Talking with Margaret Throsby

By Margaret Throsby

For more than a decade Margaret Throsby has been talking each morning on ABC-FM to some of the most intelligent and interesting people on earth. These are conversations, not interviews. Unlike TV and newspaper interviews, they are not edited and tidied up—they are live to air and spontaneous. Because the participants are barely aware of their audience, the discussion is intimate and often very revealing. In picking the very best from the last decade, Margaret has chosen people as diverse as Gerry Adams, Oliver Sacks, Michael Leunig, Patricia Routledge, Paul Keating, Maureen Dowd, Jonathan Franzen, and Gretel Killeen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allen Unwin
• Release date: Nov 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9781741766387

Book preview

Margaret Throsby joined the ABC announcing staff in 1967 and has been a broadcaster on radio and television ever since. She enjoyed a long career on mornings at ABC 702 until 1992. From 1994 to the present day she has been the host of Mornings with Margaret Throsby on ABC Classic FM. In 1989 she was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for ‘services to broadcasting’.

TALKING WITH

Margaret

THROSBY

First published in 2008

Copyright © Margaret Throsby 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Throsby, Margaret

   Talking with Margaret Throsby/Margaret Throsby.

   ISBN 978 1 74175 615 9 (pbk.)

   Throsby, Margaret,

   Celebrities – Interviews.

   Interviews – Australia.

   Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

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Contents

Foreword

Oliver Sacks

Jane Elliott

Pat Dodson

Paul Keating

Patricia Routledge

John le Carré

Bill Henson

Jonathan Franzen

Gerry Adams

Fiona Wood

Chris Patten

Maureen Dowd

David Malouf

Lincoln Hall

Brenda Blethyn

Jeffrey Tate

Pauline Nguyen

Michael Leunig

Billy Bragg

Foreword

The interviews contained in this book started life as conversations on my radio program on ABC Classic FM. The program, now in its fifteenth year, has survived, and thrived, despite early misgivings on the part of many listeners, and, to an extent on my part too.

The story goes back to 1994 when ABC Classic FM was ‘relaunched’ with the inclusion of several new presenters and programs. The newly appointed Manager was Peter James, a New Zealander who had been headhunted from the BBC. He invited me to lunch to discuss a possible role for me at the network, and over that and subsequent meetings we devised the format for an interview that would sit nicely on a classical music network. I’m not sure which of us suggested asking guests to select music for inclusion in the conversation, but that was the format we settled on. We argued over whether it should be a once-a-week program, say on a Saturday or Sunday. I persisted with my idea of doing the show daily, on weekdays, and agreement was finally reached. I probably had a vague idea of what I was letting myself in for, but pushed any doubts to the back of my mind.

Peter transferred Mark Hastings from Adelaide to produce the program, and on 4 April 1994 we dived in at the deep end with our first interview. To his eternal credit Peter James defended the program against attack from annoyed listeners who disliked the intrusion of talk into their classical music listening. He also understood the need to give the new format an extended length of time to develop its own character, and to turn around the opposition.

To say we had bitten off more than we could chew would be to admit we felt defeated from the start. That wasn’t quite the case, though there were many, many occasions when Mark and I looked at each other in wonderment that two otherwise sensible human beings could take on a workload quite like it, and remain sane. Somehow we got to the end of that first year still standing and prepared to plunge into the second, both of us convinced that two years would be the very most we could squeeze out of it. We would run out of guests, we thought, or we would run out of steam ourselves, and listeners would never come round. But gradually the complaints faded, and some people even went to the trouble of writing again and saying they had originally complained, but now had come to enjoy the interviews. Nearly fifteen years later we sometimes think we must have given birth to a monster. Mark and I are still happily working together, which is pretty good going in radioland. And it is very gratifying to receive the volume of email and letters and phone calls that we do, although I admit to consternation when listeners write ‘Never retire!’; and ‘I depend on your program to get through my day’.

Today we present this program in a completely different world from the one in which we started. We began in 1994 with just the two of us doing all the work. Computers, the internet, sophisticated research tools—and the addition of a highly qualified researcher—have allowed for a much deeper analysis of guests’ backgrounds before the interview even takes place. Researchers, including Christen Cornell, Sasha Fegan, Julianne Lamond, Catherine Freyne and currently Michaela Kalowski are all extraordinarily gifted young women with advanced academic qualifications, and over the years, one by one, every one has been integral to giving me insight into guests prior to the on-air conversation.

Much has been written about the business of interviewing people in public. I am conscious of the imbalance of power that exists in interviews. I am in control of the conversation and can steer it in whichever direction I want, although I am deeply aware of the need—the obligation—to listen carefully to guests’ answers, and follow their train of thought rather than my own, before guiding the conversation back in the direction I intended. One powerful aspect of our interviews is the fact that they are ‘live’: that is, whatever is said in the studio goes to air. Unlike the vast majority of in-depth interviews you hear or see in the media, there is no possibility for editing anything out of these conversations, so it’s a ‘warts and all’ experience. This is reassuring to many who have experienced their words being edited in other settings. Some guests, however, feel apprehension at the prospect of a live interview, fearing that they might say something they regret and would wish edited out.

For the purposes of clarity there has been a small degree of editing for these printed versions. Some of the ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ have been removed, but you will notice that we have carefully respected the speech patterns and idiosyncrasies of each guest, and what you read here is almost exactly as it was heard on air.

Many people we interview express misgivings about the length of time involved, fearing they (or I ) might run out of puff. The vast majority confess to amazement that the time passes so quickly between 10 and 11 am.

I have discovered that the inclusion of guests’ choice of music often triggers unexpected, and occasionally, unwelcome reactions. Tears are common, and several guests have felt embarrassed by their emotional response. Music does that: it can fly like an arrow straight to the heart, and when it is associated with an important or poignant, deeply personal memory, it can unleash strong feelings. Sometimes a guest will select a piece of music without realising this will happen on the day, and the fact that the emotions are revealed in public on live radio can cause discomfort. I’m glad to say nobody that I am aware of has left the studio wishing they hadn’t chosen a particular piece of music, or said a particular thing, in the interview.

You will notice that laughter is also almost always present at some time in these conversations. I don’t quite know why that is: maybe it’s to do with my own outlook on life having an effect on the questions I ask, or the fact that I enjoy a good laugh myself. Maybe, however, it’s just that people find they can relax and laugh at themselves and at life, in an extended, hour-long interview.

I am constantly humbled by the generosity of spirit displayed by our guests: in their willingness to lay bare their innermost thoughts, to speak candidly of perhaps a difficult childhood, to spend hours finalising their music choices and finally to engage in what can often be an energy-draining hour of public conversation on my radio program.

It has taken me a long while to be persuaded that it was worthwhile putting these interviews onto the printed page, in a book. I was always wary of the idea, believing that the loss of the music selections would in some way fatally damage the integrity of the interviews themselves. But I think they perhaps work in a different way from the radio experience, and hopefully will give you a chance to ponder the wise and amusing and thoughtful words of this wonderful collection of interviewees.

Oliver Sacks

8 August 1997

Oliver Sacks once wrote, in a book about migraine headaches, that patients often feel that doctors look at them, investigate them, drug them, charge them and don’t listen to them. The concept of treating illness and disease from a perspective of the whole person has somehow been overtaken by science and Dr Sacks, a distinguished neurologist, has been a leader in the field of, as he puts it ‘asserting and affirming the living subject, to escape from a purely objective or robotic science, to find and establish what was missing—a living I ’. Oliver Sacks came to public prominence when he wrote up his extraordinary treatment of a group of surviving victims of sleeping sickness with a drug nicknamed L-dopa. Their arousal from a forty-year catatonia resulted in the best-selling book by Dr Sacks, and then a movie of the same name, called Awakenings. The findings by Oliver Sacks caused great controversy in the medical community, but found tremendous public acclaim. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat followed, and An Anthropologist on Mars and many more: stories about people with a variety of neurological disorders which cause odd, bizarre, often poignant behaviours. Well, Dr Oliver

Sacks is our guest and music is of particular significance to him. We’ll find out why today. His selection for us starts with Bach.

Bach Mass in B Minor: ‘Et incarnatus est’ from the Credo—Leipzig Radio Chorus; New Bach Collegium Musicum, Leipzig / Peter Schreier

Margaret Throsby: ‘Et incarnatus est’ from Bach’s Mass in B Minor, and chosen by our guest, Dr Oliver Sacks.

Good morning.

Oliver Sacks: Good morning.

You were lost in reverie listening to that?

It’s piercingly beautiful and it transports me. Ah, I love the anguished lyrical tenderness of the strings and the voices. I’m not a religious person in any formal sense—I don’t have any dogmatic credo myself—but the height of religious sensibility is here in Bach. I’m especially fond of vocal music and I’m especially fond of oratorios and Masses, which, for an old Jewish atheist like myself . . . Although a close friend and (exact) contemporary of mine, Jonathan Miller, another Jewish atheist, has just done a ravishing production of the St Matthew Passion. And perhaps even a Jewish atheist can be taken to the heights by something like this. I think I’ve loved Bach from the first. We used to have a piano teacher before the war and I remember, when I was five or six, I was asked, ‘What are your favourite things in the world?’ And I said, ‘Bach and smoked salmon.’

[laughter] You were a precocious lad, weren’t you?

Yes. And what with this—and Tasmanian smoked salmon—you know, sixty years later, I feel much the same.

I’d like to come a little closer to music and how you’ve been exploring the whole concept of, I think, music and the human mind a little bit later. But could we just, for a moment, deal with that dominant school of contemporary medicine which seems, or seemed—I don’t know whether it’s in the past now—to divorce body from mind and emotions from sickness? I believe that you repudiate that notion now. Is that right?

Well, it’s a notion which is forced on one perhaps at some stages in one’s training. When one does anatomy, one dissects a body—a lifeless body, a body devoid of its usual functions. And, to some extent, one has to learn one’s basic sciences in isolation. But then obviously they should all come together in the person of the patient.

Was it your exploration of migraine headaches that led you to this sort of thinking?

I think I probably felt this all the way through. There’s a much earlier experience I’ve never written about, but it haunts me. When I was a medical student I was asked to see an old chap who was an old tea planter from what was then called Ceylon. And he had uraemia; he was dying; he was delirious. And my boss said, ‘You know, go see him briefly. See what delirium is like. He’s just raving and makes no sense.’

But I spent hours and days with this man and, through his delirium, I started to see the shape of his life—people, places, scenes, passions, everything came out. And I had the strongest feeling of how a man’s experience and autobiography must be embodied in his nervous system and always there, even in the height of delirium or in a dementia or in anything else. And although it was a delirium, it was his delirium, it was his life. And this sense of the personal stamp of disease has always been with me since then.

Having a respect for that is one thing, but using that in the treatment of disease is interesting too?

Well, I think one has to. I mean, you mention migraine, which is never just a headache—it’s always much more. A migraine is a migraine—it’s a clear physiological event—but it’s set in the economy of a person’s life, of their physiology, of their emotions, of their relationships. You have people who have weekend migraines, or menstrual migraines, or migraines brought on by flickering lights. But you really have to get a biography of the person.

So you personalise the illness?

Well, they personalise the illness. The illness is set in a personal context.

But the treatment, or the treater—the physician—must personalise . . . ?

Oh, it has to be individual. You find that at every level. Take migraine drugs: those that work with one person won’t necessarily work with another.

Which is not so much because they’re biochemically different, is it?

Well, they might be. There may be different ways of curing a migraine.

In your work in neurology, I’m fascinated by many of the cases that you’ve written about. You’ve written that, early on, you thought of patients with neurological disorders in terms of the loss of self, that the self had somehow become lost along the way in the course of this trauma to their nervous system. You then came to a way of thinking that it is an adaptation on the part of the nervous system. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Yes, it’s sometimes said when people are ill, you know, they are not themselves or whatever. This is especially said with something like Alzheimer’s disease or dementia. But I think that a form of self is always there and, for example, it can sometimes be reached by, and stimulated by, music, even if language is no longer possible. One of the cases— well, I call it The Case of the Colour-Blind Painter but I wanted to say one of the cases which is most dear to me, because of course I knew the man so well—was an artist who from a brain injury suddenly lost all colour perception and, since colour had been a crucial vehicle for his art and his life, and the vehicle of his emotions and meaning, this was so devastating for him that at first he found himself in a sort of meaningless world and he felt like committing suicide. He felt he wasn’t there. He felt something essential in him had been knocked out. But then—although there was no neurological recovery, although he never recovered colour—the black-and-white world became alive for him again and recharged with meaning and feeling. And he was able to go back to his art. So this is adaptation. And it first looked like destruction.

I read that story just in the last couple of days. And you write with such empathy for the man, because he was an artist whose visual world was of intense, immense importance to him. When I started reading it, I thought, ‘Well, wouldn’t it be like just looking at a black-and-white movie? And black-and-white movies are actually quite pleasant to look at, from time to time.’

Very.

But in fact it was a three-dimensional black-and-white world, and grey world, in which he lived.

Yeah. And if certain parts of the brain are knocked out, not only can you not perceive colour or motion, or whatever it is, but you can’t imagine it.

And you can’t remember it. That was the thing—he couldn’t dream in it?

No.

He couldn’t remember what red looked like.

He couldn’t even have a migraine in colour (sometimes in a migraine you have coloured fringes). And also he had had a rare thing called synaesthesia—so that, when he heard music, this would be accompanied by colours—and that disappeared for him.

Yes, so he was deprived, wasn’t he? And yet somehow he managed to create, out of that deprivation, a new experience.

Well, I think this creative power is present in everybody at every level.

It’s what allows one to survive and to forge a world with what one has.

I jotted a question down as I was reading it: do you think the body evolves with a capacity to cope with calamity?

Absolutely. I think it has to. You know, otherwise a broken spark plug [laughs] or whatever would do us in. Organisms are very, very resilient. If one limb is knocked out . . . If a dog loses a limb, it will use the other limbs. Animals regenerate limbs. We are tough creatures in some ways. So extremely fragile in others.

So if the nervous system is interrupted, it finds other paths, you say?

It tends to, if it can. And perhaps also there may be some regrowth of the nervous system, or regeneration. People used to think there wasn’t, but now I think there may be.

Let’s hear some more music. You’ve chosen Mozart, The Magic Flute. Tell me why.

Well, The Magic Flute is so magical and so joyful and lighthearted. And at the same time so, so profound. I mean the Queen of the Night is sort of a terrifying figure. But it’s the sheer joy of creation which sings for me in this duet.

Mozart The Magic Flute: ‘Pa-Pa-Pa-Papagena! ’—Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau & Lisa Otto; Berlin Philharmonic / Karl Böhm

I’d like to discuss a couple of the cases that you have written about in your various books. One, Awakenings, is well known and the film has been made, so let’s leave that to one side and discuss some that perhaps people might not be so familiar with. I was fascinated by the painter who lost his colour sight. I was fascinated by the surgeon with Tourette’s syndrome. First of all, tell us what Tourette’s syndrome is.

Well, this is something one is born with, although it usually only shows itself at the age of four, or six or eight. There are sudden convulsive movements or tics, sometimes of a very elaborate sort. There are reachings, there are lunges, there are noises, there are vocalisations— sometimes obscenities, sometimes just other words burst out. There is an acceleration of thought and imagery in association. It’s an excited state.

Is it continuous during a day?

Well, this depends. I think the disposition is always there. Some things, like hunger and tension, may make it worse, but in some situations of concentration and performance, it completely disappears.

Very alarming for people who haven’t met it before, and who see it being expressed in someone in a restaurant or something?

Yes. I have a good friend, an artist in Toronto, who has this. He gets into fights almost, and the police arrest him, and he is continually misunderstood. Although in fact he’s rather like Papageno.

Is he?

Yes. And the sort of speed and impulse—his spontaneity, you know— which are delightful in a way, but can certainly be misinterpreted. Something like Tourette’s can cause a lot of suffering, stigma, isolation— people react to it. But I think it has another side, and sometimes this spontaneity and speed and energy and vitality can really transform a life. So much so that people with Tourette’s sometimes wish they could keep the good features and get rid of some of the others.

What about the surgeon—how on earth could a man be a surgeon and have Tourette’s?

Well, I wondered. When I first saw him at a meeting, he had quite extravagant movements. I mean one of his tics was . . . He was very agile, but suddenly he’d put his foot on top of someone’s head. And I wondered what sort of marginal existence this man had. And when he told me he was a surgeon, I said, ‘You’re joking! One move like this and you’d have the aorta in two!’ And he said, ‘Well no, it isn’t like that.

Come and visit me.’ I flew out and visited him. He works in a small town in western Canada, where he’s known to the whole community.

And sometimes, you know, if a general practitioner says, ‘I think you may need an operation, or a surgical opinion; I’d recommend Dr So-and-So,’ they will give the patient a little warning. They will say, ‘Well, he has some very strange sounds and movements, but don’t be alarmed.

He is a marvellous surgeon and human being. And when he operates there’s none of this.’

Now why is there none of this when he operates?

Well I scrubbed, you know, for a long operation with him myself and I saw this. And I almost want to think of it in musical terms. It was as if, with the complex operation and the many things to do, everything in him was focussed and orchestrated on what he had to do. There was a beautiful, simple stream of action. You see this with any sort of performance with Tourette’s, whether it’s a surgical performance, or a musical performance, or a sexual performance, or an athletic performance—and there are many, many good athletes with Tourette’s. But when the person is focussed the Tourette’s is there but, as one’s energies are cohered on the task it can make one superb.

Does that mean that, if this surgeon were having dinner with friends, he could actually control it himself spontaneously?

No, I think dinner with friends would be full of distractions and he would be tapping, he would be twirling his moustache, he would be touching a nearby light convulsively and there would be various verbal tics.

But you’d think that an operating theatre is full of distractions— people bustling around, its lights . . .?

He is not distracted. And incidentally I know a disc jockey in Iowa with very, very severe Tourette’s, and all sort of obscenities explode from him. But when he’s on the air live, it doesn’t happen, though someone had to take a big gamble [laughs] when he was put on the air for the first time.

My golly! A seven-second delay. Could your surgeon run a foot race and not have Tourette’s, do you think? I’m just wondering, if he were focussed on some other activity besides being a surgeon . . .?

Quite. Well, I didn’t see him running, but I know one patient of mine with Tourette’s who is a very good swimmer. He shows no ticcing when he’s in the even rhythm of swimming. In the moment of turning around, near the end of the pool, there may be a sort of sudden convulsion. He would have loved the pool I went to this morning—the big Bondi beach pool—because this is fifty metres or more long and you don’t have to turn very much.

Yeah. I suppose behind that question was: is it just being a surgeon that focusses this surgeon friend of yours? Or is it any focussed activity that he does—being a surgeon, swimming in a pool, whatever?

Well I also flew with him, and he’s fond of flying. But he told me he was the world’s only flying Tourette’s surgeon [laughs]. And I haven’t had any other bidders for the prize.

So he has a licence, has he?

He has a licence and he’s a very good aviator. He does tic a certain amount in the plane.

Do you know what that makes me think of? Ray Charles, the famous blind blues singer, who loves flying aircraft. He loves actually being the pilot and he says he can land an aircraft by the sound of the engines. Now [laughs], I don’t know whether he’s actually ever done that but, you know, it’s something that makes people say, ‘No, that’s impossible.’ But you never know, do you?

What about Anton’s syndrome—I’m fascinated by that. Can you describe that?

Yes. In Anton’s syndrome the visual parts of the brain have been knocked out, usually by a stroke. But you know we talked about the loss of self earlier; the person with Anton’s syndrome is blind, but they don’t know that they’re blind. And they may sort of blunder around, and bump into the furniture, but will find other explanations for this.

They think they can see?

They’re sure they can see.

Can they see something in their mind?

I think they probably can’t. It’s difficult to get an answer to this, but I suspect . . .

Your visual memory exists where the visual centres are in the brain?

Yes. As with the colour-blind artist, colour and imagination and memory were wiped out together. So I would think in the primary visual areas, in a sense the very idea of seeing may be wiped out. And yet the person will maintain that they can see. One has to be very tactful and delicate because too brutal a confrontation, I think, would really cause a panic.

But there are some very singular disconnection syndromes, as neurologists call them. Sometimes, for example, a stroke will knock out the left side of the body but the person will not know this. They will say they’re fine. You will say, ‘Give me your left hand,’ and they will give you their right hand. They may sometimes maintain that the left side has been lost or has been replaced. I remember I had one patient like this—a woman who had a stroke at breakfast and, when someone came in to collect the trays, she said, ‘Oh, by the way, there’s a hand on the tray. You might as well take that away as well.’ And people who are not neurotic or psychotic will sort of say the most extraordinary things in these body-image disturbances.

Amazing, isn’t it? It is amazing and it takes a bit of time to conceptualise all of that. Could we listen to some music now which is very different from what we’ve heard. We’ve heard the Papageno, which is precise and tight. This is different entirely. Tell me what it is.

It’s a favourite Debussy prelude of mine. We had an old Bechstein at home and I think a Bechstein is ideally suited for Debussy. And it’s slow and pensive and submerged. I’m a watery sort of person—I’ve just come back from scuba diving—and this is about a submerged cathedral.

Debussy Preludes Book I: La Cathédrale Engloutie— Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, piano

I remember being very moved by your book A Leg to Stand On, which recounted your experience of going from being a physician, or being a doctor, to being a patient. You had a terrible accident, didn’t you? And you tore a tendon in your leg?

Yes, I was on a mountain in Norway and blundering around. And I’d seen a notice low down saying ‘Beware of the bull’ and I had never heard of a bull on a mountain. So I thought this was a joke although there was a little hieroglyph of a man being tossed by a bull. But it wasn’t in my mind as I plodded up. I somehow wondered if there was a bull, but in fact, when I came round a boulder, out came a snout. With the bull, which was large.

Who got the bigger fright—you or the bull?

I don’t know. I behaved very calmly and I just gently sort of turned round, but then I panicked. Which is the most dangerous thing in the world. And I started to run down this steep, narrow, icy trail. And I heard a sort of thudding and panting, and didn’t know whether it was the bull or myself. And I fell off a cliff. And I tore the quadriceps, which is the main muscle of the thigh—straight off, along with its nerve supply.

And I didn’t think I would make it, because no one knew where I was. And I had an umbrella with me [laughing], because you know I often carry an umbrella—it was a good walking stick. So I tore my anorak in two and, with the top of the umbrella, spliced the leg—splinted the leg as well as I could. And I was found and saved and taken to hospital and operated on, and I thought that everything was going to be straightforward. And it was a great surprise and shock to me when I found that the leg was not only virtually paralysed, and that I couldn’t feel it, but that it didn’t feel like mine. You know, I mentioned earlier the woman who woke up and said, ‘There’s a hand on the breakfast tray,’ and, although I didn’t think it was anyone else’s leg, it was very much a ‘thing’ attached to me—it was sort of alien. I found this very difficult to communicate. You know that passage about listening to the patient, you know?

You mean the doctors didn’t listen to you particularly?

Well, he sort of said to me, ‘Oh, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He said, ‘You know we connected the tendon. The nerves will regenerate. That’s all there is to it.’ And I said, ‘I can’t feel the bloody thing. It’s like a leg of stone. Or nothing.’

Did he give you credit for being a doctor yourself, and having some understanding of the medical factors? I mean, did you feel he adopted a superior attitude to you in some ways?

Ummm I’m not sure. I think the very fact that I answered back, in a way, may have been seen as threatening. But it may be that he genuinely had not heard—this had not been communicated. And later, you know, in the hospital and over the years I’ve spoken to many other patients who’ve had this syndrome and all of them have had difficulty communicating it. I mean, even if well, for example, one has a spinal anaesthetic—and jokingly, at the end of the book I suggest [laughs] the book be read under spinal anaesthesia—a real spinal, not just an epidural, but one which more or less knocks the spinal cord out, you’ll feel as if you terminate here in the middle, and that what lies below is not you and not anything. But it’s very difficult to communicate.

So how did it change you as a doctor, that experience?

It made me feel that it was crucial to be listened to, and attended to, and that, even if a doctor had said, ‘I’ve never heard of it, but this is interesting and curious,’ and, you know, ‘Don’t worry’, that would have been something. But the not-being-listened-to and the not-comprehending-what-was-going-on was almost as bad as the condition. I mean, I’ve subtitled my book on migraine Understanding Migraine. You know, we can’t always cure or help, but to have an idea of what’s going on is important. Another point is that saying, ‘Sacks, you’re unique. I’ve never heard of this before,’ isn’t helpful. One is not unique—we’re all built very much the same—and to know that others have the condition and that it’s a shared experience makes it easier to deal with.

You come from a family of doctors—your parents were doctors.

Aha.

Did you learn a style of doctoring from either of them?

I think very much so. I used to love . . . My father was a GP in London— as my brother now is a GP in Sydney here—and I loved going on house calls with him.

I think he went on house calls till he was ninety? Is that right?

Yes, past ninety.

And he believed in the value of a house call?

Oh yes. He felt one had to see the whole person—their context, their home—and, you know, that no office visit, or visit to the surgery, could match this. My mother was a surgeon, but she also entered very fully into her patients’ lives and she was actually a marvellous storyteller.

And I think some of my medical story-telling probably comes from my mother. She would spin stories to the milkman and the gardener for hours, and basically she used the same language whether it was to her students, her patients, her colleagues. She didn’t, as it were, have a medical language as distinct from other languages. And nor have I.

Yes, exactly. That’s why your books are so easy to read and so good to read. But I wonder whether, generally speaking, a good storyteller is a good listener—therefore, able to appreciate a story, and a story told by a patient: ‘This is what I feel, Doctor. You know, I’m feeling this is my story.’

Oh, absolutely. You have to listen to the patient’s story, get it, elicit it. You have to like stories. You have to connect it in your mind with other stories, and then sort of put it all together.

Let’s hear . . . This is interesting. Who’s Tobias Picker? I think he’s a friend of yours, is he?

Well, I heard his music long before I met him. He’s a youngish American composer who I think is extraordinarily imaginative. And rising. He had a wonderful opera called Emmeline, which had its premiere in Santa Fe last year. And he’s written a great deal of instrumental music. But I think some of his favourite music is recitatives—poems or prose pieces he loves, where there is a recitation and music. After I had come back from Micronesia for the first time, and was dreaming of islands, a friend of his gave me a set of pieces called Encantadas. These were the beautiful pieces which Herman Melville wrote after visiting the Galapagos, and they are recited by Gielgud and were set to music by Picker.

Tobias Picker The Encantadas, IV Diversity: ‘As I