Tim Lambert laughed, and then he eyed, for the full of his mouth, the contents of the doctor’s basket. Sot picked up the basket and primly moved on, the humour gone from him. The consolation was that Lambert’s lungs wouldn’t see out the winter – he had told no lie. Oh and he knew full well what they all called him behind his back. He knew it because another of his elderly patients, Rita Cryan, was gone in the head and had forgotten that the nickname was slanderous and meant to be secret.

‘That’s not a bad mornin’ at all, Doctor Sot,’ she always croaked when he paid a house call now. He tended with Rita to strap on the blood pressure monitor a little too tightly. There was temptation to open one of the naggins before he got it to the counter but he denied himself and bore the small devil’s caper.

‘You’d want a good class of a pelt on you,’ he said to the girl at the till. ‘Brass monkeys weather.’

But she was an eastern and as she blankly scanned his items he realised that pelt was perhaps a little rich for her vocabulary, not to mind brass monkeys.

‘Pelt like a bear,’ he said. ‘For the cold, I mean? Look it! Here’s Papa Bear in his lovely warm pelt!’

He flapped his arms delightedly against his sides to indicate Papa Bear’s cosiness.

‘Is fifty-three euro eighty-nine cent,’ she said.