I got the all-clear from Dr Theophilus Mary O’Leary, the consultant in Cork who conducted my recent NCT exam. After giving me a complete once-over, he concluded that all I need do to sustain my rude good health is take more exercise and drink less tea.

I don’t know what I’ll tell my cousins Kit and Bee who paid for the consultation as a present. All I can say is I’d be fairly upset if I had shelled out a few hundred smackaroonies for a piece of advice that Lily Mac in the post office could give me for nothing.

Come to think of it, isn’t it amazing the amount of advice you can get for nothing? The world is full of self-appointed experts who have achieved their extraordinary level of knowledge while successfully avoiding the exacting demands of the research laboratory and the dusty surrounds of the library. These experts are invariably blessed with a nose for solutions to the world’s most intractable problems and can deliver diagnoses and life-changing remedies based on the tiniest morsels of information. For every corn, bunion and backache, there are a thousand cures, a million remedies and countless voices only too ready to prescribe.

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How many times were you told that bird droppings give you warts but, on the other hand, that bird droppings are the best cure for warts? Half-baked notions masquerading as fact are the curse of anyone whose illness or ailments are public knowledge. I have stood in the queue in the supermarket and heard quack solutions being trotted out for the most serious of problems. I’ve even been in the chemist shop and heard all kinds of witch doctory being prescribed within earshot of the chemist. These experts have no tact and less shame as they stand there and encourage people to ignore the doctor’s prescription they have in their hand and stay away from dispensing chemists.

I remember one day being in the queue behind Minnie Gleeson of Cossatrasna at a certain pharmacy in Clonmel. Poor Minnie’s husband, Lar, is always sickly and, at this particular time, was suffering from the shingles. As if Minnie hadn’t enough problems, she had the Lugger Hanley standing beside her dispensing free advice.

“Don’t bother with creams and rubs, Minnie,” says he, “there’s only one cure for the shingles. Take every stitch of clothes off him and make him stand in a barrel of rainwater for 20 minutes.”

The Lugger’s cure was a surefire recipe for adding pneumonia and hypothermia to Lar’s list of ailments.

When the Lugger himself got to the top of the queue, I couldn’t help but eavesdrop on his conversation with the chemist. From what I could gather, he had a dose of the trots and needed something to add substance to his movements. Strange, the man had a cure for shingles but had no remedy for a common dose of the scutters.

In the same vein, the continued absence of Maurice has the leading academics at the university of the high stool expostulating at an extraordinary rate about his ailments.

Publican Tom Walshe, the dean of the faculty, tells me that when the assembled experts turn their attention to Maurice, it’s like listening to a panel of know-alls on a 24-hour news station talking in circles about a disaster that hasn’t yet happened.

Most of the commentators have concluded that Maurice is suffering from “the nerves” – a diagnosis that wouldn’t be a thousand miles off the mark. However, it’s the remedies for this particular complaint that I find both amusing and infuriating. These vary from ultra religious cures to the kind of solutions favoured by the dip-him-in-a-barrel-of-rainwater school of medicine.

Madge McInerney rang me during the week to tell me she was praying for Maurice and offered to introduce us to a man who is in possession of a thread from one of Padre Pio’s mittens, a relic with the power to lift depression when rubbed three times from left to right across the sufferer’s eyebrows. God help us.

Even more bizarre is a rumour that blames Maurice’s problems on his love life, or the absence thereof.

A certain woman came to me after hearing “for a fact” that “poor auld Maurice” made a proposal of marriage to Superquinn that was “cruelly rebuffed” and he was gone off to the wilderness to heal his broken heart. That’s a plot worthy of an opera score.

The same women suggested that he avail of the services of a matchmaker in Lisdoonvarna, who not only patches up failed relationships, but has a recipe for a coaxiorum that can stiffen the resolve of a man of Maurice’s years.

The fertility of the Irish imagination is clearly in need of no such coaxiorum. CL