An Error of Judgement [antikvár]

I Suspecting myself of a cardiac disease, I went one morning to Harley Street to see Setter, who had been recommended to me by my doctor. I am not, I think, hypochondriacal, though I am made anxious by pains which appear in places to which no concept of 'symptoms' is normally attached; and when I began to suffer discomfort at night from my right shoulder-blade and the back of my left knee simultaneously, it did occur to me that this might be a precursor of serious trouble, known to, but deliberately concealed by physicians, and in conspiracy kept out of the textbooks of popular medicine. I am forty-two, and my life has been a jerky one, an odd-job life - advertising, the B.B.C., the navy (war-time), political agent, management consultant, and finally, personnel officer to Hancock Motors. It is not that I cannot stick at any one thing. It is simply that I have not yet found a congenial thing to stick to. The foregoing, I see, re-reading it, makes it clear that I am indulging in irony at my own expense: which means that I am hypochondriacal and, though not a failure in life, have not yet had the dizzying success for which I hoped when I came down from Cambridge with a good Second in Modern Languages. I am also physically vain, and if my parting is not quite straight, or if there is so much as a phantom spot on my tie, it irks me as much as though I had a pebble in my shoe. All these things I know. And I can do nothing whatsoever about them. I have dark hair and eyes, my height is five feet seven and three quarter inches. Thank God I shall never run to fat. I am married and have no children. Setter sat in a big impersonal room with thin green curtains pulled against the pouring sunshine. I had a flashback to 5