“It was a Friday, I think, not that that matters, Mma. But it was because it was a Friday that the doctor was not in the clinic at the time. On Fridays he likes to meet some of his friends for lunch at the President Hotel, and sometimes he is not back until after three o’clock. There are some other Ugandan doctors who work here, and he likes to meet with them. Their lunch sometimes goes on a bit long.

“I never make an appointment for a patient between two and three on a Friday afternoon, to give him time to get back from the hotel. Well, on that Friday the patient for the three o’clock appointment arrived early. It was a man from the Ministry of Water Affairs, a nice man who goes to the church round the corner from my place. I have seen him on Sundays, walking with his wife and their young son to church. Their dog follows them and sits outside the church until the service is over. It is a very faithful dog, that one.

“This man had half an hour to wait, and he started talking to me. He told me that he was worried about his blood pressure and that he had been trying hard to get it down, but the doctor said that it was still too high. The doctor’s door was open while this man was saying this, and I saw the sphyg on his desk. So I thought that there would be no harm in my taking his blood pressure, just out of interest, and just to keep up my skills. So I said to the patient that I would do this, and he rolled up the sleeve on his right arm.

“I inflated the band around the arm and looked at the mercury. The pressure was normal in every respect. So I did it again, and I was about to say to the patient that everything was fine. But I stopped and thought, and I realised that if I did this, then he would say to the doctor that I had taken the reading and that it was now normal. I was worried that this would make the doctor cross with me for doing something to a patient without his permission. So I muttered something about not being able to understand these figures and I replaced the instrument before the doctor came back.