For the Methode de Proetz, the first treatment every day, one has to take a number and wait one’s turn, and somehow there are always thirty people ahead of me. Whether I come at , , , or even , there are always about thirty people who got there before me. Each person takes about two minutes, so thirty people mean waiting for one hour. I hate waiting! So now I drop in whenever I have finished my morning rituals, take a number, and do other things. First I buy a paper, then a croissant, and then I get a coffee at the machine in the Thermes’ Cafeteria and have breakfast. By the time I have reached the comments section and am getting exasperated with them my hour is up and I return to the de Proetz waiting room.
I have been observing my fellow curistes, and noticed with pleasure that many of them are my size or smaller. So either asthma affects small people disproportionately, or the people who live within a hundred miles of La Bourboule and seem to be the main Thermes patrons are smaller than the northern Europeans who normally surround me. Either way it makes a nice change for me - it is very irritating to be looked down on by the majority of my fellow human beings. That is not to say there are no advantages to being small, if I keep quiet I get easily overlooked, which can be useful. And I can comfortably use antique furniture, which was made when people were smaller – tables are not too low, chairs allow my feet to touch the ground. Taller people are often uncomfortable in antiques, and that keeps prices down! Best of all I only need a tiny house, which is a great advantage in these ridiculous house-price times.
Anyway. On Saturday I received a new toy, an aromatic oil nebuliser. I put twenty drops of oil into the apple (the top comes off), turn on the nebuliser, and aromatic steam escapes from the apple core. The apple is lit from inside, every second there is a different colour. The colour is reflected from all the miniature drops of oil which have been distributed by the nebuliser all over the inside of the apple. When it is dark it looks amazing in a Walt Disney sort of way. I had it running for much of the night with eucalyptus oil, and it really helped with the cold.
Thank you for all the Get Well wishes! I am not doing badly, I sit up on my bed and read French magazines and newspapers, having run out of English ones. Yesterday I read an interview with the daughter of Jackie Kennedy in Paris Match (took me all of three hours!), and today I tackled the DSK television interview (still in progress). I had thought of watching it, but I couldn’t find the on/off switch of the TV in my apartment. So I watched A Christmas Carol again on my little laptop and learned a great new French word: Baliverne! That means Nonsense! and is Scrooge’s favourite word before his conversion.
