic yet charismatic, tall and always impeccably dressed Critchley cast an imposing and elegant figure on his visit to the bedside of the neurologically sick at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, Queen Square, London.

The son of a humble clerk at the Bristol Gas Works he was educated at the Christian Brothers College and gained a place at the University of Bristol at 15. Deemed too young to take it up, he taught himself ancient Greek at home and then studied Russian. His determined plans to join the Imperial Russian Army were, however, thwarted by the Bolshevik Revolution. His medical studies were interrupted by a chequered stint in the Wiltshire Military Regiment. Court-martialled on a charge of being late on parade he found himself ordered to decapitate and fillet 500 fish, a factor he later claimed influenced him to avoid becoming a surgeon. A second charge of going missing, led to a punishment of intensive gardening. He never gardened again! On resuming his medical career ha graduated with first class honours at the age of 21 years, was appointed to the staff of the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, Maida Vale at 27 and perhaps most remarkably of all became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians at only 30.

Domestic honours included, Dean of the Institute of Neurology from 1948-1953, Neurologist to the Royal Navy from 1939-1977, Vice-President of the Royal College of Physicans. His Goulstonian, Harveian, Sherrington, Croonian and Hughlings Jackson lectures were meticulously prepared and captivatingly delivered. He was particularly proud of his appointment as Master of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries and in 1983 with Princess Margaret he presided at a sumptuous banquet for his many friends from the five continents. He was awarded a Commander of the British Empire but his distinguished contemporaries at Queen Square, Walshe and Symonds both became knights. When asked about his relative lack of honours Critchley stated it was because he had once driven the wrong way up a one way street in Portugal.

His academic achievements were acknowledged internationally by his Presidency of both the World Federation of Neurology and the International League of Epilepsy and in fulfilling his responsabilities in these roles he travelled and lectured all over the world. His interests in neurology were eclectic, although he is probably best remembered for his work on the parietal lobe and his interest in the then unfashionable field of dyslexia which he felt was inherited and if picked up early was amenable to remedial educational therapy. He explored unfashionable by-ways, writing on lightning injuries, the neurology of old age and the effects of boxing on the nervous system. In my own field of abnormal movement disorders he wrote extensively on the different causes of Parkinson’s syndrome and particularly reinforced Marie’s concepts of arteriosclerotic Parkinson’s Syndrome. His lecture on Huntington’s chorea which I was fortunate to hear twice, describing the arrival of the disease on East Coast of the U.S.A. with the Winthrop fleet of the Pilgrim Fathers, was enthralling. Tics and occupational cramps also fascinated him. His writings spanning six decades were so extensive with more than 300 single author papers that after his retirement I recall him browsing through the three box files containing his papers in the medical library at Queen Square and with a puzzled look asking the librarian “Did I really write that?” In neurology the only areas he left relatively unscathed for the next generation of Queen Square neurologists to attack were peripheral nerves and muscle, the latter he considered only good to eat not to study.

His restless mind could not be satisfied solely by neurology and essays such as ‘Tattooed Women’, ‘Oscar Wilde’s Death’, Man’s Attachement To His Nose’, ‘The Idea Of A Presence’, ‘The Survivors Of Shipwrecks’, ‘Sign Language’ and ‘Musical Timing’ can be found in his literary classics ‘The Black Hole and Other Essays’, ‘The Divine Banquet Of The Brain’, ‘The Citadel Of The Senses’, ‘Music And The Brain’ and ‘Silent Language’.

Critchley will be remembered for his silvery tongue, his elan and awe-inspiring erudition. He never made an unnecessary movement and frequently counselled patients against any form of exercise warning them it could seriously damage their health. His turn of phrase was both lucid and arresting and his prose polished and economical. In private he was relaxed, generous and always helpful and his mischievous wit enlivened many official banquets. His interest in body language led to his close friendship with Marcel Marceau, the French mimic. His Wednesday afternoon and Saturday morning clinical demonstrations at Queen Square were usually packed out and his controlled showmanship embellished his inspired and unforgettable presentations.

Critchley made two visits to Brazil the first in November 1958. He set off by plane from London, docking in Milano, Lisboa and Recife before arriving in Rio, to be met by Drs. Niemeyer and Akerman exactly 24 hours later. The next day he lectured on the Psychology of Pain and later gave talks on Reflex Epilepsy and the Parietal Lobe. In the visitors book at the Neurological Institute in Rio he wrote of its magnificence, its growing reputation in Europe and his impression that lively brains were at work. A week later he was in Sao Paulo and it was after this trip that the first Brazilian neurologists in training began to defect to Queen Square. Three years earlier he had published an article in Arquivos de Neuro-Psiquiatria on a phantom supernumerary limb after a cervical root lesion. Professor Spina-Franca recalls Critchley’s impressive teaching style marked by its clarity of thought and in correspondence to me he wrote “ .... in brief he inspired me as a master for whom Shakespeare stated ‘I have what I gave’. “.

In 1980, to celebrate his eightieth birthday, a festschrift was held in London at the Medical Society under the aegis of the World Federation of Neurology. It was a fitting tribute to one of the ‘grand seigneurs’ of the British Neurology and a direct link to the founders, Jackson, Gowers and Ferrier. At that time Critchley was still seeing a few patients and lecturing at Queen Square. In the same year he talked at an International Symposium on Parkinson’s Disease about his 60 page article in the 1929 edition of Brain on arteriosclerotic Parkinson’s syndrome. He concluded his paper as follows: ‘ .... in self-defence I will concede that it would have been appropriate to speak of arteriosclerotic pseudo-Parkinsonian but no other disclaimer will I make.’

Five years later I accompanied him and his second wife Eileen to L’Hospital Salpetriere in Paris for the Centenary celebrations of Gilles de la Tourette’s description of maladie des tics confulsifs. Although his vision was failing and he was frailer physically his indomitable joie de vivre and resilience were undinted. The journey passed quickly with his gossipy asides and anecdotes of bygone days at the National Hospital.

His final years were spent in his home called Hughlings House in his beloved West Country where he belied Samuel Johnson’s aphorism that once a man is tired of London he has tired of life. He continued his correspondence with friends and students using a felt pen and magnifying glass to help his failing sight. Shortly before his death he completed his biography with his wife on John Hughlings Jackson, contesting vehemently the heretical grammatical and spelling changes enforced by his publishers with their commercial eye on the American market. His indefatigable iron will had a dictionary planned as the next project.

Despite the lure of molecular biology and functional imaging Critchley’s watchful gaze from his portrait in the Queen Square lecture theatre ensures that the relevance and importance of classical clinical investigation will be preserved by his successors on the staff of the National Hospital. His example is an inspiration rather than a burden, and his maxims will be transmitted by direct leneage to successive generations of students.

He is survived by Eileen his second wife and loyal partner and collaborator, and by two sons Sir Julian, a former Member of Parliament and Nicholas by his first wife Edna.

Andrew Lees

Arq Neuropsiquiatr 1998;56(4):865-867

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Extracts from These Spindrift Pages by Theodore Dalrymple Mirabeau Press 2023

Extract 1

I know of few greater pleasures than to receive a book through the post unexpectedly, though I am aware that some people might think that this goes to show the crabbed and limited nature of my life. I report only what is the case.

   Returning home from a three-day excursion to Wales, I found two books, neither of them expected, waiting for me. The first was Brainspotting: Adventures in Neurology by Professor Andrew Lees, one of the most eminent neurologists in the country, its greatest expert on Parkinson’s disease. He kindly inscribed his book for me.

   Many books that I read leave me with a feeling of shame, not very focussed or intense, but like a faint mist covering the landscape. I feel it because the author is my superior, either intellectually or morally, or both, and so it was with this short book, the autobiographical essays of a brilliant and humane neurologist.[i] I felt, and feel, his inferior both intellectually and morally because I have never been able to muster the intense concentration to master any field or make any positive scientific contribution, having too grasshoppery a mind to do so, being too readily distracted by the next thing that catches my interest or glitters on my mental horizon. Professor Lees has stuck to his medical last in order to bring far more comfort to his patients than I ever did; and, as if this were not all enough, he shows in this short book — shows, not displays — a literary erudition and sensibility into the bargain. He unites in himself the qualities of a scientist and an artist. He believes in, and has contributed to, medical advance, but does not lose sight of the persisting need for humanity in the doctor’s dealings with patients. There is a clear and present danger of the doctor becoming a mere technician or, worse still, bureaucrat.

   Lees strikes me as a member of a species long thought to be extinct, the Renaissance man. It is not merely that nothing human is alien to him, but rather than nothing is alien to him. His curiosity is universal but not, like mine, idle.

   In his book, he alludes without the stridency that comes naturally to me to the increasing managerialism of medicine as a human enterprise. This tendency seems to be like a natural force, as unstoppable as a volcanic eruption or tsunami, though more creeping and less dramatic, and though it comes about by human agency. Institutions with a distinguished, even glorious, history are closed down without a moment’s hesitation or backward glance, let alone regret, on the basis of a reduced and probably spurious utilitarian calculation, but really because such institutions engage the loyalty of staff, and staff loyal to an institution are more difficult to manage or manipulate than those who are merely birds of passage who happen to draw their salary in one place rather than another.

   In the book are clinical stories that remind me of my own little and much less distinguished career. Professor Lees had a patient, a Polish man in his early forties, who developed symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, unusual at such an age. Lees treated him in conventional fashion, and he improved as expected. But the man’s girlfriend told the patient to ask at the second consultation whether the Chinese herbal medicine that he was taking for stress and high blood pressure could have anything to do with his Parkinson’s disease. Further investigation established that it did, and the man thus narrowly missed being diagnosed with a chronic and deteriorating condition for which he would have had to take powerful medication with serious side-effects for the rest of his life.

   People are inclined to believe — some people, of course I mean — that herbal medicine, being ‘natural’, can do no harm, as if Nature were benevolently disposed to us. And I recall that once we had a patient who had heard that foxglove was good for the heart, who therefore made tea from a foxglove in her garden and promptly suffered from digitalis poisoning.

   Likewise, non-western medicine is often assumed to be harmless at worst, but we had a few patients who were poisoned with lead, and in one case arsenic, from supposedly Ayurvedic medicine.

   I think Lees would have liked our story of a man with lead poisoning whom we came to believe was poisoning himself with lead. He would come to hospital with a high level of lead in his blood which would then decline, but he would soon return with higher levels than ever. This alternation recurred over a prolonged period until we plucked up the courage to confront him with our conclusion. We did so, however, is such a way as to offer him an honourable way out. We told him that there were only three possible explanations of the pattern of his poisoning: that he was taking lead himself, that someone close to him was administering it to him, or that he was not drinking enough water.

   ‘Yes, that must be it,’ he said at once, though of course it was a completely bogus explanation. ‘I never drink much water.’

   A direct accusation would have been disastrous. Everyone needs an honourable way out at some time in his life.

   Lees is my ideal as a doctor: learned, scientific, educated, cultivated and humane. From an early age he was highly observant of everything around him (he has a proper appreciation of the genius of Conan Doyle), and he was a disciplined and appreciative bird-watcher. He writes in a disarmingly lapidary style:

     Before I went to the London Hospital Medical College in

     Whitechapel, I had never seen a corpse. Death was hidden in

     our family and was something that happened to birds and old

     people. 

Neurologists as a tribe used to be thought of as the cold fishes of clinical medicine, cerebral without feeling, perhaps because they diagnosed without much hope of therapy.

Extract 2

I returned in my mind to Professor Lees’ book the night after reading it, when for some reason or other I could not sleep for an hour or two.

   I was deeply impressed by one of the professor’s teaching methods: he would take his students on the London Underground’s Circle Line (which takes about an hour to complete) and tell them to observe the passengers with medical conditions, asking them to describe them in such a way that they could be identified by the person to whom they gave the description. This is a method reminiscent of that employed by Flaubert (the son of a doctor) in his teaching Maupassant to write. It sharpens the powers both of observation and description. ‘You see but you do not observe,’ said Holmes to Watson. ‘You speak but you do not describe,’ might be said of many of us.

   Lees taught his students never to stop observing, which is all too easy for doctors to do. Their observations are framed by their expectations, as it were: in the clinic, they see clinical signs, but not elsewhere, though they abound. I had a personal experience of this half a century ago. As a young doctor, I frequented endocrinologists in the course of my professional duties, but they did not notice that I was grossly myxoedematous, that is to say thyroid-deficient. When I look at photographs of myself from that period (not that I do so often), I see an absolutely textbook case: I could have been an illustration in a textbook dating from 1880, before there was treatment for the deficiency. No trace of thyroid hormone was detectable in my blood; if I had suffered a mild viral illness, I might have slipped into a coma from which I would not have emerged. When, quite by chance, my condition was diagnosed (I had volunteered for an experiment in which one of the measurements was of Thyroid Stimulating Hormone), the professor brought his students to observe the slow relaxation phase of my ankle jerk reflex, a classical sign of severe thyroid deficiency, now rarely seen, and never with such clarity. If mobile telephones had existed in those days, my ankle jerk might have been immortalised for teaching purposes. It was thought a great joke at the time that a doctor should be such excellent teaching material.

   If all the doctors around me had been taught by Professor Lees, my condition would have been diagnosed much the sooner.

   Another manifestation of Professor Lees’ independence of mind is his belief that the kind of clinical research now sanctioned by the medical establishment is too narrow and thereby misses possible advances. Double-blind trials are not, or ought not to be, the be-all and end-all of such research — though they have their place.

   As a person whose only positive contribution to medical science was the recognition of a previously undescribed side-effect of an antimalarial drug, I am perhaps not in a strong position to comment. But I once thought that I had recognised a new syndrome, and had I had the energy and drive to write up a series of cases, it might usefully have entered medical nosology.

   I noticed that certain persons in their late twenties or early- to mid-thirties would give up their work and withdraw from life. My first patient of this type (whose condition I recognised) was a high-flying banker who, over a matter of weeks or months, became increasingly silent and reclusive, until she holed herself up in her house and would very seldom leave. It was assumed by every doctor that she was severely depressed, but all the usual treatments for depression failed to work. She attended my clinic with her mother, who described a marked change in her daughter’s character and conduct. Normally extrovert, talkative, and notably self-confident, she had become introverted and taciturn.

   ‘And how does she spend her days?’ I asked.

   ‘She spends her days staring at the walls in a darkened room.’

   ‘How darkened?’

   ‘She draws the curtains in the middle of the day.’

   This piece of information, that the patient had never given me herself, was a kind of key to the lock of her mind. She drew the curtains because she felt that people were looking at her, laughing or talking about her. She was not hallucinated or deluded, however; she merely felt that they were looking or laughing at her. These were ideas of reference, but she was not fully psychotic. Despite the relative mildness of these symptoms, they were having a devastating effect upon her life.

   I prescribed a very tiny dose of anti-psychotic medication called trifluoperazine, very old-fashioned (and cheap), an excellent drug apart from one serious occasional side-effect, which fortunately my patient never experienced.  

   A week later, she was transformed: or rather, had returned to normal. She no longer hid herself away, was her outgoing self again and had resumed work. Her mother thanked me for not having written her off as a weak or worthless person. After all, doctors often blame failure on their patients.

   I subsequently saw quite a few such patients, more women than men. I had no explanation of the pattern, but they all did well with very little treatment — without which, however, their lives remained deeply circumscribed or impaired.

   I should have written the series up. If my observation was a true one, it was important. The pretext for my inertia was that medical journals these days are uninterested in case studies, fixated as they are on the double-blind study or vast epidemiological enquiries that require a vast statistical apparatus (that not one in a thousand doctors understands) for a meaning to be extracted from them. But still this was just a pretext that would not have deterred Professor Lees. My life has been one long lost opportunity.

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Salley Vickers review of Brainspotting by A J Lees in Literary Review September 2022 issue

A J Lees’s exquisitely produced Brainspotting is a gem. He is a neurologist and happily shares Marsh’s ability to write elegant and lively prose. The book begins with an account of his birdwatching childhood. Lees suffers from colour blindness, which might in a different person have hampered his observations but which instead encouraged Lees to develop an acute eye for birds’ markings, an attention to physical detail that he has employed to unusual advantage in his career as a neurologist.

Lees fell into his specialisation through a process of serendipity, which also helped shape his admirably eclectic intellect. Through his early interest in ornithology, he came to read the poetry of John Clare and he describes how the poet introduced him ‘to the incredible power of passive attentiveness’ and how ‘by listening attentively to the distress calls of patients I could determine the source of their complaint’. It was his birdwatcher’s eye that discerned that the ‘tremor of Parkinson’s was akin to the kestrel’s hover’.

In a legacy of his birdwatching youth, at times when there were shortages of patients to act as teaching examples, Lees sent his students out on to the London Underground to observe people going about their daily lives and come back with detailed accounts of what they had noted: the posture, the gait, the gaze, the likely ethnic origin. Birdwatching also alerted him to the dangers of misdiagnosing diseases that mimic others. Huntingdon’s disease can present in early life as Parkinson’s, while ‘migraine chameleons included stroke, epilepsy and vestibular disorders’.

Lees also pays close attention to what his patients say: the rate of speech, the pauses, gaps, pitch, volume and inflections. Most importantly, ‘If I am told: “Doctor I am not feeling myself”, I always take it very seriously.’ He emphasises the need for expressions of sympathy and takes seriously the possibility that genuine sympathy really can be remedial.

Alongside this genial recounting of his approach to his work, Lees offers sketches of neurologists by whom he was taught or who have influenced his thinking and recollections of institutions where he has worked. One such place is the Maida Vale Hospital for Nervous Diseases, which is described in a chapter unnervingly titled ‘The Dead Hospital’. Here we encounter the dapper Dr Barnard, who arrived for work each day in a bowler hat and whose tutorials began with the offer of Earl Grey tea and a slice of Dundee cake, and Dougal, in charge of the mortuary, who had ‘a complete indifference to life and a loathing of humanity’ but was nonetheless an artist when it came to dissection of the human brain. In the chapter ‘Resurrection’ we follow Lees as he undertakes the examination of the brain of an unknown person, salvaged from the vaults of the now defunct Maida Vale Hospital. It’s a truly enthralling piece of detective work, of which Sherlock Holmes, whom Lees often quotes, would have been proud.

I loved this book. If ever I fall victim to a neurological disorder, I can only hope to God I come under the benign and intelligent care of Lees.

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Brainspotting Adventures in Neurology review by Professor Roger Barker ACNR

In his new book, Brainspotting, Andrew Lees takes us through his life using a series of short chapters around key events which begins with his passion for bird spotting at the age of 12 – a skill which has lain at the centre of his neurological practice. This skill of observing, recognising and linking together clinical signs and elements of behaviour is key to being able to diagnose patients with neurological diseases as well as alerting one to conditions that have yet to be described! This is something that Andrew has done spectacularly well through an illustrious career in which he has described and discovered so much including therapies for which, in some instances, he was the first volunteer!! (see Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment). For many of us, Andrew has been an inspiring mentor and colleague with his wealth of knowledge and openness to explore and embrace new ideas while always being so personable. This I would say suffuses this delightful book – the relationships and companionship of being a neurologist, learning not just from those that came before you but also from those after you – ensuring that you never feel that you have reached a point where you cannot learn anything new. Linked to this, as one would expect, is his keen interest in medical history which is evident everywhere in this book as he describes and discusses the origin of many well-known neurological conditions and neurologists.  

This book collects together 11 separate episodes spanning his career from times in training at medical school to fond reminiscences of the old Maida Vale hospital, which used to represent the northern border of the National Hospital for Neurology at Queen Square in much the same way as Chalfont defined its western reaches. Across these episodes, we meet doctors and neurologists that have inspired him through their diagnostic skills – and quite naturally Andrew worries that these powers of observation and deduction will be left on the pages of cases solved by Sherlock Holmes rather than in the outpatient clinic where the temptation to just order tests can sometimes get in the way of clinical acumen and insight. Further to this is the remarkable breadth of skills and interests that are on display in this book. Andrew not only shows us the fascination and sophistication of clinical neurology but explores the psychiatry and psychology that is so intimately linked to it. This even extends to neuropathology and the beauty that lies on the other side of the lens which also conjures up a history of that person in life who went on to develop such a disease. All of this led to Andrew setting up the brain bank in London near the National Hospital from which so many pioneering and defining studies have come. 

This book I recommend to all with an interest in neurology and especially those that practice it. For those of us that were fortunate enough to be mentored and supported by Andrew, this book brings back many happy memories as well as new insights into this remarkable neurologist. The book is packed with advice and inspiration, all of which might explain why Andrew once sent me a patient when I was on call at the National with what he correctly diagnosed as having myasthenia gravis, based on the patient’s fatiguable ptosis at a dinner party he had been at the night before. For me, fatiguable ptosis at a dinner party relates to what has been consumed and the level of interest in my conversation, but for Andrew, it directed him to the neuromuscular junction. That is why Andrew is and continues to be, a remarkable neurologist, who also has that rare gift of being able to capture it in words and stories. 

Read Angelika Zarkali’s review of Andrew Lee’s book ‘Brazil that never was’. Watch our film of Mike Zandi in conversation with Andrew Lees, produced on the publication of his book ‘Mentored by a Madman.’

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Bird of Passage

Bird of Passage

A personal quest into the life-story of Garrincha, Brazil’s unrefined legend

The Blizzard. Issue 25, June 1 2017

https://www.theblizzard.co.uk/article/bird-passage

Money talks but it don't sing and dance, and it don't walk

Neil Diamond

Under an unremarkable sky there were four of us out on the backstreet making our rings fly. I thrust my ring away then pulled it in, creating ellipses in the summer air. If it dared to slip I coaxed it back up, bending my knees and bracing my shoulders as I tried to circle the sun. Jill Clapham and Karen Pullen were streets ahead, looping their hoops in a swaying 2/4 rhythm and creating double flirts with their ductile hips. That morning as the larks rose into the sky above Little Switzerland I twirled my first ton. 

At two o’clock we all ran in to watch Sweden play Brazil. My father was already crouched in front of our Bush console. I sat beside him on the hearthrug and my mother brought in a jug of Kia-Ora orange squash. On the other side of the bulbous screen a thickset man in a raincoat was triumphantly brandishing a large Swedish flag. The magic mirror then moved its focus to show the opposing teams jogging up and down uncomfortably in the silent rain. At last the referee blew his whistle and the final was afoot. A quarter of an hour into the game the commentator informed us that the effervescent Brazilian fans were singing, “Samba, Samba” even though they were losing 1-0. Garrincha, their right-winger attacked from the fringes. Twice in succession in the first half, he beat three players and his inch-perfect goalmouth crosses resulted in Vavá goals. As the game went on my eyes were drawn more and more to this hunched man who never passed the ball. On 29 June 1958 I was transported to a field of dreams somewhere on another planet.  

That winter I gave up hula-hooping and started to kick a rubber ball against our coal house door. I learned to keep the pill on the ground, tame its wicked bounce and make it run. I gained a rhythm that allowed me to twist and dart past imaginary opponents. I found that with the slightest of taps from my left foot I was able to alter the ball’s speed and trajectory. I kept my feet apart, flexed my body and imagined I was Garrincha. My ball slept with me under the sheets as I listened to Bobby Vee on my portable radio.

I set unregistered record after record with that small rubber ball and became a star of the school playground. It was also the last time the skylarks darted out of the turf and diminished to dark specks in the porcelain sky, the last time they would sing their hearts out, momentarily disembodied as they summoned the sun.

It was now 1959 and I had started to go to football matches with my father. I loved the communal walk to the ground, the baying wit of the tribe and the surging swell of bodies tumbling down the terraces. But what I watched on the pitch was a war in which tough men battled it out for a paltry win bonus. The game was prosaic, forbidding and merciless and bore no resemblance to the fluidity of the Brazilian champions.

In the summer of 1966 I got to watch Brazil play for a second time. Garrincha emerged from the Goodison Park tunnel wearing the number 16 shirt. His unstoppable swerving banana kick that had hit the top right hand corner of the Park End net three days earlier had led me to anticipate a repeat performance of the mesmeric sequence of steps I had watched as an 11 year old with my father. After the band had played the national anthems Brazil’s bandy-legged outside-right ambled over to position himself next to two policemen patrolling the far touchline.

Under the floodlights and with the Liverpool crowd’s chants of “Hungary, Hungary” and “ee ay adio ” echoing in their ears Flórián Albert and Ferenc Bene set about putting the ageing world champions to the sword with fast incisive counter-attacks. Just before half-time Kenneth Wolstenholme, the BBC sportscaster, lamented, “Ah, Garrincha seems to have gone now. He has lost all the feistiness and fire and that devastating burst of speed.”  

In the second half I noticed that Garrincha sometimes came inside looking for help and on the rare occasions when he tried to get round the outside of the Hungarian defence he was easily cut off and forced to pass. At the final whistle a delirium of appreciation burst forth, as toilet rolls rained onto the pitch. A stray balloon blew up from the Gwladys Street terrace, drifting forlornly in the direction of Stanley Park. 

It is 2006 and I am sitting in the Bar Vesuvio in the old cocoa port of Ilhéus watching Botafogo play Vasco da Gama. The ball rarely leaves the ground and always seems to be angled perfectly through the narrowest of channels. Periodically it shoots out to the flanks and is then rifled back across the box. In this game corners and throw-ins are irrelevant. The ball dips and bends as it fires towards goal. Then out of the blue a Botafogo player goes round his opponent on the outside and I blurt out the words, “Alma de Garrincha.” An old man sitting beside me smiled kindly and said, “Garrincha jogou futebol do mesmo modo que viveu sua vida, divertindo-se e irresponsalvelmente!” [Garrincha played football the same way he lived his life, pleasing himself and running wild!]

Back in England football was now an acceptable topic of conversation in the hospital canteen. In fact there were many similarities between the modus operandi of university teaching hospitals and Premier League football clubs. One Tuesday lunchtime after rounds I explained that ‘Garrincha’ was a drab little Brazilian bird with a buzzing flight and a bubbly song that could not survive in a cage. Nobody had heard of Garrincha.

I then got out my laptop and showed them extracts from the 1963 Cinema Novo film Alegria do Povo [The Happiness of the People]. The film begins with black and white photographs of Garrincha to a soundtrack of samba. I fast-forwarded so they could see the Lone Star of Botafogo mesmerising his opponents in the Maracanã stadium.

One of the house officers, a Manchester United supporter reflected, “He plays a bit like George Best.” I replied caustically that Garrincha was Best, Stanley Matthews and John Barnes and a snake charmer rolled into one. “What’s more you don’t need slow motion/3D/surround sound from 23 angles to prove he has more tricks than Messi and more grace than Ronaldo.” I knew that my fuzzy evidence had not convinced them. They smiled benignly but knew their chief was basking in the emotional overglow of an unhealthy reminiscence bump. 

Undeterred I continued to watch web compilations of the Little Bird’s sillage, much of which had been posthumously embellished by music. To Moacyr Franco’s song Balada no.7 (Mané Garrincha) I watch him double back before arrowing away to the right. A magnet seemed to be always attracting him to the margin of the pitch. His style was casual, irreverent and highly improbable but never disrespectful. He tormented and teased but never mocked. He was wordless and indefinable. For Garrincha, football was no more than a series of duels against instantly forgettable defenders and foreplay was far more enjoyable than scoring. The more joyous he made the crowd, the sterner became his facial expression. He was football’s Buster Keaton cracking jokes with his bandy legs and dancing to the gaps in the music. In one game playing for Botafogo he was even admonished by the official for flirtatious play. He was a one-man carnival who could turn life upside down with his antics. ‘Seu Mané’ expunged the prison of cause and effect from the game of football. 

By the second half of the 19th century Lancashire cotton goods had become almost worthless in Brazil. Even the turbines coming in on the Liverpool boats from Manchester were in far less demand. As a consequence the 1000 or so English expatriates began to invest more in local textile production. John Sherrington, a man who had strong commercial links with Manchester, purchased a stretch of verdant land that nestled below the forested Serra dos Órgãos in the centre of the State of Rio de Janeiro. Here in 1878, in the grounds of the old fazenda, he and his two Brazilian partners constructed a textile mill. The project got off to an ill-omened start when the ancient tree said to have been more than 50m tall and with a trunk circumference greater than 30 human armspans came down during the construction of a road, but within a few years the factory was functional, converting natural fibres into yarn and then fabric. 

The municipality of Pau Grande in the district of Vila Inhomirim 50km outside Rio de Janeiro already had a small railway line. It had been constructed by the English engineer William Bragge in 1853 and connected Raiz da Serra and the Imperial City of Petrópolis with the wharf in the small port of Mauá at the mouth of the Rio Inhomirim. This railway provided a reliable form of transport from the mill to the coast. 

The Francisco dos Santos family were descendants of the Fulniô Indians, who after being ousted from their coastal homeland by the Portuguese had settled in Águas Belas, a municipality close to the Rio Ipanema. Although they had finally been hounded down near Quebrangulo and forced to take the surname of their oppressor these ‘people of the river and stones’ refused to bow to outside discipline. As their traditional lifestyle was eroded some of their number assimilated with renegade black slaves in the quilombo hideouts of the Brazilian outback.

Manuel Francisco dos Santos was the first to travel the 2000km from the tribal homelands to the boomtown dominated by the mill owned by the América Fabril company. Although the landscape bore similarities with the countryside on the borders of the states of Alagoas and Pernambuco from where he had travelled, Pau Grande itself more closely resembled Delph or Saddleworth on the Pennine ridge.

The several hundred labourers had come from all over Brazil but the mill managers were exclusively English. In return for the privileges of secure employment and accommodation the predominantly illiterate mill workers were obliged to comply with the strict discipline and moral code of the British Empire. Mr Hall, the manager, would sometimes deal with misdemeanours that had occurred outside the factory by administering a caning to the miscreant. Mr Smith, the director, emphasised the virtues of hard work and self discipline and encouraged football on the premise of ‘healthy body, healthy mind’.

On 28 October 1933 Manuel’s brother Amaro dos Santos, who worked at América Fabril as a security guard, became a father for the fifth time. The midwife was the first to notice that the baby boy’s left leg bent out and the right turned in. Manuel Francisco dos Santos had to grow up fast and his love of trapping and caging birds led his older sister Rosa to nickname him Garrincha. In his school reports he was described as quiet but mischievous and impulsive and his teachers considered him uneducable. For the young Mané by far the best thing about Pau Grande was a secluded potholed stretch of grass 60m by 40m high on a bluff that overlooked the factory. There were days when he would return two or three times for peladas [kickabouts]. Barefooted and dressed only in shorts Garrincha and a couple of mates would regularly thrash older opponents. His hunting spear was the ball and his prey lay nestled in the back of the net guarded by a goalkeeper. When he was not running with the ball he would be fishing or hunting with his friends Pincel and Swing, two brothers from the neighbouring Raiz de Serra. 

His first job, at 14, was in the cotton room of the mill with its blistering heat, lung-damaging dust and deafening machines. The air had to be kept hot and humid in this the most unpleasant working environment of the factory to prevent the thread from breaking. He was always going absent, often to drink cachaça in a local bar or have sex with the mill girls at the back of the small football stadium belonging to SC Pau Grande, which had been founded in 1908 by workers from the factory. His employers soon gave up any hope of getting a decent day’s work out of him and it was only his footballing deftness that saved him from the sack. With Garrincha in SC Pau Grande’s side the factory team went two years without a defeat. 

The coach likened Garrincha to Saci, the pipe-smoking mulatto imp whose spellbinding one-legged footwork created whirlwinds of chaos wherever he went. It was impossible to outrun Saci, who could make himself disappear at will. Sometimes he would transform into Matita Pereira, an elusive bird whose melancholic song seemed to come from nowhere. The only way to placate this legendary trickster was to leave him a bottle of cachaça. 

Eventually Garrincha’s dazzling dribbles came to the attention of scouts from Rio de Janeiro and he was offered trials for the big clubs. He arrived at Vasco da Gama’s São Januário ground without boots, turned up late for a trial with São Cristóvão and when asked to stay overnight by Fluminense feared for his job and returned on the last train home. His insouciance counted heavily against him. Eventually a supporter and scout from Botafogo, a modest football and regatta club, but one that had a strong journalistic and intellectual following, dragged SC Pau Grande’s number 7 back to the capital.

On clapping eyes on Garrincha, the Botafogo coach Gentil Cardoso is said to have muttered, “Now they’re bringing cripples to me.” He then asked the young bumpkin, “How do you play, son?” to which Garrincha replied, “With boots!” After watching him kick a ball around Cardoso had seen enough to throw Garrincha into the first-team squad’s practice match. After the game the Brazil left-back Nílton Santos, who had been nutmegged for the first time in his career by the upstart, is said to have told Cardoso that the boy was a monster and should be signed on the spot if only to prevent him being snapped up by one of their rivals. The Rio press enthusiastically heralded Garrincha’s signing as a professional footballer in 1953. Their only criticism was “the boy dribbles too much.”  

In Sweden in 1958, Garrincha was the best in the world in his position. Four years later in Chile he was the finest player in the world. After he had been officially announced as the player of the tournament, the poet Vinicius de Moraes composed the sonnet 'O Anjo das Pernas Tortas' [The Angel with Twisted Legs]:

'Didi passes and Garrincha advances

Observing intently the leather glued to his foot

He dribbles once, then again, then rests

Measuring the moment to attack

Then by second nature he launches forward

Faster than the speed of thought.'

In his June 1962 article “O Escrete de Loucos” [The Squad of Madmen] published in Fatos & Fotos, Nelson Rodrigues, the great Brazilian cronista reported that the European squads had been working on strategies to stop Garrincha but had not taken into account that the Brazilian team was a phenomenon made up of pranksters who played the game from the soul. In the last minutes of the final against Czechoslovakia, Garrincha had turned the opposition to stone. One defender even put his hands on his hips in total capitulation. Regarding the earlier 3-1 victory against England in the quarter-final, Rodrigues wrote, “The Englishman plays football whereas the Brazilian lives and suffers every move.”

Garrincha fathered fourteen children by five different women. One of them, Ulf, was born after the 1958 World Cup final and grew up in Sweden. Garrincha had a lengthy and tempestuous relationship with the samba diva Elza Soares. He drank heavily and was responsible for the death of his mother-in-law in a car accident where he was drunk behind the wheel. When he finally hung up his boots, after a brief comeback with the small Rio club Olaria in 1972, he faded into oblivion. One of his last public appearances was at the carnival in Rio de Janeiro. The shots of his hunched bloated figure sitting alone on the front of the Mangueira samba school float saddened the nation.

Following Garrincha’s death from the complications of alcoholism on 20 January 1983, Hamilton Pereira da Silva, a poet and a politician from Tocantins, composed Requiem for an Angel: 

They stood in the cortege

And offered him wings

Multicoloured wings

Vermilion, white

Chocolate

Grey

Hang gliding on the wing

For you who lived as an angel for so many years

These wings would have been meaningless

Before the eyes of the people

In the magical glow 

Of those Sunday afternoons…

Two days after the announcement of Garrincha’s death, the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade published an article entitled “Mané and the Dream” in the Jornal do Brasil in which he declared that football had become a panacea for Brazil’s sickness. Garrincha had been a reluctant hero who had temporarily banished the nation’s inferiority complex and inspired the have-nots to greater things, He pleaded for another Garrincha to rekindle the nation’s dreams: “The god that rules football is sardonic and insincere. Garrincha was one of his envoys, delegated to make a mockery of everything and everyone in his stadiums. The god of football is also cruel because he concealed from Garrincha the faculty to realise his mission as a divine agent.” 

In his imagined chronicle Diario do Tarde Paulo Mendes Campos wrote that the rules of Association Football did not apply when Garrincha was on the pitch. The pushes, trips and shoves against him went unpunished and it was only when the embarrassed defender fearful of ridicule by the crowd pulled at his shirt that the complicit referee would be reluctantly forced to award a foul. 

Despite these chansons de geste by Brazil’s greatest living writers and poets, the truth of the matter was that Seu Mané’s trickery defied literary description. Football was not an art. Garrincha had held a mirror up to the nation.

His body was taken from the clinic in Botafogo to the Maracanã stadium. Nílton Santos insisted that his teammate be buried in Pau Grande and not in the new mausoleum for professional footballers in the Jardim da Saudade. Traffic came to a halt on the Avenida Brasil as the cortège passed by with mourners crowding the sides of the road and others throwing flowers from the overhead bridges. “Garrincha you made the world smile and now you make it cry” had been daubed on a tree. As the mayhem of cars finally approached Pau Grande the bottleneck became so great that people were forced to abandon their vehicles and walk to the little church. 

Seu Mané had played the game for its own sake. His fancy footwork, element of surprise and capacity for improvisation had nourished the nation’s soul. A memorial stone was placed in the cemetery. Its inscription read, “He was a sweet child. He spoke with the birds.” Tostão, his teammate, would write on the 20th anniversary of Mané’s death, “Garrincha was much more than a dribbler, a ballet dancer and a showman, he was a star.”

My sentimental quest begins at the Botafogo Sports and Regatta Club on Avenida Venceslau Brás. It’s now used mainly by the young socios (members) to play volleyball and basketball. A picture of Nílton Santos in the entrance reminds the club of its glory years. His black and white striped shirt with its lone star hangs in a display case next to the trophy cabinet. 

When Garrincha played for Botafogo de Futebol e Regatas it was a deeply superstitious club.  The day before the game a mass communion with eggnog, milk and biscuits would took place and on match day the club’s silk curtains were tied up to symbolise the ensnarement of the opponents’ legs. An hour before the game each player was compelled to take a mud bath and eat three apples. An ex-Fluminense player had to be included in every team. Before each game a stray mongrel called Biriba would piss on the leg of a player. When things were going badly for the team the Botafogo president would release the little dog from the stand to run onto the pitch and distract the opposition. Biriba became so important at the club that he was included in one of Botafogo’s championship winning team photographs.

I set off past the Aterro do Flamengo with its fenced playgrounds full of youths playing football, I look over at the Marina da Glória with the mist-topped Sugar Loaf in the background, heading for Praça Quinze where the boats come in from Niterói. Out in the bay the Ilha das Cobras is surrounded by frigates. I drive fast on the Linha Vermelha heading north in the direction of Galeão. To my left is the vast sprawl of the Complexo do Alemão favela, the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz and the toy-town church of Nossa Senhora da Penha perched on its sacred mount. I reach the artificial brine lake designed to deter the favelados from hanging around the beaches of the Zona Sur and then drive north towards the Federal University Hospital block where I had lectured the day before. A nauseating smell of sewage fills the air. I head north-east through the teeming run-down districts of Baixada Fluminense, which are full of old trucks, new schools and stray dogs. 

In Casa-Grande & Senzala [The Master and the Slaves], Gilberto Freyre uses the term bagaceira – the shed where the dry pulpy residue left after the extraction of sugar is stored – as a metonym for the exploitative plantation culture. Freyre wrote that “Brazil is sugar and sugar is the Black” and both were linked in the collective unconscious with sensuality and sexuality. Bagaceira was later used to refer generically to marginalised riff-raff. Football had provided Garrincha with an escape route from enslavement but when all the fibre had been squeezed out of him cachaça left him as bagaceira.

The municipality of Magé with its farming communities guarded by the Dedo de Deus mountain marks the official leaving of Rio de Janeiro. We turn right along a bumpy narrow road filled with buses and motorcyclists, cross the single lane railway track, go past a man on a horse and open roadside kiosks selling tyres. The people seem gentler and more approachable than in Grande Rio. At a birosca that sells buns and cachaça I stop to ask the way to Pau Grande. Chortling, the bar owner points to his groin and says, “Aqui está.” “Pau grande”, I later learned, was slang in Brazilian Portuguese for “big cock”. 

After another 15 minutes drive the Estadio Mané Garrincha, the home of SC Pau Grande, comes into view, its rustic white walls and small arched entrance resemble an Andalusian village bullring. The grass is lush and samba drifts from the television in the clubhouse. The president, plump, with a Zapata moustache and dressed only in fading khaki shorts, greets me effusively. In one corner of the clubhouse are three cases of memorabilia, one filled with small trophies, the other two with crumpled newspaper cuttings and posters defining the ascent of the Little Bird. One of the pictures shows an 11-year-old Garrincha sticking out in a team of men and another his father Amaro, looking down affectionately on his young son from a small wooden veranda. In some of the group photographs there are boys who resembled my own teammates from school, pale solemn faces, straight brown hair and small chins.

The president tells me that Garrincha used to love to return to Pau Grande for a pelada with his old friends after playing at the Maracanã. Over a glass of cachaça he tells me the club are hoping to raise money to create a small museum. He also reminds me that the black and white striped SC Pau Grande strip is identical to that of Botafogo except for the star. I offer him money to buy a ball, but he refuses and we settle for just another photograph. I then walk down the cobbled road to the centre of the village where a small bust of Garrincha greets the few visitors. To its right are a series of murals illustrating how Pau Grande used to look in its prime. 

América Fabril closed in 1971 and its buildings now operate as a distribution centre for mineral water but the Neo-Gothic grey and white Capela de Sant’Ana that had been overwhelmed by Botafogo supporters at Garrincha’s funeral is unchanged. A car blasting out propaganda for Sandra Garrincha, a candidate in the Magé prefectural elections, drives by, followed by a group of young girls waving flags in support of her campaign. 

I ask one of the security guards at the gate of the old factory if I can have a look around. The factory looks much the same as it did in the days when it produced cloth. The chimneystack is still standing but there are now vast empty spaces giving parts of it the appearance of a vacant exhibition space. In some of the rooms machines rumble away bottling water from the mountain springs. I thank my guide and walk back into the village in the direction of the lemon bungalow which the Brazilian football federation had bought Garrincha for his part in the World Cup victory in Chile in 1962. Two of Garrincha’s friendly grandnieces are standing on the veranda talking to a young man astride his bicycle. Grilles guard the windows of the house even though I am told there is still next to no crime in Pau Grande. There is a mural of Garrincha’s head in his playing days at the front door and on the wall of the house looking onto the street is written the legendary number 7 he carried on his back and the words “jogando certo com as pernas tortas” [playing straight with twisted legs]. One of the girls invites me to enter a small shrine at the side of the house. Among the photographs and medallions is a framed tribute fastened on one of the walls:

'Garrinchando

'Garrincha pretends that he despises the ball, but she knew he would always come back to pick her up.

The dribble was his courtship.

Garrincha, you passed through life, overcoming all obstacles that were put before you. But in the end that relentless adversary Death defeated your dribble.

From that moment on the ball and the football universe became orphans of the most blessed contorted legs football has ever known.'

Pau Grande is still full of gente boa. Doors do not need to be locked at night. Round the corner from Garrincha’s old house an elderly man tells me that the former mill town is still full of Garrincha’s ancestors. He then leads me up a path behind the houses that reminds me of the Brackenwood edgeland of my childhood, full of weeds, plastic bottles and butterflies. After a short walk up a steep incline we reach an empty white outhouse with two palomino horses tied up outside. 20 metres below the high bank is a clearing strewn with twigs and leaves. At either end are goal posts without nets. I climb down and start to run close to the right edge where patches of grass grow sheltered by overhanging trees. I pause. I then sidestep to the right and accelerate. I twist round with my back to the goal, shimmy and shoot. I feel free. When I can fly no more I sit on a bench behind the far goalposts. Once I have gained my breath I rise and walk to the edge of the ridge and look down on the mill, the little chapel and the orderly rows of houses. 

An hour later I drive on up to the cemetery at Raiz da Serra. As I am parking the car, a skeletal drunk in shorts, sandals and a fading orange shirt staggers out of the Encontro dos Amigos bar offering to guide me to Garrincha’s grave. He tells me that the previous Friday three Vasco da Gama players had made the pilgrimage from Rio to pray for inspiration before their game against Flamengo. Tucked away in the middle of a row of closely packed tombstones I am shown a faded inscription, which says “Here lies the man who was the happiness of the people Mané Garrincha.” On the worn headstone his date of death is recorded incorrectly as 20 January 1985. There are no flowers or graffiti. A singer and friend Agnaldo Timóteo had paid for the funeral, the tombstone had been paid for by his captain Nílton Santos and a local family called Rogonisky had allowed Garrincha’s remains to be buried in the same grave as their 10-year-old son who had been killed in a road traffic accident.

I then climb up to look at the newer but equally stark and neglected obelisk. Written on a memorial tablet are the words:

'Garrincha

The Happiness of Pau Grande

The Happiness of Magé

The Happiness of Brazil

The Happiness of the World.'

As I sit in silence in this deserted cemetery I think that it could only have been my great-grandfathers’ deep loyalty to street, neighbourhood and even mill that prevented them packing their bags during the slump. It was in towns like Oldham that association football first changed from a game played by gentlemen into a profitable attractive Saturday afternoon spectator sport. As I sit by Garrincha’s grave I see their familiar faces under their flat caps, their trunks bent over by the damp and onerous labour, hurrying past the smokestacks and rows of terraced houses to Boundary Park. The Latics were yet another stabilising devotion that stopped them sailing down to Rio on a Lamport and Holt steamer. 

Football has been hijacked by television money and sponsorship deals. It was now much more of a spectacle but had fewer magic moments. Running fast with the ball glued to your toes was high risk and was decried by millionaire coaches. Wingers like Garrincha (outside rights and lefts) had been replaced by a new breed of wing-backs that could attack and defend. Power and victory were what counted these days.

A small brown wren-like bird with a large cocked-up tail, sharp beak and shiny black cap flits under a neighbouring headstone and interrupts my litany of regrets. Dusk is falling and with a heavy heart I leave through the dark forests on the steep ascent to Petrópolis. I am now certain that when I have started to dribble my lines, when I can no longer remember my date of birth or the names of my children the alchemist will still be around beckoning me to come and join him for a pedala in the clearing above the cotton mill.

[aleesblog]

Whizz Town Literary Review 2020

Wigan lies just a few miles down the road from St Helens, where I was born. Wiganers considered us the noisy neighbours while we joked that they were humourless country bumpkins. When I first looked down from Billinge Lump onto Wigan’s pit heads and smoking chimneys dotted among a conglomeration of cluttered streets, what I saw looked like the mirror image of my home town. We were both part of the same coalfield, even if Wiganers gravitated towards Manchester and we towards the Irish Sea.

Sometimes in the summer holidays, I travelled by train from my grandma’s house near Bolton to Wigan’s Wallgate station. Armed with my Ian Allan ABC books and a pencil, I took my place at the end of the platform there. For hours, along with a group of Wigan lads, I stared down the tracks looking for veils of black smoke, listening for the first rumble from the track. Then, all of a sudden, the ‘semi’, with its devouring wheels, was there in front of us, breathing fire and sweating steam, pistons hissing and rods thrusting as it pulled its scarlet livery in a straight line up to Euston.

With its grimy river and even grimier canal, Wigan was a hard-living town – a place full of industry, where men toiled in unpleasant jobs to keep their families fed and clothed. The clanking of cages in echoing shafts, the clatter of shuttles, metal on metal, hooters, cranks and levers and the whir of heddles were what I heard whenever Wigan came into view. Camelot, once the home of the White Knight, lay close by where the forests once stood.

In 1901, H G Wells, a staunch believer in the power of engines, wrote a short story called ‘The New Accelerator’, which was published in The Strand Magazine. A pharmacologist called Professor Gibberne synthesises a nervous stimulant that he hopes will help the tired and exhausted to cope with the stress of modern life. In the noble tradition of science, he decides to test the nostrum on himself first. Within seconds of taking a few drops, Gibberne and the narrator both experience a sensation of imminent combustion. As they travel through Folkestone at two miles a second, they are disgusted by the glacial catalepsy of their fellow promenaders: a bee’s wings seem to vibrate more slowly than the progress of a snail down a garden path and the wink of a man loses its quality of spontaneous gaiety. After an indeterminate period of time they feel like an express train slowing down into a station, and return to quotidian dreariness.

Gibberne informs the narrator that his ongoing research at University College London to develop an antidote called the Retarder will not delay the introduction of the New Accelerator into clinical practice as treatment for a disease referred to down the road in Harley Street as neurasthenia and in Wigan as bone idleness. With a sangfroid that would no longer be tolerated by the regulators in the service bureaucracies, he adds: ‘Like all potent preparations it will be liable to abuse. We have, however, discussed this aspect of the question very thoroughly, and we have decided that this is purely a matter of medical jurisprudence and altogether outside our province. We shall manufacture and sell the Accelerator, and, as for the consequences – we shall see.’

Wells anticipated the commercialisation of amphetamine by over twenty-five years. A few months after I read ‘The New Accelerator’, in what I refused to accept was an uncanny coincidence, I started my own research into speed at University College London. Amphetamine was now a class B drug and known to cause psychosis and dependence. Doctors had been advised to prescribe it only for the treatment of narcolepsy and the management of hyperactive children. Unlawful possession carried a penalty of up to five years in prison.

I gave dextroamphetamine to caged male Sprague Dawley rats and observed their movements. Within a few minutes of injection they started to make tight circles, shimmy backwards and occasionally somersault. I then injected amphetamine, in combination with other compounds known to block or enhance the release of serotonin and noradrenaline. My colleagues and I concluded that the chemical messenger dopamine was responsible for the stereotyped behaviour of the rats and that amphetamine derivatives should be reinvestigated as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease.

On the way to the laboratory in John’s Mews, I would sometimes stop to read the names of the Lancashire towns inscribed on the lodges at the gateway to Euston station. The name of Wigan prompted a faint glow in my mind, inextricably linked with the smell of mint and treacle. During the time I was carrying out my experiments with the lab rats, Wigan Casino had become the undisputed headquarters of Northern soul. The nightclub’s members, predominantly white, male and working class, wore baggy trousers, star knit polo shirts and Solatio boxtop loafers. Obscure up-tempo tracks with heavy syncopation, four-to-the-floor rhythm and plenty of horns became the signature dance sound. Some of the Wallgate trainspotters had become spanophiles, collectors of rare seven-inch vinyls, spending all their spare time rummaging through forgotten crates of demos, visiting out-of-the-way record shops and even travelling to Detroit in search of uncommon finds. The stars of the Casino were black singers that Berry Gordy at Tamla Records had overlooked, along with a handful of blue-eyed soul artists like Frankie Valli and Timi Yuro.

Wigan has long had a fascination with celerity. For Wigan’s soul boys, amphetamine was the ideal accelerator. It made the heart race and enhanced respiration, provided momentum and facilitated hours of nonstop dancing. Speed could subvert clock time and accelerate travel in the fourth dimension. The music never died, but each all-nighter came to symbolise a little death. Looking down from the Casino balcony, all one could see was a blur of frantic supercharged excitement. The intricate, balletic dervish spins, Soul Train turns, backdrops and Bruce Lee somersaults reminded me of amphetamine-driven rats.

In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell called attention to the plight of the powerless masses during the Great Depression. He wrote that his journey to Wigan was akin to ‘venturing among savages’ in a foreign land. He described the town’s ‘belching chimneys’, a woman with a desolate expression poking a stick up a drainpipe, rats on the snow-topped slag heaps and the Roquefort cheese appearance of a miner’s nose. Those cheerful men I saw at Knowsley Road in St Helens when Wigan’s rugby league side came to play belonged to a mechanised workforce, constrained by rigid management systems in a squalid, impoverished, ugly town.

Orwell’s well-meaning call to arms encouraged hopelessness and surrender and failed to empower the place. For people in Wigan, there was no pleasure in taking money from the state. Even today, many would rather still be self-combusting down the pits, since it paid well and provided steady work. In last December’s election, the Labour majority in Wigan was reduced from 16,000 to 7,000. Jeremy Corbyn’s elite city socialism did not resonate in a town engaged in fighting a race to the bottom. Its MP, Lisa Nandy, is now competing to replace Corbyn as Labour Party leader.

Wells believed that the speeding up of land locomotion would revolutionise society, that the distinction between town and country would become obsolete and that a new urbanity would evolve. The New Accelerator was a product of the human desire to achieve instantaneous communication and connection. Breathless lightning breaks, a boy with twinkle toes in a T-shirt and black shorts, and a register of inviolable racy tunes are Wigan’s lasting benefaction. Analeptics and high-speed broadband might just prevent Whizz Town from dying.

[aleesblog]

Five Most Infamous Fictional Psychiatrists

Wall Street Journal

The Dice Man

By George Cockroft, writing as Luke Rhinehart (1971)

In this novel, a character named Luke Rhinehart is a middle-aged Manhattan psychiatrist suffering from depression. Disillusioned with medicine and with life, he finds freedom in the roll of the dice. One roll dictates that he carry out his deeply disturbing fantasy of raping the wife of his close colleague. When he knocks on her door and tells her what he plans to do, he’s taken aback by her compliance. He’s disturbed further when, after two agreeable hours, he realizes that he has changed in some indefinable but significant way. He extends the laws of chance to his clinical decision-making, which alleviates his deep-seated fear of failure and allows him to begin viewing his work as something of a game. He advises a female patient diagnosed with nymphomania to find work in a  busy Brooklyn brothel. To a slender young woman from Greenwich Village who likes talking about herself he says, "In summation, that as human beings go you are mediocre in all respects except in the quantity of your fortune."

The Silence of the Lambs

By Thomas Harris (1988) 

Hannibal Lecter is a serial killer who—before his conviction for nine homicides and subsequent commitment to the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane—was a highly respected forensic psychiatrist. He has an unerring capacity to strip people of their mental defenses and an intelligence that defies metrics. A cultured man, he’s endowed with a glacial calm and an iron will. We’re told that Lecter’s thoughts are no more bound by fear or kindness than “Paradise Lost” author John Milton’s were by physics. Hannibal abhors bad manners and enjoys eating the flesh of the intolerably rude. He delights in describing to Clarice Starling—the FBI trainee sent to seek his assistance in solving a case of serial murders—how he savored a census taker’s liver, which he cooked with fava beans and washed down with a glass of Amarone wine.

Super-Cannes

By J.G. Ballard (2000) 

Lured by tax concessions, a Mediterranean climate and a Euro-corporate lifestyle, dozens of multinational companies have moved their business into Eden-Olympia, a business park populated by a highly paid elite of senior managers, administrators and entrepreneurs. The flawed and dangerous antihero of this dystopia of technology is the staff psychiatrist Wilder Penrose, an “amiable Prospero” with evasive eyes and an eager smile, who steers his clients’ darkest dreams toward the daylight. Wilder’s vision is to create an intelligent modern city that promotes advanced health screening, up-to-the-minute gadgetry and the replacement of the civic with the commercial. But as the novel proceeds, it becomes clear that Wilder is more concerned with exciting the base instincts of those in charge. He explains to the book’s protagonist, Paul, that ever since he organized the drug and vice rings and a leather-jacketed “bowling club” whose sorties into the outside world leave Arab pimps and Senegalese trinket merchants bleeding in the gutters, the park’s chief executives no longer complain of stress and burnout and profits have soared.

The Alienist

By Machado de Assis (1882)

A young doctor decides to settle down and set up a medical practice near Rio de Janeiro. The corrupt local council, dazzled by Dr. Bacamarte’s impeccable credentials, welcomes him and gives him carte blanche to study mental illness free from oversight. As Bacamarte diagnoses more and more people as being mad, the town’s barber leads a revolt against him. Justifying his actions, Bacamarte explains: “Till now, madness has been thought a small island in an ocean of sanity. I am beginning to suspect that it is not an island at all but a continent.” After he has locked up more than 80% of the town’s population—including his own wife—Bacamarte suddenly suspects that it is the remaining, seemingly well-balanced minority who are crazy. Rectitude, patience, loyalty and modesty, he now believes, are the true signs of mental illness. And as the most rational individual in the region, he is now compelled to diagnose himself as mad, spending the final 17 months of his life in solitary confinement. The author of “The Alienist” was an epileptic with considerable experience of real doctors. This 80-page novella is steeped in humor, in addition to being a tale of professional power run amok.

Asylum

By Patrick McGrath (1997) 

Peter Cleave, the medical superintendent of an English asylum for the criminally insane, is the narrator of this story. Set in 1959, the tale revolves around the fatal erotic obsession of Stella Raphael, the cultured and restless wife of one of Peter’s colleagues. The object of her passion is the talented sculptor Edgar Stark, who was committed to the asylum for murdering and disfiguring his wife. That doesn’t prevent a relationship with Stella from blossoming once Edgar escapes from the asylum. Stella meets up with him in London and establishes a bohemian life. The scandal forces Stella’s husband, Max, to leave his position as a forensic psychiatrist and work elsewhere, but that doesn’t put an end to the affair. Peter is a rather dry narrator, but there are hints of his deficiencies as a psychiatrist. Infatuated with her, ignoring his duty as her psychiatrist, he pursues her obsessively, to a not altogether surprising ending

[aleesblog]

MY LIFE IN BOOKS: DBC PIERRE

Irish Sunday Independent Easter Sunday April 17, 2022 DBC Pierre is the author of the novels Ludmila’s Broken English, Lights Out in Wonderland, and Vernon God Little which won the Man Booker Prize, the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel, and the James Joyce Award from University College Dublin. His memoir Big Snake Little Snake has just been published by CHEERIO. The book at your bedside? Distinction by Pierre Bourdieu, which gets piled over with other books. Above it, The History of Bones by John Lurie, Bolt from the Blue by Jeremy Cooper and The Illuminated by Anindita Ghose. The first book you remember? I remember two, one for the wrong reason. [Gertrude Crampton’s] Scuffy the Tugboat - where Scuffy gets swept down a benign little river into a dangerous harbour - I found spine-tingling as I immediately knew it referred to life. The other book was The Impossible Theater by Herbert Blau; it was positioned at just the right height on my parents’ bookshelves for me to see the spine - and to me it read The Impossible The Ater. I still have trouble with the word theatre, thanks Herbert. Your book of the year so far? Again, I have two: Fortune by Amanda Smyth, which is just so beautifully detailed that you forget you’re not living it yourself. And a debut, The Flames by Sophie Haydock, on the life and loves of artist Egon Schiele; don’t be fooled by the saucy cover, it’s the type of historical novel that makes you believe the author was there in person. Your favourite literary character? Has to be Ignatius J Reilly from [John Kennedy Toole’s] A Confederacy of Dunces. If we identify with characters like ourselves, then although I’d like to be James Bond I can’t get away from that whimsical oneman walking disaster zone. A book that changed your life? Papillon by Henri CharriÈre. I read and re-read and re-read this when I was living through hard times. The narrator Papillon was imprisoned on Devil’s Island and spent the whole book escaping or being recaptured, which gave me a hopeful kind of sticking power. Once I was free from my own Devil’s Island I even moved to Trinidad, which was one of Papillon’s safe havens on his final escape. The book you couldn’t finish? Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy. It wasn’t even foisted on me, I bought it voluntarily and wanted to read it, and did read plenty of it. But rather than imparting a view of all philosophy, it just seemed after a while to be a view of Russell’s viewpoint. Your Covid comfort read? I heartily recommend this to anyone who wants to be somewhere else for a year: The Transylvanian Trilogy by Miklós Bánffy. Totally out of left-field, I started with They Were Counted and just couldn’t stop. Bánffy was an aristocrat in Austro-Hungarian Transylvania who wrote beautifully about the shenanigans of the Transylvanian aristocracy of the time, clearly autobiographically; the work is translated with help from one of his descendants. It was a journey to a beautiful place and time. The book you give as a gift? Mentored by a Madman by AJ Lees. Lees is a leading neurologist who describes his dealings with medical practice and the brain through a prism of the profound effect William Burroughs had on his life. I give it as a gift as it says things about life and the body which we will not hear in public, especially from the world of medicine. The writer who shaped you? There’s a question. I don’t really know, as I started to write without thinking too much about it. I’ve probably taken a bit of courage from everything I’ve read. The book you would most like to be remembered for? The next one, and maybe a few after that

[aleesblog]

Brainspotting review for Air Mail by George Pendle

The world-renowned neurologist A. J. Lees is on a mission to humanize doctors April 2, 2022 If, during your annual checkup, your doctor were to admit to having been influenced in their medical thinking by the deviant beat writer and heroin junkie William S. Burroughs, you might be a little wary of taking their prescription. But what if that doctor were Professor Andrew Lees, a legendary neurologist and one of the world’s foremost authorities on Parkinson’s disease? My father was one of Lees’s patients. He had always had a deep distrust of the medical profession, but he came back from these appointments strangely revivified. “That Professor Lees is a fascinating man,” he would tell me. He took the medicines Lees prescribed, but perhaps the most effective one on offer was the doctor himself. Lees, now 74 years old, has released three books in the last five years that transcend medical writing. They meld memoir with manifesto, polemic with poetry, and exude an unconventionality that is utterly bracing. In Mentored by a Madman, Lees explained how Burroughs’s writings helped him challenge medical hierarchies and encouraged him to self-experiment with therapeutic drugs. In Brazil That Never Was, he went in search of a myth from his childhood—the doomed Fawcett expedition to the Amazon—and delved into the occult and the perilous mental trap of nostalgia. Now, in Brainspotting, he recounts the roads less traveled that he has taken, and rails against the “robotic adherence to rigid guidelines and protocols,” as Lees wrote to me in an e-mail. The result is a portrait of a man who is both pre-eminent in his field and distinctly out of left field. Birds to Brains As a boy, Lees bird-watched in the northern English town of St. Helens. This led to an interest in cataloguing and organizing knowledge. The nature poetry of the autodidact and asylum internee John Clare taught him “the power of passive attentiveness” and the ability of words to make things visible on the written page. This led him inexorably to medicine. Whereas before he had learned to identify a bird by its song, now he thought “that by listening attentively to the distress calls of patients I could determine the source of their complaint.” Lees, who went on to study at the Royal London Hospital and the Hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière, in Paris, before taking a post as a professor of neurology at the National Hospital in London, developed an almost supernatural ability to interpret his patients’ gestures, postures, and facial expressions. He learned to listen not just to a patient’s words but to the “rate of speech, pause-to-speech ratio, the pitch, tone and volume of the voice.” Smell and even taste could provide clues to a diagnosis, but the most important sense to him is one that many would not think a doctor of brain diseases would require: “the intimate bond of touch.” This Lees praises as “an essential constituent of healing and another way of listening that never lies.” Anyone writing a popular book about neurology must face comparisons with the late Oliver Sacks, who in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings gave many their first glimpse into the bizarre nature of the brain. Indeed, Lees and Sacks were friends for 40 years. But while Sacks sought to humanize his patients, Lees seems to write in order to humanize his fellow doctors, a tribe who can often seem cold and heartless and whom Lees, in his gentle yet radical way, is seeking to reform. He is appalled by the overuse of diagnostic technology and of some doctors’ brusque and offhand dismissal of patients’ lives outside of their symptoms. In Brainspotting, Lees hopes to create what he terms a “soulful neurology,” one in which medicine is treated as much as an art as it is a science. Evidence of this can be seen in his teaching, which always stressed the importance of the imagination. Lees would sometimes ask his students at the University College Hospital to diagnose patients just by looking at their empty beds. On other occasions he would take them on the London Underground to spot neurological illnesses—limps and twitches—in the wild, as it were. “My intention was to try and encourage them to become doctors on whom nothing could be lost,” he notes in Brainspotting. It’s no wonder that Lees writes so lovingly about the influence of Sherlock Holmes on his clinical practice. But whereas Holmes was frostily analytical, there is something poetic that goes hand in hand with the precision in Lees’s writing. Even when discussing the dissection of a brain in technical language, Lees can seem like a nature poet describing a tidal pool or distant nebula: There was a profusion of star-shaped tufts, intermingled with radial fibrous arrays within astrocytes, and clumps of insoluble tau overloaded with phosphorous clogging up axons in the front cortex. Brainspotting is rich, not just with neurological insight—such as the way in which patients’ throwaway comments often reveal the cause of their illness—but with an intoxicating sense of place. Whether it is Lees’s descriptions of the Liverpool docks of his youth, with their steamers chuffing out into the exotic, or of his time as a “mod” doctor, dressing sharp amid the ever changing tapestry of 1960s London, he seems bound to certain places in his past. Lees told me that he suffers from “saudade and an insatiable yearning for the distant horizon,” and there is something melancholic that pervades his writing about the past. It’s as if he’s cradling his own brain in his hands, gently probing through its ridges and folds for something that is forever just out of reach. This is the tale of Doctor Faustus in reverse: of how to be a doctor without losing your soul. Brainspotting: Adventures in Neurology, by A. J. Lees, will be available beginning April 5 George Pendle is an Editor at Large for AIR MAIL.His book Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons became a television series for CBS All Access. He is also the author of Death: A Life and Happy Failure, among other books

[aleesblog]

Jim Phelan’s Liverpool Home

From the George Garrett Archive by AJ Lees (corrected version)

After I had written The Rolling English Road for Dublin Review of Books on May 18 2015 ( https://www.drb.ie/essays/the-rolling-english-road ) Seumas, Jim Phelan’s son, wrote me a letter:

“ I enjoyed your piece about my father-it was pretty colourful and you’ve clearly put a lot of work into the research. It is still missing crucial areas, particularly Jim’s part in the Irish War of Independence, which became a defining event of his early life. To understand this, you have to read Green Volcano, his 1938 novel of the Irish struggle which he called ‘the most important book’. This will tell you all you need to know about Jim's views on the formation of the Irish state, and how and why he was involved.”

Forrest Reid in his review for The Spectator described Green Volcano as a thriller about the role of rival secret services during the Irish troubles concluding his short review waspishly with, ‘Luckily it breaks off before Mr Phelan has time to spoil it: the hydra of propaganda is just beginning to raise its head when the curtain is rung down’. Green Volcano is now a collector’s item but I eventually got hold of an electronic version and read it carefully. When I reported back to Seumas I told him that I had enjoyed the gripping tale of espionage and vengeance but that my ignorance of the complexities of the Irish struggle had hindered my understanding. Seumas replied:

Glad you've read Green Volcano, and at least it should give you some understanding of how deeply Jim and those of his generation felt about the betrayal of the Irish republic at the end of the War of Independence (1918-21) and how bitter were the divisions left by the Civil War that followed. It was the Free State forces (Fine Gael) that won the war, backed by arms and money from Britain. while De Valera and his Fianna Fail followers were the losers. The one thing they all had in common was that they all outlawed the IRA. It is sometimes hard for English people to get a handle on Anglo-Irish politics but it's really pretty basic. So far as Jim is concerned, the key point of Green Volcano is the secrecy -- because his work was undercover -- and the division, because the movement was left fatally split in two. The Ben Robinson character is semi-autobiographical and the gun-running is clearly based on experience. My father was a rebel and involved with the Irish Citizens Army but like most of those who had been committed to the cause he was always very guarded about what he said later even to me- that's really all I can say, and I hope you can work out the rest.

Phelan wrote in his autobiography (The Name is Phelan) that during the Dublin Lock Out while working as a blacksmith at Inchicore he had walked through the city with an iron bar concealed in his sleeve and had become adept in rough house tactics in the street battles fought against ‘Murphy’s men.’He had also observed the brutality of the police as he listened to the fiery Liverpool-Irish orator Jim Larkin deliver his Bloody Sunday speech from the balcony of Murphy’s Imperial Hotel on O’Connell Street. The ‘lawless nightmare’ came to an end after 4 months of resistance in 1913 when the Trades Union Council of Great Britain refused Larkin’s and the Edinburgh born Marxist, James Connolly’s request to recommend a general strike to its members. Most of the defeated men drifted back to work where they were forced to sign a pledge that they would not join any trades union. Some of those who had been blacklisted felt they had no alternative but to sign up for the British Army. It was not too long before Phelan was back counting the milestones, this time on the run from the looming threat of two shotgun weddings. After a walk to Toulon and Marseilles he arrived in London on the SS Halcyon and tramped north up the old Watling Street toby. On arrival in Liverpool he checked into a boarding house full of navvies, sailors and drifters, and after sprucing himself up set off in search of his old shipmate George Garrett, but was informed by a sailor that his friend was away at sea. Phelan then walked down to the docks where he bumped in to a Dublin acquaintance, Archie Anderson hanging from the stern-rail of SS Elbana. Anderson who was ‘a Jim Larkin man’ told Phelan that James Connolly had resurrected the Irish Citizen Army as an alternative to the Irish Volunteer Force and was recruiting revolutionaries to continue to fight for an independent Irish republic. He then took Phelan ‘to do a bit of business’, which involved buying four revolvers. After Phelan had returned to his job as a blacksmith at the Inchicore factory in Dublin Anderson would bring guns for him to fit with new springs. In 1921, after the Anglo-Irish Peace Treaty had been signed, Phelan listened to a rallying speech given by Liam O’Flaherty. O’Flaherty was an Irish Guards veteran of World War I who had joined the Industrial Workers of the World in New York, and been introduced to Communism by his brother before returning to Ireland. Like Phelan and George Garrett he would also become a writer. Phelan wrote in The Name is Phelan:

‘O’ Flaherty was a magnificent speaker, with an ineradicable twist of mischief in his makeup. The organising of a beggar’s legion, comparable to the host of the beggar syndicate described by Dumas in Twenty Years After obviously appealed to him. It did to me too’.

After more casual jobs Phelan next answered an advertisement to join the Tank Corps in the British Army and set off for a place called Wool in Dorset, where a huge mausoleum of World War I fighter tanks lay unused. Instead of supplying his new friends in the Citizen Army with weapons he whiled away the hours reading the works of Thomas Hardy and playing chess. On a period of leave he returned to Dublin to find The Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary (The Black and Tans), made up mainly of World War 1 veterans from English and Scottish cities, patrolling the Dublin streets in armed vehicles. To Phelan’s disappointment his former friends in the demi-monde of The Liberties had decided to support the British against the poorly paid Irish workers of Townsend Street.

               During his time back in Dublin he fell into a relationship with a girl called Dora Mary O’ Brien. On his reluctant return to his blacksmith work at Wool he learned that an anonymous letter had been sent to his superiors alleging he was a conspirator. The British authorities did not pursue the matter but the accusation gave him the opportunity to negotiate an early discharge. On January 18 1922, a garrison of unemployed men led by O’Flaherty which included Phelan seized the Rotunda in Dublin (now the Gate Theatre). O’Flaherty in his capacity as spokesman for the ‘Council of the Unemployed’ informed the press that it was a peaceful protest against the apathy of the authorities but warned that should they be arrested they would not recognise the legal process. The hoisting of the Red Flag, and the declaration of a Soviet Republic, led to consternation in the ranks of the newly formed Irish Communist Party, and the gathering of an angry crowd outside the concert hall. After four days of occupation during which shots were fired over the heads of the mob from inside the hall, the Free State troops evicted the anti-Treaty protesters. Phelan travelled with O’Flaherty to Cork before returning to Dora in Dublin where he resumed his role as a gun repairer for Archie Anderson.  On March 13 1922 he was back in Liverpool and wrote in The Name is Phelan:

I jumped about, to Cardiff, to Bristol, to Glasgow, but always back to Liverpool (or to the port of Garston, rather which is seven miles from Liverpool up the Mersey) where my main interests lay’. …There was a quiet unhurried feel about Liverpool that I liked. From the first day I was at home, nearer to peace than I had been for months. The vast line of docks inevitably drew me, and much of my time went in learning the names of ports as strange-sounding as Tyre and Sidon.

There he took a job as a blacksmith at Bowman and Beddows in Roscoe Street and on 31st October 1922 became a father when Dora had a daughter Catherine Mary born at 296 Beaufort Street, Liverpool 8. Although the British were less concerned about Irish politics now the peace treaty had been signed, and the Irish republicans were fighting amongst themselves, the Liverpool police kept a close eye on Phelan. On one occasion an Irishman called Detective Inspector Moore spoke to him in Gaelic and warned him to keep away from the waterfront. Some weeks later he was stopped and searched on the Dock Road by detectives. His stealth and secretiveness and use of aliases such as Albert or Seamus Finchley led to suspicions among the authorities that he might be the new chief of the IRA.

               George Garrett was still working as a stoker but in meetings he had with his compatriot referred to himself as a writer. The Irish Civil War had begun with fierce in-fighting between two factions of the victorious rebels. Phelan’s brother Willie was now in prison and Liberty Hall had been fired on by the Free State Government. Liam O Flaherty came to Liverpool and told Phelan that the Republicans planned to wage war in the Wicklow Mountains and that he wanted him to join as a commandant. Phelan declined:

Not knowing, how could I tell him I felt nothing and hoped nothing that I knew no loyalties to tear at me, had no convictions to drive me, wanted everything from the world but expected nothing and would take nothing.

On June 11 1923 Phelan and another man attempted to rob a post office on Hopwood Street off the Scotland Road in Liverpool. During the raid Thomas Lovelady, a 22 year old man rushed to the rescue of his sister and was shot in the abdomen by one of the gunmen. Phelan was arrested shortly afterwards and later charged with murder. In his statement to the police he claimed that he had joined his accomplice a man known to the police as John McAteer or McGinty at a lodging house at 97 Byrom Street on June 8. At about ten minutes to seven in the evening the two men entered the post office. With Phelan standing with his back guarding the door McAteer went behind the counter to snatch the proceeds. One of the postmistresses attempted to phone the police while the other made a movement as if to go to the back of the shop but then froze. The girl with the telephone then screamed and Phelan claimed he ran out and into Scotland Road. As he was about to run down Newsham Street he heard a gunshot. McAteer then rushed past him, and as he tried to escape, Phelan then claimed he had been forced to fire his 0.22 pistol in the air to scare off a group of men who pursued them. Before being arrested he admitted firing a second shot although he later retracted this. He also claimed that McAteer had instructed him on the morning of the robbery to bring the guns to the lodging house saying that ‘one of them post offices has got to go up’. The guns had been supplied by John Braddock and handed over to him in a package on Hardman Street by James Horan, a Communist,  he had also received a piece of lead pipe from a man called Joe Kennedy. Another gun had been handed over to Augustine Power who had been with McAteer and himself sussing out possible targets around Scotland Road earlier in the day and were supposed to meet them that evening. Phelan denied that they had any intention of shooting anybody and that the choice of the post office had been made randomly at the last-minute. In a subsequent statement Phelan added that he had first been approached in March the previous year by Joseph Kennedy and James Cully to assist in a hold-up, either at a butchers called Higgins or a post office on Scotland Road near St Martin’s Hall, but he had backed out. Phelan was sentenced to death by hanging and detained at His Majesty’s pleasure in Strangeways. It was accepted that he had not pulled the trigger. On the eve of his execution following pleas for clemency from his mother and others, the Home Office commuted his sentence to life imprisonment, a fate worse than death in Phelan’s eyes. Not long after he had begun his prison term he was subpoenaed to give evidence against Augustine Power and John Braddock, two Communist sympathisers, charged with being in possession of guns and explosives. Despite his statement to the police that had incriminated the two men Phelan had made his mind up not to turn King’s evidence. Each of the Prosecution barrister’s questions was greeted with ‘I did not’ and finally he shouted in a loud voice, ‘I will not have my evidence distorted by the police.’ The Daily Express of September 29 1923 headlined their special report from the courts with ‘Jaunty Life Convict. Reprieved Man’s Grimaces and Smiles. Sneers in Court’. After the trial Phelan was branded  as a dangerous IRA gunman by the English press, a misnomer he did nothing to dispel during his 13 years spent in HM Prisons.

               Nothing was known about McAteer’s escape until the recent publication of a book by Barry McLoughlin entitled Left to the Wolves; Irish Victims of Stalinist Terror . John Francis (Seán) McAteer was one of fourteen children, born in in a two up two down terraced house with an outdoor toilet and no hot water in Barnet Street, Liverpool 7. After he had been sacked as an agitator in the Dublin docks he became embroiled in several revolutionary adventures in the United States of America. In 1922 he returned to Ireland and joined the Republican cause with the Irish Citizen’s Army living at 10 North Clarence Street in Dublin.  He also fought with the IRA in Wicklow and Tipperary. With financial assistance from the British Communist Party, McAteer had managed to escape justice in England and fled to the Soviet Union where he assumed the name of David Ivanovich Twist or SeánTwist and married a Russian woman called Tamara. The Russians put him to work as a teacher and propagandist in the Seaman’s Club in Odessa, and in 1927 he was sent to China as a Comintern agent. He then returned to Odessa where his outspokenness against corruption brought him enemies. During the Great Purge he was charged with spying, and executed by a firing squad on 29th November 1937. When I asked Seumas about McAteer and his links to Russia he wrote back:

Green Volcano was translated into Russian in 1941 and distributed in the USSR, as you probably know, but you may not know that the first country in the world to recognise the Soviets as the legitimate government was the infant Irish Republic -- at one time every Soviet schoolchild knew that because it was taught in all their schools. The preface written by the literary critic Abel Startsev was removed in later print runs when he became persona non grata during Stalin’s anti-Semitic purges. There were a lot of sometime Bolsheviks in Ireland in my father’s time, a reminder that Ireland usually reflects dominant global ideologies in one form or another. I had to drink a lot of toasts in vodka when I was there under Brezhnev. Good luck with your efforts Slan go fail, Seumas.

Larkin, Connolly and McAteer were all members of the International Workers of the World (Wobblies)a labour union founded in Chicago in 1905 that promoted the concept of "One Big Union" and contended that all workers should be united to supplant capitalism and wage labour with industrial democracy. The Wobblies constitution stated that the working class and the bosses had nothing in common and that industrial peace could never exist as long as millions of workers suffered from hunger and want. Class struggle had to continue so that the rank and file could take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth. Phelan and McAteer had been frequent visitors to a Dublin house on Langrishe Place, owned by Jim Larkin’s sister, Delia. It was a known meeting place for intellectual reformers like Maude Eden and Maeve Kavanagh, and writers like Sean O’Casey as well as some members of the Transport Union. Delia kept salon with great strength of character so that even after her marriage to a Colgan, the workers of Townsend Street continued to address her respectfully as Miss Larkin. Phelan’s sister, Maggie, married Delia Larkin’s brother-in-law, John in 1921, and one of McAteer’s sisters Catherine married Phelan’s younger brother William Cornelius (James) in St Joseph’s church Dublin. It later transpired that the botched post office heist in Liverpool had been ordered by far left elements within a successor group of the Irish Citizen’s Army in the immediate post-truce period to acquire money for the dependents of imprisoned comrades.

To try to understand ‘the rest’ as Seumas had put it I next turned to Ten-A-Penny People, a book published in the same year as Green Volcano about working class tensions in Manchester based on Phelan’s own working experiences in Liverpool. The book opens with a story that George Garrett had told  Phelan when the two men first met in New Orleans in 1913 and when Garrett had helped Phelan get a seaman’s card. Garrett told him that when he had refused to follow in his father’s footsteps and go to sea his father had beaten him senseless and then urinated on his face before carting him down to the docks and pocketing the signing on fee. Garrett becomes Joe Jarrow in the book:

The soft Liverpool brogue can be menacing at times, and Old Man Jarrow meant to be threatening now. Slit-eyed, with his mouth set hard and both big fists clenched, he surveyed the enormous youngster before him.

After the beating by his father Joe Jarrow goes to tell his girlfriend Kitty the bad news in a meeting place which was probably close to the Tate and Lyle sugar factory on Love Lane:

The long dead wall of a well-known sugar works flanked the road. He walked close to this wall, partly turned inward in uncomfortable diagonal fashion, so that his progress was furtive and slinking. Although he trod the streets of a sea-port he moved like a forest-animal, crouching close to the cover even as he walked….He halted in a mean little square. A dozen tiny cottages grouped around a single water-tap, a lavatory and a row of dust-bins…Young Joe lounged away, down a ‘jigger’ to the right into another and smaller jigger where he waited. Like most of the lanes, it was about four feet wide, ran between seven-foot walls and looked like part of a maze. Here in the rabbit-burrow passages so incongruous in a big city, was the only meeting place known to Young Joe and his kind.

              Joe returns home and throws the only photograph of his bullied and beaten dead mother onto the fire and takes the tram to the Herculaneum dock to board SS Ventura, bound for Callao. The narrative continues with a patchwork of cinematic montages describing the formative years of some of the main characters of the book. There is an extended account of violent strike action at the shipbuilding firm of Gannet and Swon, an attempted suicide by a mother, a romance and a case of arson with murder. Factional quarrels lead to disorganised chaos and counterproductive mob rule at the factory.  In the mayhem that ensues the police end up battering the blacklegs that they were meant  to be defending.

                   Later on in the story Joe Jarrow who has become a tramp learns from a lorry driver that his sweetheart Kitty is now married and living in Manchester, and has become a committed member of the Communist Party. Jarrow tells the lorry driver:

I’ve preached the class- struggle up and down a few countries. I never pass a Communist or Socialist branch. But I’ll join no party.

                In Ten-A-Penny People there is a couple called Dick and Joan Rogan, both Party members who talk like automatons with telegrammatic speech and consider themselves to superior idealistic intellectuals distinguished from the hoi-polloi by their willingness to die for their beliefs:

“Acquiescent?-name?” inquired Dick. “Wife-gas. “Harrish”, Joan told him. “Minnie’s father”. “Harrish, Probably Harrish .Crushed, strained. Long tension. Snap-violent. Harrish!” Rogan was almost positive.

            Phelan concludes his story with the veteran socialist ship stoker Soashie Rudd, who had befriended Jarrow and given him ‘The Apostate’ by Jack London to read on the Ventura, speaking from a soapbox on the cast iron shore to an angry crowd of Liverpool dockers:

Aye mates that’s what it means. This wage-cut of yours isn’t directed to you boys alone. They’re aiming for the whole working class. All over the world boys from Tientsin to Madrid, and from Liverpool and Manchester to Berlin and Addis Ababa, they’re aiming at the whole working class. You saw it two months ago in Manchester; you’re seeing it now here. I don’t work in your trade, mates. I’m just a ship’s foreman who knows the boss-class. I

               In Ten-A-Penny People it is the ordinary working people like Joe Jarrow (George Garrett) who opposed class war and agitprop, and not the automatons of the British Communist Party that come over as the heroes.

             After his release from Parkhurst prison after spending 13 years in prison Jim Phelan became a successful writer mixing in London literary circles where he was suspected by some of his acquaintances of being a double agent. He was sympathetic to the Wobblies and subscribed to the view of his friend Garrett that all workers were slaves to the capitalists, irrespective of their race colour or creed. In the George Garrett Archive in Liverpool there is a signed copy of Museum (published under the title of Lifer in the USA) Phelan’s first book. On the inside cover he has pasted a red illustration in the style of a Soviet propagandist poster announcing

‘Jim and Jill have a baby’ (Seumas) and a dedication: To my old-time side-kicker, George Garrett-the sailor, the stoker of steamers, the man with the clout. Some come through. Jim Phelan September ‘37.

Below this he had glued in a typed bio-sketch, possibly written by his publisher;

‘Born Seumas Ua Faolain (a cousin of Sean O’ Faolain, author of A Nest of Simple Folk. Mr Phelan early became a worker for Irish freedom, took part in the Easter Rebellion, and after the shooting of a mail-clerk in Lancashire, became known in the British press as the ‘Silent Witness’ because of his refusal to incriminate rebel comrades. While in prison he wrote nearly five million words, ranging in tone from lyric poems to the brutal truth about penal servitude’.

               By Phelan’s own admission The Name is Phelan was written to capture a readership in post-war England and it cannot be excluded that some of what he wrote was ‘a line of guff’ but it seemed unlikely. Phelan’s father had served time in prison and had a revolutionary background as had his grandfather. Independent historical sources supported what Seumas had told me that his father was a staunch republican with sympathy for international workers’ rights, a man who had made no secret of his deep mistrust for the Catholic Church, all politicians and The Communist Party.

            After learning the rest I now saw Phelan as a radical libertarian socialist who became involved in the Irish War of Independence but was to find his greatest freedom roaming the roads of The British Isles and Continental Europe, He was a committed outsider and a lucid dreamer who by freeing up time found himself able to link his future and past through many varying presents:

Drifting I looked out over the water, at the other iron bollard on Dublin riverside and at the thirteen-year-old who sat there to look out over Dublin bay at me. I looked forward, too, and saw many a picture which in later days, I knew to come alive. Hamburg docks, for instance, I saw quite clearly, and years after the false-nostalgia came when I looked at them in reality. I even saw Guatemala.

This essay is dedicated to Seumas Joseph Phelan born February 4 1938, moral compass of the newsroom, Republican and socialist who died on  November 13, 2016 in Bundeena on the outskirts of Sydney Australia.

Seumas Boy Phelan- ‘a childhood work’ Extract from II- Naughty Mans (Horizon ed Cyril Connolly July 1943): When your Jim is thinking a lot, about the bloody words he’s going to type, that’s lousy. Rule one, stay alive. Rule two, don’t fool about with your food. Rule three, don’t go off the deep end. Your daddy goes off the deep end if you intersturb him when hc’s writing the bloody words. I made rule three. Jim says There’s a Clever Boy. When I get to be a big man I am going to shoot Jim. Ah, no, Seumas Boy, of course not, your good Jim. So I will though’.

Andrew Lees is a Professor of Neurology at the National Hospital, Queen Square London and a writer.. His next book Brazil that never was to be published in 2020 by Notting Hill Editions and New York Review of Books like most of his previously published works has been inspired by the port of Liverpool.

Acknowledgements My thanks are due to Barry McLoughlin, author of Left to the Wolves: Victims of Irish Victims of Stalinist Terror for his scholarly insights into Jim Phelan’s involvement in the Irish struggle and for providing me with some documents relating to the trial at Manchester Assizes. Dr McLoughlin also gave me permission to publish the picture of Phelan at the time of his arrest and the 1922 photograph originally from Freeman’s Journal of January 20 1922 and published in his book. David Cowell and Tony Wailey also provided black pearls.

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Extract from Panégyric by Guy Debord describing his time in Chamot in the Auvergne in the seventies

I even stayed in an inaccessible house surrounded by woods, far from any village, in an extremely exhausted mountainous region deep in a a deserted Auvergne. I spent several winters there. Snow fell for days on end. The wind piled it up in drifts. Barriers kept it off the road Despite the exterior walls,snow accumulated in the courtyards.Logs burned in the fireplace. The house seemed to open directly on to the Milky Way. At night the nearby stars would shine brilliantly one moment, and the next would be extinguished by the passing mist. And so to our conversations and our celebrations, our meetings and tenacious passions. It was a land of storms. They would approach noiselessly at first , announced by the brief passage of a wind that slithered through the grass or by a series of suddenflashes on the horizon: then thunder and lightning were unleashed, and we were bombarded for a long time and from every direction, as if in a fortress under siege.Just once at night. I saw lightning strike near me outside, you could not even see where it had struck, the whole landscape was equally illuminated by one startling instant. Nothing in art has seemed to give me this impression of an irrevocable brilliance, except for the prose that Lautreéamont employed in the programmatic exposition that he called Poésies. But nothing else neither Mallarmés blank page, nor Malevitch's white square on a white background, not even Goya's last pictures where black takes over everything like Saturn devouring his children. Violent winds, which at any moment copuld rise from one of three directions, shook the trees. Those on the moors to the north, more dispensed , bent and shook like ships surprised at anchor in an unprotected harbour.The compactly grouped trees that guarded the hill in front of the house supported one another in their resistance, the first rank breaking the west wind's relentless assault. Further off, the line of the woods disposed in squares over the whole half-circle of the hills, evoked the troops arranged in a chessboard pattern in certain eighteenth century battles scenes.And those almost vain charges sometimes made a breach, knocking down a tank.Piled-up clouds traversed the sky at a run. A sudden change of wind could also quickly send them into retreat, with other clouds launched in their pursuit. On calm mornings there were all the birds of the dawn and the perfect chill of the air and that dazzling shade of tender green that came over the trees in the tremulous light of the sun rising before them. The weeks passed imperceptibly. One day the morning air announced the arrival of autumn. Another time,a great sweetness in the air, like a quick promise always kept, 'the spring breeze.' In regard to someone who has been, essentially and continuously as I,a man of streets and cities- one will thus appreciate the degree to which my preferences will not over falsify my judgements- it should be pointed out that the charm and harmony of these few seasons of grandiose isolation did not escape me. It was a pleasing and impressive solitude. But in truth I was not alone. I was with Alice.

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Gerald Stern Journal of Neural Transmission supplement 2020

Gerald Stern was a doyen of clinical neurology of international repute who made numerous significant contributions to neurology and the field of movement disorders. His early life and career in neurology have been documented in other published eulogies (Lees 2018a, b; Quinn 2019; Lees and Ockelford 2019)—we would urge you to read these as they tell a compelling story of his upbringing, his entry in to medicine, and the start of his love affair with clinical neurology that contains object lessons for those about to embark on a similar voyage. For those of you who never met Gerald or heard him speak and have not read any of his numerous publications, you should indulge yourselves by reading one of his later works (Stern 2011) or the Stanley Fahn Lecture presented at the MDS meeting in 2010 in Bue- nos Aries which you can watch on YouTube (Stern 2010) and an interview carried out by Niall Quinn (Quinn 2010) following that presentation. Then, you will realise what a master of the English language he was, his intellect, his ability to dissect and analyse complex areas of neurology, and how he used his wit and humour to entertain an audience. Gerald showed boundless enthusiasm for clinical neurol- ogy and was beloved by his patients who adored the time and patience which he showed in trying to understand their problems and to treat them to the best of his ability. Such was the respect of his patients that two apparently penniless, little old ladies left him substantial legacies with which he funded his research. Famed for his tact and diplomacy and courteous manner, he was sought out by the rich, the famous, Kings, Presidents, and Popes for his clinical skills. Asked why he preferred to practice private medicine rather than aim for a chair of neurology, he responded in typical fashion ‘My dear boy, I couldn’t possibly afford to be a professor’. A pioneer and a non-conformist—some would say rebel—he was involved in the earliest studies of L-dopa in Parkinson’s disease and subsequently in the introduction of dopamine agonist drugs, notably apomorphine and bromocriptine. Probably, he would have been most proud of his contribution to the introduction of the MAO-B inhibitor deprenyl in to the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, which included being his own guinea pig for testing the safety and effect of the drug—unthinkable in the modern era. Less well known is Gerald’s love of science and laboratory-based research which was fostered by periods in his early career that he spent in USA and in Paris. He must have been one of very few clinicians who subscribed to and read Nature and Science on a regular basis. Enthused by articles that stimulated his imagination, he would be immediately on the telephone to discuss the details of the experiments or he would buttonhole people at meetings and have long conversations which showed the depth of his knowledge and his deep understanding of the relevance to clinical neurology. He would enthuse and even cajole his basic science colleagues in to action to exploit these latest ideas and to translate them in to practical solutions for his patient population. Gerald always described himself as ‘a simple clinician’, but those who worked with him found that he was far from that and including him in the basic science team raised novel ideas and concepts that his lateral thinking brought to the table.Gerald was involved in early studies on the function of the substantia nigra and sub-thalamic nucleus inducing electrolytic lesions in primates under the tutelage of Fred Mettler at Columbia University in New York. This formed the basis of his MD thesis which he wrote sitting on a bidet in a former bordello in Paris. He later forged long-term relationships with Professor Merton Sandler at Queen Charlottes Hospital, London studying catecholamine metabolism and, subsequently, the actions and metabolism of deprenyl. He then became fascinated by the potential for curing Parkinson’s disease through the use of foetal cell transplantation and in many respects was a pioneer in this field enabled by another long-term relationship with Professor Harry Bradford at Imperial College London. One of us (PJ) has personal experience of how Gerald never let an unsolved problem rest. One of his earliest studies, in 1963, was in to the cause of nigro-pallidal degeneration in horses induced by the ingestion of the yellow star thistle. Gerald tried unsuccessfully to induce the same degenerative process in both rodents and primates convinced that there was a specific toxin in the plant that had relevance to human disease. Some 30 years later, when MPTP was first coming to prominence, he related these studies to me, and after reading his paper, I was sufficiently convinced by Gerald’s enthusiasm to go back to the problem. Together with a Swiss phytochemist, toxic components of the plant extracts were identified as sesquiterpene lactones (Cheng et al. 1992)—although it still remains a mystery as to why only horses are affected. In his professional life, Gerald Stern was, by nature, a quiet, generous, and unselfish man who gave his time freely to others and was never one to seek the limelight. In fact, many will remember him because of the patronage which he showed to young neurologists and scientists encouraging them to greater things through his enthusiasm for the field. A gift that is not as common today and for which we are poorer. One of us (PJ) will be forever grateful for the support and encouragement that he received from Gerald in the early part of his career—everything from listening my woes to constructive criticism of my work to bombarding me with ideas to ensuring that I took the right path to achieve my ambitions. He was a father figure to many, but never took the credit for doing so much to advance the field of movement disorders in the UK and on an international basis. Perhaps,in these young people, he recognised something of himself and saw their struggles as the ones which he himself had had to overcome. One or two final quotations personify Gerald and his personality. ‘Surround yourself with clever young people who are more industrious, more imaginative, more intelligent than yourself’ and ‘Be nice to old ladies’. Rest in peace dear friend! References Cheng CH, Costall B, Hamburger M, Hostettmann K, Naylor RJ, Wang Y, Jenner P (1992) Toxic effects of solstitialin A 13-acetate and cynaropicrin from Centaurea solstitialis L. (Asteraceae) in cell cultures of foetal rat brain. Neuropharmacology 31:271–277 Lees AJ (2018a) In memoriam: Gerald Malcom Stern (October 9, 1930–September 9, 2018). Mov Disord 33:1831–1833 Lees, AJ (2018b) Munk’s Roll vol. XII, Royal College of Physicians, London. https://history.rcplondon.ac.uk/inspiring-physicians/geral d-malcolm-stern. Accessed Feb 2020 Lees AJ, Ockelford J (eds) (2019) Remembering Gerald Stern. Virginia Keiley Benefaction, London Quinn N (2010) Interview with Gerald Stern, Buenos Aries, MDS Archives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EST-Otslc8g. Accessed Feb 2020 Quinn N (2019) Gerald Malcolm Stern: 9th October 1930–9th Septem- ber 2018. Mov Disord Clin Pract 6:9–10 Stern G (2010) Stanley Fahn Lecture, MDS Meeting, Buenos Aries. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0_MZWVK3mE. Accessed Feb 2020 Stern G (2011) Why catechol? Mov Disord 26:24–26 Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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The Collector in me

What I am trying to understand on this snowy morning is why I feel the need to buy copies of some of the rare soul 7 inch vinyl records that release tunes I have carried in my head for 50 years. Rhythm and soul loves you back, it is eternal and aspirational, and can even be curative despite its angst ridden lyrics, but why my sudden need to own what is easily accessible on the World Wide Web? Although I have always disliked throwing things away I have never been a pathological hoarder. In my youth I saw serious collectors as god like masters of the natural world not depraved deviants battling hidden childhood trauma. Now I know that collecting arises in the medial prefrontal cortex and can be enhanced by excessive use of amphetamines but the same area of the brain is associated with the appreciation of beauty. I want to believe that my desire to collect these objects stems from an enhanced aesthetic appreciation of life rather than a pathological disinhibition. Source: aleesblog

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Saveiro on the way to Cachoeira from Carybé, Caymmi, Verger bool

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From the Sao Francisco church in the Carybe, Caymmi, Verger book