The Ends of Our Tethers by Alasdair Gray Page A

produce – eggs, milk, butter, cheese – also sugar and salt, but eat more fruit and vegetables, preferably organically grown. Two months of this diet would heal my skin if I also took more exercise: a brisk half-hour daily walk would be sufficient. When cured I could experiment by trying some things I had eliminated – wine with my meals or ham-and-egg breakfasts. If the disease returned I would then know what to blame. He also prophesied that any orthodox skin specialist I saw would prescribe a stronger kind of steroid ointment than prescribed by my general practitioner.
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    I left that clinic certain I had been told the truth and determined not to informmy wife. She would have adopted that diet for me with enthusiasm, especially the no-alcohol part; I would then have started tippling in secret and been continually found out and denounced. But I told her when I visited a Chinese clinic that sold me brown paper bags containing mixtures of dry twigs, fronds and fungus with instructions to boil the contents of one bag in water – simmer for half an hour – strain off the liquid – drink a cupful three times a day for two days then repeat the process with the next bag. My wife refused to do that so I did it myself, but kept forgetting to set the cooker alarm so twice ruined pans by boiling the vegetation into adhesive cinders. I realised that orthodox British medicine was the most convenient, even when the skin specialist prescribed what the nature healer had foretold. Luckily by then I had turned my bad skin into a hobby.
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    Explanation at this point becomes embarrassing because it requires a four letter word I hate. Chamber’s Dictionary gives it several meanings but the relevant one is this:
    Scab noun: a crust formed over a sore or wound .
    I take a gentle pleasure in carefully removing most such crusts and have my own names for the main varieties:
    Cakes and Crumbs . Black or brown lumps that form on the deepest scratches. Dried blood is a main ingredient. I try not to touch these because, picked off too soon, they leave a hole in which fresh blood wells up before clotting.
    Hats . A cake or crumb may grow a crisp white border, as much part of it as a brim is part of a hat. This brim overlaps the surrounding skin in such a way that the tip of a fingernail, slid beneath, easily lifts off the whole hat uncovering a moist but shallow and unbleeding wound. A few hours later other kinds of crust form over that. They also form over larger sores where topskin has crumbled off, flaked off or been scratched off.
    Bee-wing . Pale grey and gauzy. It has white lines like veins on wings of bees, wasps and house flies, but more random looking. Minute red or brown spots sometimes suggest wings of more exotic insects. Bee-wing is so transparent that if laid on a printed page words can be read through it.
    Parchment . Pale yellowish-brown, notgauzy, yet as transparent as bee-wing. It seems made by the drying of moisture exuded from raw skin beneath. I remove it by pressing a fingertip into the skin on each side and pulling them apart. The living underskin stretches, the parchment splits, its edges curling up like the edges of water lily leaves, making peeling off easy.
    Moss . This yellowish-grey furriness seems an intruder, like the mould on rotten fruit. It grows in circular holes and narrow grooves made by accidental scratches in swollen, inflamed skin, but is so far below the skin’s level that fingernails cannot reach it without doing more damage. I use fine-pointed tweezers to grip an edge of such growths and, since their roots must be intertwined, easily lift out the whole mossy mat or strip.
    Paper . A splendid example of this lost me control of my remaining firm.
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    The board meeting in our Waterloo Street office consisted of secretary, accountant, lawyer, works supervisor and two major shareholders who were partners from the days when my father’s firm had built housing