Volume 21.4 
Oct 2005

Dr Hugh Joverdraft’s
Dispensing Diary

Stressed-out, overworked, underpaid and perennially misunderstood, Hugh Joverdraft enters the matchmaking stakes in a typically doomed attempt to improve the gaiety of nations.

The first important piece of devastating information that I need to share with you all this month, dear readers, relates to stress and depression. Fasten your seat belts because here it comes: cohabiting couples are more likely to be unhappy and ill than the traditionally married variety.

I am not coming at this from any moralistic or religious viewpoint, you must understand - au contraire, my beloved and I lived in glorious sin in a dingy ground floor flat in Chiswick for four years before plighting our troth, although in fairness we were engaged for most of that time which added a certain air of respectability to the arrangement as far as our hand-wringing parents were concerned. But I digress.

A study by the Institute of Social Research conducted by the intriguingly named Miss Smock and published in the Journal of Family Issues a while back was based on 10,000 women between the ages of 16 and 44. Apparently those folk who live together without getting married are more abusive, unfaithful, unhealthy, less happy and less fulfilled because they lack stability.

Since one-in-three marriages in the UK end in divorce I'm not sure I am entirely convinced, but inspired by this groundbreaking piece of work my partners and I have employed a retired vicar who needs the dosh to run opportunistic marriage services in our waiting room for the most morose amongst our cohabiting customers. The receptionists now come to work dressed as bridesmaids just in case, and we use shredded confidential medical records as confetti. My old Dansette record player from medical school days churns out 'All You Need Is Love' from its precarious position on the reception counter whilst our practice nurse runs a special honeymoon family planning and travel advice clinic with a poster declaring 'Tunnel of Love' on her door.

As soon as a suitably miserable couple of cohabitees hove into view the vicar pounces pronto from behind his mobile pulpit (constructed ingeniously from a zimmer frame on wheels and cardboard) and before they know it they are spliced, one of our smallest sized ring pessaries being pressed into action as a substitute band of gold. The retired vicar’s dementia combined with his myopia are a slight complication as last week he married the surgery cat to the local Scout Master, but we are not disheartened as it is still early days yet. I will let you know the result of this on-the-hoof bit of psycho-social engineering once it has been published in The Lancet. If it all goes pear-shaped I shall be having a certain Miss Smock's guts for garters.

Switching from stress and depression to the equally gloomy subject of addiction I have to confess to being both appalled and intrigued in equal part by the addictive dietary cravings of pregnant mums. A poll of 200 pregnant women in the UK conducted by vitamin gurus Sanatogen found that leading cravings included children's gym shoes, burned matchsticks, ice lollies dipped in mustard, beetroot with custard, garlic bread with strawberry yoghurt, chocolate mixed with salad cream, stuffed olives with lemon curd and coffee granules on crumpets.

A spokeswoman for the Maternity Alliance (sounds like an extremist terror group to me) unhelpfully advised mothers to check with their doctor if their cravings seem 'very' bizarre. Thus put-upon, we have felt obliged Chez Joverdraft to enlarge our dispensary in order to cater for these hormonally driven appetites. Gym shoes for chewing are selling almost as well as the toenail clippings and horseradish sarnies. Profits look set to hit record highs as long as we keep prescribing placebo instead of Ovranette.

Taking all of the medical research above into account I can only conclude that if marrying makes you happier than living in sin, then being married three times must make you deliriously happy, especially if it allows you to chew plimsolls when you become pregnant. It all reminds me of an ancient limerick penned in the days when tragically they were oblivious to the delights of munching on footwear whilst up the duff.

There once was an old man of Lyme
Who married three wives at a time
When asked "Why a third?"
He replied "One's absurd!
And bigamy, Sir, is a crime!"

Dr Joverdraft is a dispensing GP somewhere in the West Country