Treat every crisis as normal and soluble.

John le Carré

In the early 1990s, I was working in a large bookshop in Dublin, one of these temples of print and publishing, spread over several floors, classical music, children's activities, Sunday opening hours, free coffee and red wine, readings, the lot. This is where families would go for an outing on a rainy weekend. Those were the pre-latte, pre-kindle days. My family occasionally visited me at work but I never really had the time for coffee, let alone reading or browsing. Show me a bookseller who then had the time to read anything apart from sales figures, bestseller lists, blurbs on the back covers and all the invoices and I'll tell you he/she is a fraud.

For a couple of months we had one of those strange bestsellers. It happened every so often. A book would sell like hotcakes without any advertising, anything in the media, often a title from a small, even obscure publisher without a sales rep. 

Anyway, we sold stacks and stacks of The healing power of illness: the meaning of symptoms and how to interpret them. We sold it to young parents, ageing hippies, elderly matrons, priests and nuns, journalists, teachers, even the odd medical person.

The concept was intriguing and at first glance even convincing. Take the common cold. What do the symptoms - coughing, sneezing, sore throat, runny nose, blocked ears etc. - tell us about the patient? Yes, the message is obvious: stay away, keep out, leave me alone, I cannot talk, I cannot listen, I want peace and quiet and so on. Look deeper and bingo, the diagnosis is staring you in the face: too much stress, too much involvement, too busy ignoring what is really bothering you and so on. In other words, you, the patient, have a minor psychological drama at your hands, but luckily, you now have the power to overcome this. 

This nice little pattern is put to work for almost any health issue and reading it you will find yourself nodding your head here and there. Gosh, how obvious. 

I admit I was pretty hooked - and I have a much leafed through copy somewhere to prove it - until I came to the chapter on migraine. Now, I have never - touch wood - suffered from migraine myself but to diagnose migraine as a misguided orgasm in the head? Good grief. 

Illness and health a far more mysterious. And the riddle never ends. Count your lucky stars for every day, every night of well being, no matter how relative in comparison to whatever. And when the shit hits the fan and you cannot get one foot in front of the other, try to remember that your body with all its billions of cells is programmed for recovery. Which takes time and maybe the outcome is not what you expected. Don't get mad. It's hard work.