I decided to allow the first Anecdote to sink in, and to regale you with the self hypnosis experiments I carried out on myself.

The first one, of course, was the Smoking Cessation recording. You will recall that I hypnotised the current editor of the U.T.,S. student newspaper Newswit, and because the tape fouled up I recorded another one. Just by listening (for quality control – didn’t want to stuff up and find unflattering references to me on the front page) I just stopped smoking. No problem. It was as if cigarettes were ablated from my mind. I remember someone saying as we were watching a film: It must be so difficult. I realised I had been watching a cigarette ad (this was 40 years ago) and wasn’t aware. Even other people’s smoke didn’t bother me. Well, it did, but not to entice me to smoke: I became a pain in the arse around smokers. Glaring, complaining, I could even summon a nasty cough as I explained I was highly allergic to cigarette smoke.

So when I put on weight, which often occurs after giving up cigarettes, I thought: Let’s see what happens. I wrote a script: I should say at this point that the two hypnosis scripts that have had the most thought and time and effort expended on them are the smoking and the overeating scripts. The smoking script is the result of several sessions with post-graduate students at Macquarie University supervised by Professor A. Gordon Hammer and Dr. James Jupp. The overeating script has been gone over by various experts with a fine tooth comb. So I recorded my script and listened to it according to my instructions. And every time I put on a bit of pud I went back to it. And every time it worked. (More next time)