Grace Notes @ Snarkattack

Woods, that is.

At the beginning of the week, my irritable bowel syndrome was activated by the humble artificially flavoured jelly sweet. I didn’t realise they had that crap in it, which is very nasty for sufferers of IBS, as I found out a few years ago, even before having a mental meltdown. It just cramps up your bowels and forces EVERYTHING out of them. Solid, or liquid, it matters not.

This, admittedly, made me consider taking sweet diazepam, to settle my hyperactive bowel. It is a tranquilliser, after all. When the pain is excruciating, it is actually quite useful (diarrhoea does dehydrate you, so it’s not good for you at all) for just getting things to f-ing calm down.

And, I’m not the first person to have resorted to narcotic relief for chronic stomach problems (let me just step up onto my soapbox and say: i. avoid stress; ii. don’t starve yourself - ever - it really screws up your digestion later on in life; iii. don’t turn food into an emotional blackmail battleground, and run like hell from any little psycho Asian woman that pulls that shit on you).

Thomas de Quincey, the author of one of the first autobiographies in the English language, wrote an account of his narcotic addiction entitled Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. It’s gloriously entertaining, funny, sometimes dream-like and nonsensical. I mention him, and his work because a fellow student at university introduced him to opium because he too was plagued by chronic stomach pain. Given the addictive nature of opium, de Quincey pretty much became one of the oldest documented English stoners. Thankfully, he is eloquent, witty, and as far as I can tell from his writing, not at all paranoid but gets up to all sorts of funny things in order to obtain his beloved opium.

It’s a bloody good read, I highly recommend it. It’s even funnier to think that he was a gifted Latin scholar, and came to embrace opium for its therapeutic properties, so out the window went that Latin stuff, ha ha.