Hospitals are peculiar places, and the dressing gown is a great equaliser. They ought to make it a compulsory uniform on the outside. Mostly everyone’s nice to each other, exchanging shy comradely smiles, a bit abashed that fate has knocked them off their feet and into their bedclothes. You become a benign connoisseur of other people’s troubles, musing to yourself as the new arrivals stumble in, ‘I wonder what happened to him?’ and ‘What’s she got?’ It’s not a bad idea to be put in hospital along with other sick people; it keeps misfortune in perspective. It’s when you get back out among the well that your vision really starts to blur.

I was dozing at visiting time one day when the nurse said, ‘There’s someone to see you.’ I opened my eyes and there were Titch and his mother, carrying grapes and newspapers. ‘It’s the first time he’s been out,’ his mother whispered to me as they sat down.

Titch was staring at me, with his mouth half-open. There was still a vulnerable, exposed quality to his bulk, a sense that he had recently emerged, blinking, into an over-bright and hostile world. I suppose I must have looked terrible to him.

‘Don’t worry, Titch,’ I said. ‘They say I’ll have my old face back in a few weeks, but with a couple of extra lines on it.’ He had to work hard to decipher what I was saying.

‘What happened to you?’ he said.

‘The same guys that did you over, took me on a trip to the waste ground,’ I said. ‘You can probably imagine the rest of it.’

‘Phyllis told us about it,’ his mother said.

Titch kept on staring, as though his eyeballs had stuck to my stitches.

‘When are you coming home?’ he said finally.

‘I don’t think I will be coming home,’ I said. ‘When they let me out of here, I’m going away for a while.’

‘I came home.’

‘I know you did, but it’s different with you. I don’t think they’ll give you any more trouble. Anyway, how are things?’

‘He isn’t getting the counsellor any more,’ said his mother.

‘What happened?’

‘He spilled his orange squash on her case notes when she was in the bathroom, and accidentally ruined them,’ she said.

I saw a prim little smirk on Titch’s face, of the sort that Queen Victoria must have worn when she first glimpsed John Brown in the nude.

‘Attaboy,’ I said, ‘I hope you bought the poor woman a new jotter.’

‘She wrote down about me liking biscuits,’ he said, with a passable stab at indignation. ‘And then she wrote that I was unhelpful. But she was supposed to help me, not the other way round.’

He was obviously perking up.

‘Send her over to me. I’ll give her something to write in her notebook,’ I said.