There was a time when seeing a doctor on a ship required either a passenger liner or a convenient outbreak of appendicitis in mid-Atlantic.
On a cargo ship you were the medical plan. If something ailed you, you consulted the First Mate’s locker, a dog-eared manual, and whatever unguent looked vaguely medicinal. A wipe down with boiled linseed oil was considered bracing. A strategic dam of Swarfega dealt with anything dermatological, mechanical or moral. If you survived, you called it resilience. If you didn’t, well, burial at sea was straightforward paperwork.
To be fair, anyone who has done a Master Mariner’s Certificate of Competency has effectively spent a week in A&E. The medical training is brisk, practical and faintly alarming. You learn how to suture, how to splint, how to inject, and how not to faint. It is all very admirable in theory. In practice, the prospect of allowing the First Mate to operate on you on the chart table with a bent spoon, while the ship rolls in a moderate swell, is not to be relished. Self-reliance has its limits.
And then there was Dhobi Itch. The name itself is a relic of empire. A “dhobi” is a washerman in the Indian subcontinent, from the Hindi word for one who launders clothes. British sailors and soldiers, stationed in hot climates, noticed that communal washing and damp kit encouraged a persistent fungal rash of the groin. The condition acquired its nickname accordingly. Officially it was tinea cruris. Unofficially it was Dhobi Itch, spoken in lowered tones as if naming it might encourage it.
The tropics had their own ideas about personal dignity. Hot steel decks, salt sweat and kit that never quite dried. Sooner or later something itched with intent. It was endured with stoicism, a dusting of antifungal powder if the slop chest happened to carry it, and a great deal of pretending it was merely “a bit of heat.” No one volunteered for a bent-spoon intervention in that department.
That sort of upbringing leaves a mark. You learn that most things pass. Cuts knit. Coughs rattle on and then retreat. Ankles swell and then forgive you. The human body, like a decent marine diesel, will usually keep going provided you don’t poke it too much.
Then I entered commercial life and discovered the modern miracle of the GP appointment. Not for the medicine, you understand. For the half-day off. A faint twinge in the elbow became a strategic diary intervention. “Medical,” I would say gravely, as if I were about to undergo exploratory surgery rather than sit in a waiting room leafing through a 2017 copy of Country Life. The NHS became, in a modest way, a form of sanctioned absenteeism.
Retirement has altered the calculus. Time is now my own. Pottering is sacred. The moment you book a GP appointment, it colonises the week. You must remember the day. You must remember the time. You must remember where the surgery has moved to since last Tuesday. It will, without fail, be at 10.40 on the one morning you had mentally reserved for reorganising the garage, or contemplating the metaphysics of a Triumph wiring loom.
And that is before the referral.
At our age, a GP rarely says, “It’s nothing.” They say, “Let’s just get that checked.” Which is code for Bristol. A city whose charms are much celebrated by those who do not have to drive into it. Parking is theoretical. The Clean Air Zone looms like a municipal tollbooth. Twenty mile an hour limits appear in places where even a milk float would feel constrained. One emerges from the experience not cured, but fined.
So the old sea-going instinct reasserts itself. A cough? Salt air would have sorted it. A twinge? Walk it off. A rash? There’s probably something in the workshop that will sting convincingly and therefore must be working. I find myself eyeing the Swarfega with renewed medical respect.
Being married to a PhD biochemist does not help. In her world, a cough is not a cough. It is an early signal in a complex cascade of pathological doom. The female body, she reminds me, is magnificently complicated. Layers of regulation, feedback loops, hormonal choreography. Compared with that, the male version is apparently a stripped-down edition. It is said that the default setting for a foetus is female and that becoming male requires the activation of certain genes and hormones. My wife summarises this more economically. In her view, maleness is what happens when something fails to develop fully, usually the brain.
Her concern, therefore, is not hysteria but projection. If one has spent a career navigating the biochemical labyrinth of female physiology, one naturally assumes that any organism emitting an unexpected cough is on the brink of systemic collapse. I, meanwhile, operate on the maritime principle that if the engine is still turning, we are broadly seaworthy.
The truth, of course, lies somewhere between boiled linseed oil and tertiary referral in Bristol. The sea taught self-reliance, but it also quietly relied on luck. Modern medicine is miraculous, but it has a talent for turning minor inconvenience into a logistical campaign.
So I compromise. Anything that interferes with pottering for more than a fortnight is escalated. Anything that bleeds excessively, glows, or produces a new and interesting smell is negotiable. Everything else is monitored with the seasoned eye of a man who once treated minor ailments with industrial cleaning products and called it character building.
If I do eventually succumb, I hope it is not in a multi-storey car park in Bristol, searching for a payment machine that only accepts an app. That, frankly, would be a poor end to a life at sea.
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