The dog just bounced back from one of those health things they call a scare. For a couple of weeks, we thought we had lost him. If we got lucky, they said, it might be no worse than the loss of a tongue, a jaw, or whole irradiated throat.

            If not, we should “prepare for the worst”. There was worse?

            Instead, we paid for a lesson in what it means to be uninsured in a world full of price points, in which Oscar Wilde on cost-and-worth has been put beyond parody, in which there is no NHS for dogs. What remains are feral types asking why an NHS could be cost-effective, as a “burden on the taxpayer”, for anyone.

            The dog, little bastard, refused to succumb. With a head full of dope he was probably as funny, in a fuckem kind of way, as me sober. I won’t lean against your leg while attempting a straight line, but he’s better-tempered. At the end of it all, the diagnosis said there was probably a “foreign body” under his tongue.

            “Dog,” I said. “You’re a metaphor.”

            “What else is new?” he said.

            “Besides, according to that nice lady who had her fist down my throat, these things ‘have a way of finding their own way out of the body’. If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have chewed on the crap in the first place.”

            “So you want to talk about metaphors now?”

            “Naw,” says the dog. “Show me the new polls instead. Then tell me how stupid you are, compared to me. What is that stuff you people swallow?

            “I might have evulsed a George Osborne on your carpet there, by the way. You might want to mop that up.”