A Canadian colleague on the Heart of the Dragon project, Douglas, told me in 1984 about two American friends of his, a married couple, trying to cut down on their expenses. The husband went through the bills and said to the wife, “You’ll have to drop the number of visits to the shrink from three times a month to twice a month.”
A few years later, an American student doing an MA at SOAS came to my evening classes. One day, she told me that the librarians had not been particularly polite to her, which she put down to their not liking Americans much. After yet another dosage of such treatment, she flipped and said, “You know what the trouble with you Brits is?! You don’t go to the shrink often enough!”
I had to exercise great self-control and not laugh over the “[not] often enough” — the Brits don't go to the shrink at all.
(New York / London, 1980s)
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