What Jan Chaney wanted to know – and Jan was too confident and good-looking, even if she lacked Stephanie’s pregnant glow, for us all not to want to know what she wanted to know – was whether Alister ever felt inclined, once he’d knocked his patients out, to whip off the odd unsightly mole as a bonus, a little something over and above what it had been required of him to remove. The answer was yes. And when that inclination had proved too powerful for Alister to resist, and the offending mole had turned out to be not only aesthetically unpleasing to the doctor but also malignant to the patient, well, Alister had reason to feel more than a little justified, didn’t he?

It was a mere conversational hop skip and a jump to get from this to the whole delicate issue of the rights and obligations of cosmetic medicine. Very soon we were on to geriatric sexuality and where a doctor like Alister should or shouldn’t stand in relation to the dry vagina question. I say we, but in fact I had been excluded from this discussion by Craig with whom I shared the other end of the table and who insisted on taking me through the history of British comedy – the Goons, Hancock, John Cleese, The Young Ones – in order to find out what I thought. ‘So which writers do you like, Howard?’ Craig asked me, changing tack.

I went through my usual routine. I didn’t really think I liked anyone. (I didn’t want to go as far back as Chaucer or Ben Jonson – not in Perth.)

The sentence, ‘Oh, I see, it all comes back to the bloke and the rights of his pecker,’ floated down to me from the interesting end of the table.

‘I think it’s wonderful if doctors can help people to enjoy an active sex life well into their eighties,’ Stephanie said.

Craig was entirely oblivious to this rival conversation. I don’t believe he heard a word of it. ‘Come on, Howard,’ he challenged me. He had an expression of intense, eager curiosity on his face. But there was a no-nonsense air about him as well. He looked like a man who’d heard a lot of bullshit in his young life. ‘Come on,’ he repeated, ‘there must be somebody you like that’s still alive.’

‘If the vagina’s dry, then let the vagina stay dry,’ one or other woman who wasn’t Stephanie pronounced.

Geraldine, I noticed, had a queer look on her face, as if she couldn’t decide whether this raucous party meant that her evening was a success or not. But she was looking progressively less like a bishop’s amanuensis.

‘Presumably it’s dry because it wants to be,’ I heard Ros inveigh.

‘Well?’ Craig pressed.

‘I suppose Bellow,’ I said.

‘Bellow?’ He was flabbergasted.