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My aunt bought him for £25 from an East Kilbride family whose cat had mated with a stray. She knew I was looking for a cat and gave him to me as a housewarming gift. I named him Marlowe, for either the investigator or the playwright, I can never remember which. When I first brought him home he was eight weeks old and had a bad case of fleas, so I took him to the vet. She gave him a spot-on flea treatment and sounded him with a stethoscope.

“I can hear a little squeak on his heart,” she said. “It’s not at all uncommon and probably won’t come to anything, but if his abdomen ever swells and he starts coughing bring him back here straight away.”

I never had pets growing up. My brother is allergic to everything with fur aside from certain breeds of rabbit, and my dad always insisted that if we got a dog he’d end up being left to walk it. So here I was at the age of 30, having my first experience as a cat owner.

At first I thought I’d got in over my head. Marlowe had an endless energy and enthusiasm and could never be tired out with kitten toys. By the end of the first month I was just about exhausted. Then the family from East Kilbride emailed again and after another car journey, another £25 and another trip to the vet I brought home Marlowe’s sister Millie.

Getting a second cat swiftly became the best idea I’d ever had. They formed an instant double-act. He was Nichols to her May, Morecambe to her Wise, Huey Lewis to her News.

Visitors always made a fuss over Marlowe, but my friend Nyree was the first to say, “Stu, your cat has one white and one ginger ball.” And she was right. Two Australian houseguests were equally taken with his polychrome crown jewels and talked about them on Twitter. News of Marlowe’s stylish attributes spread far and wide across the internet. After he was eventually neutered a woman who never even met him drew an ‘in memoriam’ picture of his testicles.

As he came to be full-grown Marlowe became a bit more timid around strangers. He also put on some weight. He would walk across to people and plop down on his side, looking for a tummy rub.

On Thursday night when I put food in his bowl he was a little slow in coming. On Friday morning he didn’t come at all. He stayed sat in the living room, looking like he had once before when he ate something he shouldn’t have. I waited for him to throw it up and feel better. That didn’t happen. By evening he was still not eating and not moving around, and he looked as though he was panting. I phoned the out-of-hours vet and they gave me an appointment for 11 p.m.

At around 10 o’clock he followed me into the kitchen and lay at my feet. He was now struggling to catch his breath. When I put him in the cat carrier and drove him to the vet’s surgery he miaowed all the way. He made such a noise that I thought he must not really be all that bad.

They said there was fluid in Marlowe’s lungs. They put him on oxygen and said that they would keep him overnight at the surgery and try to stabilise him. At first the emergency vet told me that he hoped it was only asthma and could be easily treated. But when I told him what the other vet had said at the very beginning, about the noise on Marlowe’s heart, his manner changed. That was the moment when I started to believe I might not get my cat back.

I went home and slept for a couple of hours. The vet phoned at 6 a.m. Marlowe died in the early hours of Saturday, the second of March. He was one year and three days old.

After the vet had hung up I sat in bed for a while and thought about all the summer days when Marlowe won’t get to play with his sister and sleep in the sun. He was the first cat I ever had and the first one I ever lost. I wish I could have been there at the end to comfort him and to apologise. I’m sorry, pal. I gave you all the love I could. I just wish it had been enough.

Batman: The Killing Joke by writer Alan Moore and artist Brian Bolland

Listen very closely, because I’m about to tell the world how to write a great Batman comic. And I’m also going to explain why The Killing Joke is not a great Batman comic.

The Killing Joke has had a disproportionate effect on my life. It’s the story that made me a comics fan (as opposed to a Spider-Man fan, which is what I was before). I read it when I was, I think, about ten, because my brother had a copy. It’s probably the single comic that has everything ten-year-old me could have wanted: it’s so cynical and nasty, it’s incredibly stylish with those scene transitions and opening and closing slow pan to a closeup of a raindrop splash, it has amazing Brian Bolland art and it’s about grown man dressing up as a bat.

But as time passed I came to believe that it’s not a good story about a grown man dressing up as a bat, and it took me years to figure out why. Alan Moore has given numerous interviews about his dissatisfaction with The Killing Joke where he says things like “it doesn’t tell you anything except that Batman and the Joker are mirror images of one another” but that doesn’t really resonate with me as a criticism.

No. Here’s the problem. The story of Batman is at its heart the fantasy of a five-year-old boy. It’s “a bad man hurt me so I’m going to become badder and scarier than everyone else and nobody will be able to hurt me again.” And you should be able to explain the bare bones of any essential Batman story on exactly that level. You can do it with The Dark Knight Returns: “Batman retired years ago but now the world needs him again so he comes back.” Batman: Year One is the origin story from the comics, so no problem there (yes, more adult things have been added around the edges, like Catwoman is now portrayed as a prostitute, but the story doesn’t turn on that).

You can do this with Mad Love: “the Joker’s sidekick tries to impress him by killing Batman.” Blades: “a man who reminds Batman of his childhood hero Zorro comes to Gotham to fight crime.” JLA: Tower of Babel: “Batman has been making plans for how to beat the rest of the Justice League if they turn evil, and a bad guy gets hold of the plans.” And so on.

So let’s try this with The Killing Joke: “The Joker wants to prove that everyone is like him really so he cripples and sexually assaults Commissioner Gordon’s daughter and then puts the Commissioner on a funfair ride and shows him the photographs to try and drive him…” and my imaginary five-year-old has already lost interest and gone off to read something like Knightfall, which is a far less accomplished comic but which doesn’t do violence to the core concept of what a Batman story is.

Interestingly, the one great Batman comic that doesn’t seem to fit this theory is Gotham Central, which for those of you who haven’t read it is a police procedural set in Gotham City, sort of like Homicide: Life on the Street if those cops had to face off against the Riddler and deal with occasional cameo Batman appearances. You can’t boil down those stories to be five-year-old friendly. But I don’t think this is an exception to the rule at all. Gotham Central purposely doesn’t build on the Batman myth. Batman appears in those stories but you never find out anything about him. I’m not sure to what extent writers Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker were aware of this, but if they had widened the narrative viewpoint so that you knew who Batman was and how he came to be it would have made the whole enterprise implode in a cloud of shark-repellent Bat-Spray.

Anyway, now you all know how to write a great Batman story and there is no longer any excuse for not doing it.

There’s this terrific book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy, which is full of pen portraits of legendary codeheads. The secret origin of every hacker follows this basic pattern: got their hands on a computer at an impressionable age, had an experience which rewired their brain for life, ended up basically unfit for most forms of human contact.

Well, something similar happened to me. It was 1989 and my dad took my mother to Paris for their anniversary weekend, leaving my grandparents to look after me and, crucially, his work laptop. This was a deeply ’80s laptop: a weighty grey suitcase of a thing complete with smeary monochrome display and a complement of applications designed to brighten the day of your average bored participant in the fledgling knowledge economy. There was Washing Machine (a programme whose sole purpose was to tease a passable facsimile of a spin cycle noise from the PC’s bleepy internal speaker), Leather Goddesses of Phobos (racy science fiction text adventure; sadly the game’s accompanying scratch ‘n’ sniff card was nowhere to be found) and Leisure Suit Larry (…in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, to give its full title).

Larry is what rewired my brain. The actual gameplay was frankly terrible: you controlled the title character as he smudged his way through state-of-the-art 16 colour representations of a singles bar and a 24-hour wedding chapel among other locations (all rendered in 16 different shades of grey by the laptop’s LCD screen). And you died a lot. Virtually every move you made in Larry seemed to result in the main character’s annoying demise. By contrast, in Leather Goddesses of Phobos trying a new action was more likely to lead to a message reading “You have encountered stale pizza. Scratch off panel number 5.”

But because the plot of Larry was deemed to be risqué (the goal was to find a way for Larry, a middle-aged man, to lose his virginity) in order to play you had prove your age by correctly answering five trivia questions geared to the over-18s. For example: “Which song was not recorded by Elvis? a. Hound Dog b. Love Me Tender c. What’d I say d. Heartbreak Hotel.” (9 year-old me: “Where’s option e., ‘Who the fuck is Elvis?’”). Obviously this provoked a certain rebellious impulse in me and I simply kept reloading the game until I had all the correct answers memorised. As a result, I had no idea who John Belushi was but was aware that he had appeared on Saturday Night Live. I knew that G. Gordon Liddy had found fame as a member of The Plumbers. I knew that a person named Jayne Mansfield had existed and that she was not a sportscaster.

This set a pattern of context-free trivia knowledge that has persisted to the present day. When I was 18 and spending an hour a night drunkenly prodding at the touch screen of the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? quiz machine at the foot of the stairs in Glasgow’s famous Garage nightclub, it was really all because of Al Lowe.

Al, as I found out sometime later, once Wikipedia had happened, was the creative powerhouse behind the Leisure Suit Larry franchise. In my years of frequenting computer game stores I had seen but never actually bought his work both on non-franchise titles like Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist and on such Larry sequels as Shape Up or Slip Out! and Passionate Patty in Pursuit of the Pulsing Pectorals. Was he still at it, I wondered, hard at work on another instalment, provisionally titled Leisure Suit Larry and the Half-Bright Innuendo? Surely his website, linked at the bottom of the wikipedia article, would hold the answer.

On clicking the link I was immediately greeted by a Flash animation of Al Lowe’s head, balding, bearded and lasciviously gyrating like… well, I want to say ‘like Banquo at the feast’ but ‘like a Reliant Robin driver outside the schoolgates’ is probably nearer the mark. The text content revealed that Al had parted company with Larry‘s publisher years before, and that despite his offering to contribute he’d had no input into the series’ most recent entry, Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude.

The website reproduced an appalling email exchange on this topic. You can read it in the original if you like, but let me paraphrase. One of the writers who had been hired to work on Magna Cum Laude had contacted Al after completing work on the game, essentially to say “Thanks for your creation, it has been a real honour to work on this iconic series which you originated.” Al responded with a severe case of “Interesting that you have finished work months before the game hits the shelves. In my day we used to work hard, improving the game right up to the last minute. Back then we used to care about QUALITY. Best regards, your hero.”

In the absence of Larry-related employment, the website continued, Al had been hard at work compiling a book collection of humourous emails entitled You’ve Got Laughs! but was otherwise retired. And although I had no reason to disbelieve that, some impulse led me to check the website again a few months later.

By now it was 2006, and at this time an Al Lowe-related announcement stunned the world. You believed I had retired, Al told us all, you thought the world had seen the last of old Al Lowe. But that was just a cunning ruse! All this time I have been hard at work on a HILARIOUS NEW GAME! It’s called Sam Suede: Undercover Exposure. I’m writing it, iBase Entertainment are developing it and it will be my GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT. Al Lowe is BACK, baby, and BETTER THAN EVER!

Shortly thereafter, iBase Entertainment announced that it had run out of money, was shutting down production and that the release of Sam Suede: Undercover Exposure had been postponed indefinitely.

Every so often, events conspire together and I end up driving an extremely nice car for a few days. Most recently, the events involved laundry, overdue library books and a diarrhetic cat. The car is a Mercedes from their Heated Leather Seats in a Fuel Guzzler range. It belongs to my dad.

To people from other parts of the world this car might not look hugely impressive, but in Glasgow things are generally smaller and grubbier and here it is clearly the car of a much older and richer man.

The car originally came into my family as follows: my dad’s boss upbraided him for taking the bus to work. My dad, as he approached his fifties, had gone from working in IT for local government to being communications director for the regional fire brigade. Initially, the only change this made to his morning routine was that he got a bus in the opposite direction. But the British Fire Brigade organisations are based on military hierarchy. Superior officers are expected to continually emphasise their superiority. This means signing all memos with your name followed by a list of qualifications and professional society memberships, and it definitely means driving a better car than staff on a lower pay grade.

My dad’s boss took him aside. “This bus thing, it has to stop,” I imagine him growling with real menace. “We’ve given you a suitably large and convenient parking space and we damn well expect you to park something big and impressive in it every day.” And so my dad’s public transport days came to an end and the West family became, for the first time, a two-car household.

Now, the fact that my dad had to have pointed out to him something that everyone else in the history of the Fire Service has apparently intuited makes me think there is a gene called the car gene and the West men do not have it. I never realised that driving a car is a political statement until the first time I drove to work in the Merc.

I was working in the biotechnology industry at the time. As anyone who has seen an episode of The Big Bang Theory knows, the sciences are also very hierarchical, but in a different way from the Fire Brigade. Everyone knows who has a doctorate and who only has a masters, everyone knows who has been trained to do the most exotic lab techniques and who is being published in the highest-impact journals. I only have a bachelor’s degree and when I set foot in a lab things have the tendency to burst inappropriately into flame. So when I showed up at work driving the best car it went down like a turd in a punch bowl.

(No careers guidance officer ever said to me, “Listen, you might want to reconsider, non-executive pay in the life sciences is dire,” but it might have been useful to know. And check out what’s in the staff parking spaces outside any biotech company building if you don’t believe it.)

The people in my department were a jokey bunch. Wear a different-coloured shirt to work, there would be jokes. Bring a different packed lunch and there would be jokes. But drive to work in an impressive car, no jokes. No-one asked about it. No-one even mentioned it. Eventually the receptionist, a non-scientist, stopped by to ask how I had enjoyed sailing to work in my boat. The others stared at their computer screens in stony-faced silence, attempting to shut out this horrendous breach of protocol.

Anyway, I gave my dad back his car and eventually I left the job and I forgot all about the political aspects of car driving until last night. I was going for dinner in the west end and I had the windows wound down to clear some mist from the front windscreen. The CD changer clicked over and the opening notes of one of my dad’s Dire Straits albums began to play.

For a moment I had an out-of-body experience. I had somehow become that person who shows off his sound system by broadcasting ‘Money for Nothing’ at a high but tasteful volume through the open windows of his Mercedes. I began to re-evaluate my entire life.

“This cannot continue!” I yelled, mashing my hand into the dashboard audio controls. Mark Knopfler vanished, replaced by a radio station: current hip hop. “Worse yet!” I cried, clawing frantically at the sound and window controls, suddenly just one more mid-life crisis at large on the streets of Britain.

So. There I was, slumped in a table seat on the early-morning southbound train from Glasgow Central when I suddenly became convinced that there was an iPhone-style charging gauge suspended in the air above my head. And not just me: there was one above every Scotsman. With each passing mile the gauges filled and we became tougher and more dangerous until just past Manchester a voice said “Level up! You are now official representatives of the Hard North.”

There are great advantages to being Glaswegian somewhere other than Glasgow. I once averted a mugging attempt at a lonely London cashpoint by the simple expedient of pulling my phone out of my pocket and being loudly regionally accented at it.

Here at home, of course, I enjoy no such advantage and as a result every fight seems to deteriorate into an opportunity for me to bust out some classic buffoonery. There was the punch that left me splayed across a car bonnet (age 10), the unexpected kick in the belly that made me let out a huge squeaky fart (age 13) and the altercation outside a chip shop which ended with most of a fish supper lodged in my ear cavity (“that guy really battered you,” my friends noted approvingly).

I only remember one time when I actually started a fight with a complete stranger. What happened was this: sixteen-year-old me was headed for the bus home one Saturday night after a few pints at the October Cafe in town. At the top of Union Street my friend David and I became aware that the man behind us was saying unpleasant and ill-mannered things to his (I assume) girlfriend and making her cry.

I turned to the guy and made some totally innocent remark to the effect that he was a dickhead and why didn’t he shut up, and suddenly he got a little confrontational. He was squaring up to me, my friend David was standing between us telling me the guy wasn’t worth it and the girlfriend was trying to calm her man down. Meantime the guy launched a series of ad hominem attacks on my haircut (centre-parting, shoulder length, probably a bit greasy), my shirt (I like to think I was paying personal tribute to Nelson Mandela with that night’s choice) and various other aspects of my physical appearance.

Now this guy, physically, was no great prize either. Besides having the expression of a mean drunk in ugly temper plastered across his face he was also jowly and corpulent, with the physique of a manual labourer running to flab as he reached middle age.

In other words, he was probably something around three times my physical size and strength.

Three things then happened in quick succession. First, I said the words “Who ate all the pies anyway you fucking fat bastard?”; second, he barged David and the girlfriend aside and lunged at me; third, I ran for it.

I’ve never been able to run very far but I set the pace of my life as I sprinted across the road and down the other side of the street. Once I’d gone half a block I looked back to see this massive form pounding towards me in the grip of a killing rage. As I looked he launched himself at my legs in a diving tackle, came up short by a few centimetres and crashed into the pavement. He got back up and immediately resumed the pursuit but the dive lost him enough time that I was able to get across the Argyle Street junction and into the McDonalds on the other side.

It was after eleven p.m. on a Saturday night, so McDonalds was crammed full of people who had been at the under-18s night at the Sub Club next door. I got in line at one of the counters, hoping that somehow the guy hadn’t seen me come in or that he would suddenly lose interest or forget my existence entirely. I was so busy willing these unlikely events into existence that I forgot where I was until I reached the front of the queue and the staff member asked for my order.

Reflexively I turned and looked back at the entrance. The guy was staring in from outside, his vision obstructed by both the greasy handprints on the door glass and a generous helping of the red mist. Our eyes met. Before I had time to react he had burst in, grabbed my head, smashed it against the counter—

—and then ten plainclothes policemen congealed out of the Sub Club Unders crowd, pulled him off me and frogmarched him outside to a waiting van.

One officer took me aside. “He’ll spend a night in the cells,” he said. “You won’t have to give a statement or anything. But do you know why he attacked you?”

I shrugged. “Totally unprovoked,” I said.

[2011 note: from June 2007. The clip above features the business end of Manning and Richard Wilson's appearance on the Mrs Merton show.]

So the news sites are reporting that workingman’s club comedian Bernard Manning has posed for his last naked-in-a-tub-of-baked-beans publicity shot, passing away after a short illness at the age of 76.

Two themes predominate in the obituary quotes. The first is that he was a very nice man who did a lot of good work for charity; the second is that the allegations of racism in his comedy were simply the misplaced ire of the “PC Brigade.”

I can well believe the first assertion. It’s quite common for performers to appear at charity fundraisers supposedly “for free” meaning that they charge no actual fee, but bill the charity for huge expenses including first-class travel, posh hotels, room service, etc. Manning apparently never did this. When he appeared “for free” he appeared, near as dammit, for free.

As to the racism part, standard Manning joke from his act: “…them coons, y’know. They think they’re English because they’re born ‘ere. That means if a dog’s born in a stable, it’s a fookin ‘orse.” Cue massive audience reaction: not so much laughter as cheering.

And it wasn’t just in his stage act either, as you’ll know if you saw the talk show appearance where he got on his high horse about how “the darkies never fought for England in World War II” or some such, and fellow interviewee Richard Wilson, actor Richard Wilson, interrupted and said “I don’t believe it—”

—no, actually, what he said was “That’s total nonsense, have you never heard of the Commonwealth Army?” which, of course, he had, their existence simply happened to be inconvenient to the intolerant tirade at hand.

(Note that I am in no sense saying that Bernard Manning was responsible for the racism of his audience; only that he made a career out of exploiting it.)

So no, the racism wasn’t just a part of the act and no, the reaction against it isn’t just PC run amuck. Bernard Manning: nice guy, did a lot of good things; massive inexcusable bigot. Much as it would make the world simpler for these attributes to be mutually exclusive, it ain’t necessarily so.

[2011 note: this is from October 2006]

I would like to be able to tell you that the surname West is a glorious remnant of ancient clannish tradition, proudly handed down from generation to generation across the centuries, but it would be more truthful to say that it congealed out of the Lanarkshire mud around 125 years ago.

When I asked about the family history, my immediate relatives could only give me the following information: that my father’s father’s father was a foundling, that he was raised at the Quarriers Orphan Homes in the west of Scotland in the late nineteenth century and that he was given the name of the sitting Prime Minister, becoming William Gladstone West.

(When I started high school, because my mother was paranoid about someone stealing my schoolbag she wrote my full name on it in Tipp-Ex block capitals, complete with vestigial middle name: STUART GLADSTONE WEST.)

The only surviving family member old enough to be able to fill in any more of the picture is my Aunt Daisy, who is something over ninety years old — there’s a degree of secrecy and confusion over her exact age. The problem is, she doesn’t like talking about how the family came out of an orphan home. Also, it turns out that her given name is Eugenie, not Daisy. She’s my grandfather’s sister, so she not only goes by an assumed name, nobody knows when she was born and she’s not even my actual aunt. If it turned out that she had been on the MI5 payroll all these years none of us would really have much authority to feel shocked.

What Aunt Daisy was able to tell me was that my great-grandfather and his sister Sarah West were both Quarriers children. Sarah was relocated to Canada under a turn of the century scheme that provided Canadian farms with cheap Scottish labour, William stayed behind in Glasgow and the two lost contact.

Flash forward. One day in the 1970s, Aunt Daisy gets a phone call. The caller introduces himself as the son of Sarah Viancour (née West) and explains that although the family has now settled in Ohio, he is in Britain on a business trip and is keen to catch up with his long-lost Scottish relations. He has just enough time in his schedule to travel to Glasgow on the Thursday of that week.

You might think that this sort of call would come as exciting news, but this is the point in the conversation where it becomes clear that the Wests really do have cold, deadening Lanarkshire mud circulating through their veins. Without hesitating even for a second, Daisy delivers a perfect off-the-cuff mot juste which ensures that no-one in Glasgow ever heard from the Viancour family again. She says the following:

“Oh, no, that’s no good. Thursdays are when I go to the bingo.”

[2010 note: originally from February 2005]

A while ago I ended up in the hospital with a severe chest infection. I was in a four-bed room for the best part of a week. There must have been upwards of ten different patients in the other three beds over that time, but for some reason the room was always guaranteed to return to the following configuration. One (1) ancient and incoherent gentleman in the mode of Father Jack from the Father Ted TV series. One (1) stout fiftyish gent, a devotee of Traditional Values and prone to speechifying about the debased state of the world today. One (1) enthusiastic and emaciated user of hard drugs whose lightbulb-shaped head made pinpointing even his approximate age extremely difficult. And one (1) of me.

On my second day in the ward, the role of Traditional Values was being played by a taxi driver from Clydebank. Just to make conversation I asked if he’d ever had Marti Pellow in his cab, thinking I might get to hear an amusing anecdote about the lead singer of Wet Wet Wet propped up in the back seat trying to shoot heroin into the veins between his toes. Instead I was treated to an detailed history of the entire Pellow clan, told as an extended metaphor for the moral deterioration of modern Scottish society. I was quite weak at this point and being rehydrated via an IV drip, so this was almost more than I could endure. Luckily the nurses turned up with his discharge papers just as he was warming to his theme. He was still talking as they escorted him out past the reception desk.

I lay back on my bed and began to lightly doze. There was no-one in the Hard Drugs role that morning. Instead there was a gaunt, ashen 70ish fellow with asbestosis. The current Father Jack was heavily sedated and on a chest drain: a brown rubber tube led from each side of his ribcage down to two clear plastic receptacles on the floor, filled to the brim with murky, foaming brown fluid which sloshed up and down every time he drew breath.

–not so anxious for that pint of real ale now, are you?–

But anyway. I was vaguely aware when the new Traditional Values was led in: stout, ruddy complected, wearing a lumberjack shirt. He sat in the blue plastic chair in front of his bed. After a while I noticed strange noises coming from his direction and sat up. He was grunting to himself and violently rocking back and forward.

I got up off my bed wheeling the drip in front of me. I asked “Are you alright?” but he kept rocking and had now begun to foam at the mouth. I walked out into the corridor and said to a nurse, “The guy in the bed opposite is foaming at the mouth. I’m pretty sure he shouldn’t be doing that.”

A few nurses ran into the room, pulled the curtains around Traditional Values’ bed and started talking to him. It took him a while before he could stop grunting and rocking and respond, but eventually he was able to tell them his name, and the date, and the name of the hospital. The curtains were pulled back, and all the nurses but one left. The last one stayed, talking to the him occasionally until he had completely come back to himself.

The next day, a doctor came in during rounds. “Mr Values, do you know why you’re here?”

Values, it turned out, had no idea.

“You’re here because when you were downstairs at the sleep clinic talking to your consultant, you had an epileptic fit.”

Values said, “No I didn’t. I don’t know why he told you that. I haven’t had a fit in months. I just turned up for my usual appointment, and he suddenly said that he wanted me to stay in overnight.”

The doctor said, “You had a fit in your clinic, and you had one on the ward last night. Both times you were unconscious for upwards of ten minutes.”

Values said, “No, no. That’s not what happens to me when I take a fit. I just get a funny taste in my mouth and it goes away after a while.”

“I understand you drove here yesterday, Mr. Values,” the doctor said. “Don’t you know that you shouldn’t be driving with your condition?”

“No, nobody’s ever told me that.”

“Well, you need to give up the driving. You need to get someone to come here and pick you up. Can you manage that?”

“Aye, aye sure I can manage that.”

“Okay. Now I’ve brought you a course of some new medication and I’ve made you a follow-up appointment at the clinic for next week. You can go home now.”

Traditional Values packed his things together in about five minutes, muttering to himself about how stupid doctors are. I’m sure he took the lift down to the ground floor, muttering all the time, and got in his car and drove home.