Dad's Breakdown

I once wrote the reasons for having the nervous breakdown I was proposing to indulge in in one column. The reasons for not having one were to go in the opposite column.

The reasons for having the breakdown were difficult to establish.

One of them was: the woman I think I'm in love with (though I wasn't entirely sure that I was) had just told me she is a lesbian, and she has fallen in love with her woman psychiatrist.

You may well laugh. I certainly did when I wrote it down in my portentous breakdown column.

I felt better.

The young woman in question then went on to have affairs with gay men. I put it all down to her father, who is a retired naval commander who invested his money in footling projects like selling clip-on car boots which only fitted one model of Rover, which was then withdrawn. Then there was her brother, who had acquired so few life skills that he could only sell the Encyclopedia Britannica to the intellectually challenged.

The right column set reasons for falling about laughing as one way of seeing the world, at least in one-point perspective.

As for shades of gray: well, I like gray - it's a friendly, comforting colour. And it was good enough for Giacometti. I went into Richmond today, and everything looked delightfully grey and muted. Grey faces smiled at me through the traffic fumes.

"I wouldn't swap this paradise for the Bahamas on a balmy day," I said to Ted Evans, our security officer, former police officer, and ex-police marksman, who had taken me to Habitat to collect the new, neutral, good-taste light fittings I had chosen for the hallways in King George Square.

"What do you think?"