Barking mad

To paraphrase Oscar: “Some people come to resemble their pets, that is their tragedy some people don’t come to resemble their pets, that is theirs.” I think in this context of the German woman I have met twice now walking her Leonbergers down the road near Clapham Junction where the boys and I wait to get the bus on the way back from school. The woman is frowsty with a leonine head of pink, dyed hair, thick round the middle – she’s only 5ft 2in, or thereabouts, and must weigh getting on for 10 stone – and as for the dogs… well, they’re not called Leonbergers for nothing. This is the nearest thing you get to lion that’s still canine. Their dotty owner – who snapped “Leonberger!” at me, when I asked what breed they were (as if it were entirely obvious) – must have to go out with a shovel to pick up their dung.

Boomtown stats

Last time I was in Dublin, Vivian drove me round in a big black Merc; this time it’s a still bigger and blacker Chrysler. “I should’ve bought a cement truck,” he observes, as we ooze past the Point, a massive new shopping-cum-entertainment complex that’s sprouting a small forest of large cranes. “I’d be coining it now.” Last time I was in Dublin, the old city seemed teetering on the edge of being metropolitan – now it’s fallen over. Last time I was in Dublin, the joke was the group of three pyramidical office blocks on the bank of the Liffey that were known locally as “Canary Dwarf”; now it’s them that have been dwarfed – or, at any rate, flanked by acre upon acre of plate glass and steel.

The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of Aids by Elizabeth Pisani

Back in 1985 I was an inpatient at a drug rehab in the West Country and had genital warts that required regular and painful treatments.

Each week I went to the STD clinic at the nearby hospital, where a middle-aged consultant applied an acidic preparation to the glans of my penis. One day, while he was actually holding the afflicted portion, he remarked — quite casually — that the best way to rid the country of HIV/Aids would be to “castrate all you junkies — and the queers, too”.