You know him. This supposed gentleman in tails, standing somewhere deep inside the brain with a silver baton, commanding everything: Now feel. Now remember. Now concentrate. Now do try to stumble with a little more dignity. A touching notion. Sadly, about as wrong as the claim that one can understand a sonata merely by monitoring the second violin.

It was a case of insulin resistance. A distressingly unwieldy term for a rather impertinent bit of behaviour: insulin knocks politely at the cell’s door and says, “Would you be so kind as to let the sugar in?” and the cell replies with aristocratic lethargy, “Regrettably, not today.” 🚪🍬

It concerned memories. More precisely: memories that were no longer being stored properly. No dramatic disappearance, no grand finale, rather a quiet crumbling away. The sort of dismally unobtrusive thing biology is especially fond of arranging.

London wore a cloak of the finest drizzle, one of those days when the city decides not to vulgarise its soul with sunshine. I sat in my rooms on Baker Street, far from the pedestrian world of footprints and cigarette ash, studying the elegant folds of a human brain. A glass model, naturally. The original was precisely where it belonged: inside my s...

On the cover it read: “Brain fog after infection – MRI unremarkable.” Ah. The classic. When the MRI shows nothing, people start using their imagination against the patient. I opened the file.

On my desk lies a crime of subtle almost poetic malice. A crime not committed in alleyways, but in the hidden subway tunnels of the brain. I call it: The Case of the Swollen Waterworks.