My encounter with a Bond girl

It’s my birthday. Four in the morning and I’m in the back of a cab coming back from a night out in town with Trev. He’s in the front, telling the driver about this 18-year-old he’s been seeing. You’d think an 18-year-old would be a sort of Holy Grail to a 51-year-old, but no. Far from it. She’s a nice-looking maid, he says, but talks a load of crap. Drives him nuts. The taxi driver nods sympathetically, the tart. He can well believe it, he says, youngsters being what they are these days.

I worked on a men’s long-stay ward of a mental hospital in the early Eighties. Chronic schizophrenics who’d been stuck in there 20, 30, 40 years. Albert Marples. Reg Ford. The hospital mascots. Institutionalised institutions. Completely gone, they were. Animal noises. And the psychiatrists used to have a nice term for their state of mind. Bert and Reg had reached their ‘plateau’, they said.