Brain Epitaph

A man's back goes at 07:20, sitting on the edge of the bed, with one sock on. Nothing was lifted that morning. He is holding the other sock and he has stopped moving too. He is not deciding whether to call out. He is deciding what to call it.

A wardrobe would be safer. A wardrobe stays where you put it.

By breakfast it was a wardrobe, and by the weekend it was Sunday league rugby. Nobody involved thinks of this as lying. They think of it as rounding.

Clinics have started writing the load down. The intake sheet has a field marked "weight involved, in kilograms". Most men put a number in it. The clinic writes a second number underneath, and it gets that number from the man's wife, in the corridor, while he is still on the table. The two are never close.

The sheet also asks what the man was doing. Dressing comes first. Sex comes second, and it does not appear under that name. The form calls it "unplanned domestic movement", which it defines as movement that was, in fact, planned, by at least one of the two people present. Men tick it without reading it. The women read it twice.

There is a field for witnesses, and almost every man writes none. The witness is four metres away at the time, standing in the corridor, giving the clinic the second number. She has never once asked to be added. She corrects the weight.

The form offers pictures for the men who cannot put it into words. They are the pictures from the lifting poster on the wall of every warehouse: knees bent, back straight, a box held close to the chest. The clinic asks men to point at the one nearest to what they were doing. There is no nearest one. Most point at the box.

There is also a test, in which a trained adult watches another adult put on a sock and awards it a score out of five. Men in their fifties do badly. The clinic has stopped reading the result out, because of what happens in the car afterwards.

"A wardrobe would be safer," said Dr. Anneke Ruis, who has read these forms for most of her working life and can now tell from the handwriting alone which ones will say furniture. "A wardrobe stays where you put it."

Insurers have noticed. Claims for wardrobes are rising in homes where nothing has been moved for years. An insurer now asks for a photograph of the wardrobe, taken from the front, with a person standing beside it for scale, and dated. Most claims stop there. The rest arrive with a photograph of a wardrobe.

The clinic keeps every version of the cause. In March a man reported a wardrobe, and in August, same injury, same man, it was a wardrobe and a stair. Neither the wardrobe nor the stair exists. The back does.

Men have not accepted the findings. Their objection is that the test was done in the morning, before anything had warmed up, and in front of a woman holding a clipboard. They would like to be measured on a good day. None of them can name the last one.

The health service says the field is not a judgement, only a way of making sure the load is known. The load is known. It is a woman. The form wants her in kilograms. It lists her under equipment.

At press time an insurer had booked the space beside our Sunday league rugby results. Nobody has ever sent us a result. We print them anyway.