Digested week: Doctor, doctor it’s OK to joke about my kidneys | Lucy Mangan

Monday

Dame Maggie Smith has gone to the great green room in the sky. My dad worked at the National Theatre back in the days when its canteen was run by two women called Rose and Nellie. Rose was zaftig, ebullient and did most of the serving, accompanied by much loud commentary and happy chat. Nellie, skinny and careworn, was rarely heard from. She spent most of her time scurrying about in the background with pots and pans, or bent almost double over the sinkfuls of washing up that accrued during the turning out of 50 or more hot lunches courtesy of two battered domestic stoves.

A pre-damehood Smith was in the queue one day with a friend, who watched those before them being served for a while before leaning in towards Smith and saying “Isn’t Rose marvellous!” “Yes,” agreed Smith. “But Nellie’s the part .”

Tuesday

The Tory leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick has revealed that his daughter, born in 2013, was given the middle name Thatcher. He thought “it was a good way of reminding her of a great prime minister”.

Much to unpack here. Much to unpack, had we but world enough and time. But for now let us ask the very first and simplest question: dear GOD, man – why not “Margaret”?

Wednesday

The medicalisation of the human condition continues apace. (I’m all for it, by the way. Give me pills for everything. When I first read Brave New World my only real concern was whether soma came in both liquid and tablet form because I wasn’t very good at taking the latter back then, plus I didn’t know about slow-release capsules and it sounded like the kind of thing you wanted a steady infusion rather than quick hit of.) Now we have “emophilia”. The noughties rock and blood disorder jokes have all been made, so – it’s the tendency of some people to fall in love at the drop of a hat and then be devastated when it ends, before falling in love again just as quickly and with just as unfirm a foundation the next time, and so on and so on and so very much on.

Drama queens as was, then. Your most wearisome friend. Your least favourite, most exhausting sibling. The emotionally incontinent, if you are in polite company. Bloody idiots, if you are not. I hope officially labelling the phenomenon helps – both them and the forcibly and far more profoundly affected people around them. I long for the day when instead of hours, days and weeks of counselling X or Y through another heartbreak I can say briskly: “Oh no! You’re having another emophiliac attack! Poor you. Here, let me find your meds” and then popping a little white pill down the throat of the afflicted and clamping my hand round his or her jaw until it’s swallowed. Like worming a kitten, but far more satisfying.

Thursday

I’ve been to various appointments recently about some lumps and bumps on my kidneys and today they were finally, definitely determined to be cysts. “Some calcified, some jelly,” said my lovely doctor. “But just cysts. You’re just – quite cysty!” I was glad to know that my innards, at least, have a hobby. But he suddenly snapped his mouth shut and looked horrified. My first thought was that he’d read the wrong form and was about to tell me I’d got cancer after all, but then I realised that he was simply panicked because he had made a joke.

No one – but especially doctors, already so burdened with trying to pretend that they and the patient are equal in all things, up to and including medical expertise and that no power dynamics are at work – is allowed to joke about serious things any more. We have, thanks mostly to the internet, entirely lost the ability to distinguish between laughing about and laughing at something or someone, so it’s best to stay well away from either.

So I laughed extra heartily and threw in the hobby gag for good measure. I do not know who, by the end of that appointment, was more relieved by the outcome.

Friday

Today the worst thing in the world happened. My computer died. Anyone who doesn’t know about computers knows the agonies I went through. Thoughts of finding a new one, talking to salesmen without a shared language between us, installing Microsoft Word, trying to minimise (I have long since given up the hope of avoiding entirely) the expensive anti-virus software ripoffs … Unbearable. I fell to my knees and prayed to all my gods (Steve Martin, Martin Short, Selena Gomez and Jane Lynch) to help me.

And they did! After much weeping, waiting in lines at various shops and talking to upwards of a thousand patient, 12-year-old assistants in their technology departments, it turned out to be only a dead battery. The charger had stopped working without me noticing. The sweet child who had ultimately diagnosed the problem proffered a new one. It was £127. That is more than I paid for this computer, I said. Please get me a chair and some smelling salts.

The child looked at me for a moment, as I stared at the price tag and tried to accommodate myself to it. I could sense a spirit rising and moving within him. “You could,” he said eventually, “buy a slightly older one. We’ve still got a couple. But they’re not the newest version.”

“’Not the newest version’ is my life motto, baby boy. Please, tell me the price.”

“£34. But it’s really old – like, not even last year.”

“But it will still do everything I require of it? Everything the latest one does? There is no fundamental difference in effect or utility between the two? No? Then I will take it, my dear. And please do let this be some kind of awakening regarding the unremitting cynicism of western capitalism for you.”

I’m absolutely sure it was.