As I am a crackpot cat, I have to take medication, and spend lots of time getting on and off things (not things like trains, though I do like trains; drugs, I mean). I’m thinking about adding a new ingredient to my pharmaceutical cocktail – I wonder what that might be called? Manic Mule? Bats on the Beach? Starting taking new medication is usually a bit dreadful, but nothing like as monstrous as getting off it. Here’s something I wrote last year, when I was stopping taking a certain fiendish drug, and the very expensive Parisian psychologist forgot to tell me there would be side effects, or symptômes de manque, ‘symptoms of missing’ :

It’s 3am and I can’t sleep because my sinuses are aching from crying and I keep thinking crazy things. So I looked up citalopram – the drug I’m trying to stop taking – on Google, in English. As I live in France, Google sometimes automatically translates web pages. It’s very thorough. So here are a few of the effects that this drug may have :

it may cause convulsions in depressed Islamic scholars
it often works as an anti-depressant for hunters and priests
it may mean amputation for Dutch adventurers
it may cause delays in intestinal worms in Mediterranean people

…good news for hunters and priests, but I’d be worried if I were a Dutch adventurer

it may give you a knowledge of kings
it may work for Anyone!
it may cause Mexicans only to imagine healing
it may cause the suicide bull to appear in France
it may cause village communities with ruddy complexions to need help
it may cause billion-dollar-armour-plated-like skin deformation
it may cause primitive nomads to reach Europe

…wouldn’t like to meet the suicide bull in some midnight Paris backstreet, must keep a look out

it may cause a psychiatric November

I quite like that one…

people taking it may get a citalopram withdrawal pet

Absolutely! Everyone trying to come off citalopram should get a citalopram withdrawal pet! I’ll think about that and maybe I’ll get to sleep. I have my citalopram withdrawal pet here on the bed beside me. She’s snoring and she has her paw tucked under her chin.

I recently tried to find this web page again. It is nowhere at all. But it was there! I didn’t imagine the suicide bull! It wasn’t a product of my mangled mind.