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In the opening scenes of Evelyn Waugh's novel Scoop, William Boot, nature correspondent of the daily Beast, famous for such lines as ‘Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole …’, is summoned from his remote country seat to the metropolis. The newspaper's proprietor, Lord Copper, has been tricked by the brilliantly scheming Mrs Algernon Stitch into appointing Boot war correspondent to the Civil War in the remote country of Ishmaelia. Copper brooks no refusal; every time Boot protests that his speciality is nature, not war, he doubles his salary. Boot goes and eventually returns a hero having, through sheer naïvety and luck, got the story which eluded the sophisticated Fleet Street journalists. But he was the wrong Boot all along. Mrs Stitch's protégé was Courtney Boot, the fashionable novelist.
Memories of this plot came to mind when I read, with excitement and some anxiety, Joan Raphael-Leff's invitation to give this third British Journal of Psychotherapy annual lecture. Had they got the wrong person? What could a rural refugee, only partially assimilated into the mainstream of psychotherapy, have to offer that would be relevant or interesting? But then, like Waugh's readers, I abandoned myself to the oedipal reverie of the changeling, the naïve younger brother who with the help of the good fairy outflanks the corrupt patriarchal order. Tempering this phantasy with reality, I began to think that perhaps there was something to be said for a view from the periphery, a rural worm's-eye view of urban psychotherapy. I reminded myself that Waugh had also made a move from London to the West Country, that Scoop marks the transition from the witty chronicler of the gay young things of the thirties to the more serious concerns of his later novels; that psychotherapy might need, if not a barefoot view, at least a gum-Boot as well as a Gucci.
To continue in this home-spun vein, I sometimes at the start of a psychotherapy session picture it as a t