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I'd forgotten about the lump of chalk beneath the bed. I'd pushed the Dyson (vacuum cleaner) extension under the duvet and heard a hailstoney rattling in the metal tube, saw white grit spinning in the see through drum. I knelt and peered into the limbo of suitcases and fluff and there it was a large chunk of chalk. A Feng Shui lady had told me that chalk under the bed was good for arthritis. Why or how she didn't say. I had some vague notion of chalk absorbing dampness which seemed potentially beneficial, so I'd picked it up at the foot of the cliffs at Newhaven and brought it home. It was quite heavy and I'd been careful about carrying it to the car, visualising the diagram entitled 'Uplifting heavy things' in one of my books. Head high, deep breathing, that kind of thing.

Newhaven was where I'd collected the crystal. There's a stratum of them at the top of the cliffs embedded in blue-grey clay. A psychic I call the White Witch had told me that crystals were good for arthritis. I brought some home, washed them as instructed, and asked them to draw the pain out of my body. After our little chat I lie face down and put them on my lower spine and my left shoulder and visualise my aches drawn into their chunky translucent facets like a sort of transparent smoke. Then I wash them again and visualise the aches flowing down the plughole and away to the sea, where there is space and home for human pain, along with a considerable tonnage of oil, plastic and faecal matter.

My pendulum comes from Lulworth Cove. I was walking along the beach, stepping over kelp stalks and clumps of wrack, when something made me look down and I picked up a small piece of sea-smothered wood about the size of my thumb. This is a gift I thought. Thank you. Back home I drilled a small hole the top, snipped off a length of brown thread, squeezed a blob of superglue into the hole, pushed the thread in and capped it with a wedge of matchstick. I think of it as a power pendulum, drawing power from the soil then drifting on the tides and currents of the sea, absorbing the secrets of two great elements.

I stand in the produce section of supermarkets at off-peak hours, furtively dowsing vegetables and fruit. I dowse what I should have for breakfast, how often I should swim at the Leisure Centre. I guess I should be grateful to my osteo-arthritis for the array of exotic learning experiences it's introduced me to. I've been Rolfed, manipulated by osteopaths, tweaked by Bowen therapists and cracked by chiropractics. One of the latter group spent quite a lot of time digging an elbow with full force into the deep muscle on the side of my hip, thrusting at what he called an epicentre, making me cry out with the pain. (This must be good! No pain no gain!) Eventually he told me I should consider seeing a psychic healer. The Feldenkrais technique seems promising. I've been seeing a student who works on me in exchange for bags of organic oats. The Alexander technique is on the dwindling list of things I haven't tried. And cranio-sacral therapy. Currently I'm in a 'heal yourself without an expert' phase. Its part of the contemporary paradigm, and it's cheaper.

On the whole I think it's fair to say that none of the above made any appreciable difference. Bowen therapy is in some ways the best - it doesn't hurt, it's very simple, and there have been several occasions when the Bowen therapist relieved me of severe spasm.

Yes, it's been a learning experience, having osteo-arthritis. How else would I have known of the existence of tablets containing extracts of green-lipped mussel shells, which I tried for a couple of months until a homeopath said, "They won't do you any good." Or of the Gerson coffee enema, recommended by a local trader called Organic Bob, a process I failed to accomplish satisfactorily. Whimpering on the toilet floor, a rubbery umbilical-like tube writhing between my bony knees. Or of the juniper remedy, currants soaked in gin, handfuls chewed with a drifting buzz in the cerebellum. Or of the weekly arthritis bath routine, very hot water with a melted dollop of Epsom salts, sea-salt and iodine, twenty minutes of that, then jump into bed wrapped in towels, lie there sweating until sleep evokes dreams of infernos. There's the Hungarian snake venom cream rub that in after a bath and you feel like your skin's been scorched. There's the glucosamine ointment from an American company called 'Born Again', the K-compound charcoal tablets, the capsules of urine-coloured fish-oil, the ginger and cayenne poultice, the Niagara massage pad, the copper bracelet, the hot-water bottle/ice-pack routine, the blend of herbal tinctures that tastes like the liquid oozing from zoo cages.

The thing about osteo-arthritis is there's no single recognised way of dealing with it. And it's quite prevalent. Also, as is the case with rheumatoid arthritis, there seems to be a wide range of causes AND a wide range of sub types. One book I read suggested there were over 400 different categories of arthritis. The NHS (National Health Service) line seems to be that if you have a chronic illness there's little or nothing doctors can do for you. If I go to see a medical doctor with my condition he or she will invariably prescribe a NSAID (Non steroidal anti-inflammatory drug) like Ibuprofen. Which, according to some of my research, actually worsens the situation since it inhibits the growth of new cartilage, quite apart from its range of potential unpleasant side-effects. This combination of factors throws the whole field wide open. I've found that doctors, homeopaths, body workers like osteopaths and chiropractors, herbalists, nutritionists, acupuncturists etc are rarely familiar with healing methods outside their particular area of expertise. So someone suffering from arthritis or rheumatism, if not happy with the NHS response, is confronted by an enormous range of options and little guidance as to how to choose among them.

I dream of a health or healing centre where the different disciplines or therapies are represented, and where there is a genuine spirit of working together in the interests of the patient, and where the people who work there all know at least a little about how their colleagues work. New patients are examined when they enter, a full profile is completed which is then examined, discussed and diagnosed by a number of healers and a decision is made, with the patient present and actively participating about what seems to be the most appropriate form or forms of healing. If they're in Subud, people could even test about it.

Meanwhile, people like me are obliged to do the rounds. I've been exploring what I call the meta-physiological area. Trying to approach my condition on a deeper level.

An example of this is positive thinking. I was immersed in an Epsom bath a few months ago reading a book called 'Curing Arthritis' by Margaret Hill. At the end she quotes an old saying "Whatever the mind of man can perceive and believe, it can achieve." I felt a great surge of optimism leap through my body. "I'm gonna beat this bastard." I yelled, leaping out of the bath into a new life. Alas, by the time I reached the bath mat my back was in severe spasm, and I was immobilised for 3 days. There's a moral in there somewhere.

Still on the meta-physioiogical theme, an astrologer told me I had Chiron in the first house. Chiron's the wound she said. The first house is the self. So my wound and apparently we all have them in some aspect of our beings is in my relationship with myself. People with this configuration, I learned, have tendencies towards martyrdom, or victimhood. Oh yes I thought that rings a bell. Maybe there's a bit of Jesus in us all. The cross, if not the redemption. Just because you have what seems to be a chronic and incurable disease that has taken over your lower back and is currently colonising your left shoulder and arm, you have no right to anoint yourself as victim. FIGHT IT! Watch what you eat, practice positive visualisations. ('You're a silver birch' I tell my backbone. 'You're supple and strong and you lean with the wind like a dancer'), stay active, do your exercises.

UNDERSTAND IT! In line with this last imprecation I did some testing a while back. 'Is it God's wil1l that I experience this pain?' Huge force pressing me to the ground. Me, moved to push up against it with a tremendous effort. Answer - unanimous among the three of us: 'Yes' Ancestors? Material forces? If it's God's Will am I supposed to be grateful? Thank you brothers. Hugs.

An American medical intuitive named Caroline Myss says that lower back pain is associated with the second chakra, which has to do with work and success and a feeling that the universe is cooperating with you (I find it hard to conceive the possibility that English people actually HAVE chakras.) Frankly the universe hasn't been terribly helpful of late. On the work front, on the money front, on the success front, on, well, almost any front, come to think of it. So perhaps if start earning more than about £400 a year, and start getting lots and lots of positive feedback from the cosmos or at least from my family and friends, my body will feel better.

Sometimes I look back ruefully at all the money I've paid out, at all the time I've spent on treatment couches of various designs waiting for another pair of hands to finally crack the Gordian knot, at all the pills, tinctures, remedies, supplements, creams, bath additives, oils, the therapies or remedies that looked like cures and weren't. As the Grateful Dead used to sing: 'What a long strange trip it's been'. I think of my mother, who died of motor neuron disease, incapable at the end of almost any movement at all, and wonder if immobilisation is an imprint in my genes, potent and inescapable. No Mutahar don't get into that. I found this passage in a book by Meir Schneider, a healer who cured himself of almost total blindness. I pinned it to the wall in my studio:

"No matter how badly off you may be, or handicapped, there is a strong power within you which can always heal you or at least make your situation better. No matter how isolated you feel, your higher self is always there to be your best friend. Knowing this, you need not feel isolated, fearful or helpless. Our power of healing exists in every muscle of our bodies, in every brain cell, every nerve fibre, every blood vessel. Finding this power is like opening a closet and locating what you have been looking for everywhere. It was there all the time, but you just didn't see it. We search everywhere for cures to our diseases, not realising that there is a force within us which has an infinite capacity to heal the body. This capacity is far more powerful than any disease. Disease exists only when we overlook this healing power."

Guess I'll keep looking for that closet.

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