The Dog Who Came In From The Cold

Chapter 32: A Homeopathic Joke

Dee had discovered from experience that opening the Pimlico Vitamin and Supplement Agency on a Sunday brought particularly good results. She had made this lucrative discovery a couple of years earlier when she had gone into the shop on a rather dreary Sunday to do a stocktaking and had inadvertently turned the Closed sign to Open. This had resulted in a stream of customers, most of whom spent considerably more than the average. The average spend of her customers on weekdays was £6.38; on that Sunday it reached £18.76. A subsequent trial Sunday opening had resulted in an even higher spend of £23.43. That clinched matters, and from then on the Vitamin and Supplement Agency opened its doors at eleven on a Sunday morning and remained open until five in the afternoon.

She had tried to work out why Sunday should be so successful. It was not the case for every business – a nearby commercial neighbour who ran a small card shop sold practically nothing on a Sunday, and spent her Sundays tackling the more difficult weekend crosswords. Another trader at the end of the street, a dress shop for thirty-somethings, did a certain amount of business round about eleven in the morning, only to have these purchases almost invariably returned by five o’clock the same afternoon. The owner was puzzled, until the realisation dawned: her customers were buying the dresses purely in order to wear them to Sunday brunches and lunches at friends’ houses before returning them for specious reasons later in the afternoon. It was a radical solution to the complaint of having nothing to wear, or at least nothing that one’s friends had not seen several times before. Fashion for free, as one offender so honestly put it; one can, after all, be honest about dishonesty.

“We have become a thoroughly unscrupulous nation,” said the shopkeeper to Dee one day.

“Have we?” asked Dee.

“Oh yes. There’s been a survey, you know. And they – the scientists or whatever – found that fewer than half the men asked about this phenomenon of pretending to buy a dress thought that it was dishonest.”

“And women?” asked Dee.

“I remember the figure exactly. Eighty-eight-point-five per cent thought it was dishonest.”

“Well, there you are,” said Dee. “It shows that we aren’t all bad.”

The other woman disagreed. “Not at all. The fact that eighty-eight-point-five per cent of women thought it was a dishonest thing to do wouldn’t necessarily stop them doing it. They all do it – or most of them – even if they think it’s dishonest. They just don’t care.”

Dee sighed. She would never do it herself, but she suspected that the shopkeeper was right, most people now would do this sort of thing without hesitation. Look at the way people treat insurance companies, she thought; look at the way they think nothing of claiming for things that they haven’t lost. Fiddler nation, she thought.

It was all very interesting, if depressing, but it did not address the issue of why Sunday should be such a good day for selling vitamins. The answer, she suspected, had to do with what some people got up to on Saturdays. If people behaved in a virtuous way on a Sunday – and Dee was firm in her conviction that the buying and taking of vitamins was an entirely virtuous activity –it was entirely possible that they were compensating for having behaved in a vicious way on the Saturday night. And to a large extent, people did. They drank too much; they ate to excess; they stayed up too late. With the result that on Sunday, if they walked past a vitamin shop, their consciences pricked them like a thorn.

Now, sitting at the till of her shop, reading the latest copy of Anti-oxidant News, she kept half an eye on a couple of customers huddled at the back of the shop in the flower remedies section. In general, her customers did not steal; on Sundays at least, they were clean-living types, with consciences as clear as their lower intestines (or that was the case for those who underwent regular colonic irrigation, anyway). No, she need not worry too much about shoplifting.

But there was something that did worry her. She was reading a report in Anti-oxidant News to the effect that a new study purported to show that homeopathic remedies achieved no better results than placebos. This worried Dee. Principally, she doubted it were true; everything in her rebelled against the thought that mere evidence-based medicine should seek to debunk an entire section of her shop, for that, indeed, was what she had, half a wall of homeopathic remedies, designed to deal with a wide range of those ills to which the mortal flesh was heir.

She read on. “The authors of this so-called study” – that was fighting talk, thought Dee, with approval – “argue that the very small dilutions of the active ingredient cannot possibly have an effect on the human body. They forget succussing, of course. So many critics of homeopathy forget about succussing.”

“Exactly,” muttered Dee. “Succussing changes everything.”

“There is ample proof,” continued the article, “that the act of striking the container of the dilution ten times or more on a firm surface makes all the difference to the molecular properties of the water. So why do these allegedly dispassionate scientists ignore something as significant as that?”

Why indeed, thought Dee. Because they don’t want to find out the truth? Because they don’t want homeopathy to work? Talk about homeophobia!

Succussing: it was a most peculiar thing, but she was convinced of its efficacy. Only last night, a friend had given her a gin and tonic as a treat, and Dee had found herself succussing the glass against the arm of her chair. The drink had been delicious, and she was sure that it had been much more potent as a result of the succussing. Perhaps that was why James Bond called for his martini to be shaken, not stirred. It was for homeopathic reasons.

She was reflecting on the so-called study, her outrage growing, when she saw a tall man in his early thirties enter the shop. Many of her customers she already knew, but not this one; she was sure she would have noticed him before now.

He came to the cash desk. “You telephoned me,” he said. “Richard Eadeston.”

She looked at him blankly. “Did I?” And then she remembered. Of course she had. This was Richard Eadeston, the man who described himself as a venture capitalist. She looked at him with renewed interest. So this was what a venture capitalist looked like. Rather dishy. An adventure capitalist, perhaps!

“Can I make you a cup of tea?” she offered. “Peppermint? Ginger? Mixed fruit?”

“I rather like peppermint,” he said. “It’s so refreshing. Thank you.”

“10x dilution?” said Dee, and then laughed. “Just a little homeopathic joke. Nothing serious.”