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And then there was Grit, a former soldier, five-foot-two tall and as hard-boiled as a twenty-minute egg. I loved Grit. He possessed very little in the world but an outsize sense of decency; his flat in a Glasgow high-rise had been broken into and when he challenged the suspected culprits, they stabbed him. One knife wound pierced his spinal column and he was paralysed down one side. Grit had been treated with little sympathy by the police and had languished without expert care in another city hospital – just one more knife victim with the wrong post code – until a doctor had recognised the seriousness of his injury and got him transferred across the city to spinal. He couldn’t believe how well he was treated in this unit by comparison.

‘Night and fucking day, Mel,’ he told me. ‘They’re just fucking angels here, the nurses. The doctors listen to you. They just didn’t care in the last place. Not fucking interested.’

Grit and I were mates from the days of high dependency when we’d had beds in facing bays; I told him he’d be walking soon and so he was, within a month, so he took to calling me Crystal Balls. He had a lot of mates, hardmen like himself, who crowded round his bedside and told him how his football team was doing and discussed the people who’d stabbed him. They knew fine who’d done it.