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The next day Dougie took the Dictaphone and promised to email the recording to London.

They must have transcribed it and put something in the paper because at one point Su Pollard phoned the ward to talk to me, which was precisely the moment I knew my spaceship had landed on another planet. Su Pollard, for those under forty, is a wacky English character actress best known for a sitcom in the 1980s called Hi-de-Hi, which I had been aware of, as a young twenty-something, as a piece of cheesy middle-brow telly for my parents’ generation. A totem of its time, like Morecambe and Wise. Su is famous for eccentrically outsize glasses and a funny voice. Good-humoured Eighties kitsch. I had never met her in my life.

‘Call for you,’ said a nurse, holding the phone, eyebrows raised, a rather amused expression. ‘It’s Su Pollard.’

It must be a morphine moment. She would drift away in a minute.

‘THE Su Pollard?’ I said.

‘Sounds like her.’

‘But I don’t know her.’

‘It’s you she asked to speak to.’

Too random. Had to be opiates. The nurse held the phone to my ear and I had a short, apparently lucid conversation with someone who sounded exactly like the hapless holiday camp chalet maid Peggy Ollerenshaw whom I’d occasionally seen on TV thirty years ago.