March 14, 1955

I met a new patient today and wondered why I had been summoned all the way from Manchester to see him. Vincent Velcro seems normal enough for his age. Like so many men in their mid-sixties, he mourns the lost world of his youth.

“Britain has gone to the dogs,” he told me. “When I was a child I felt completely secure. I had a wide range of friends. We learnt and played together. There was so much for us to do. I was happy. Grown-ups were mostly kind and helpful. Yes, there were boundaries, and we were punished when we crossed them. But inside those boundaries we had space to explore, to try things out, to make sense of the world around us.”

I asked Vincent what he thought had changed. “Are you blind?” he responded. “Look around you. Britain is utterly different. It’s a far grimmer place. People are worn down. They don’t respect the values that my parents instilled in me. They treat kids worse. I would really hate to grow up in Britain today. It feels like a foreign country. You look about the same age as me, Wilf. Don’t you feel the same?” (I always encourage new patients to call me “Wilf” instead of Dr Fazakerley: it lowers barriers between us.)

After more in this vein, I brought our session to an end. I saw no point in staying for the full, allotted hour. As soon as I had taken blood and urine samples, I returned to the manager’s office and asked him why on earth he had involved me in the first place. There was nothing about Vincent to justify my five-hour journey to London: the local staff could deal with him perfectly well. Many adults, especially older ones, have a rosy view of the past and contrast it with life today. I could have used his very words to describe my own childhood in Liverpool before the first world war.

“Stay one night and see him again tomorrow,” said the manager. “If you still feel you have wasted your journey, return to Manchester by all means. But I think you will find that Vincent is far stranger than you realise.”

March 15

The manager is right. Vincent turns out to be the most curious patient I have ever examined. When I entered his room this morning, he started by offering me coffee. “I like ‘lattay’,” he said. “How about you?”

“ ‘Lattay’? What’s that?” I replied. “Ah yes, I forgot. You won’t know about ‘lattay’ — a shot of espresso with lots of steamed, frothy milk. It was very popular when I was young. There were plenty of places you could get good coffee. Today there are hardly any. If I want ‘lattay’, I have to make it myself.”

“Okay, I’ll try it.” He poured coffee into a mug and added the milk, which he had frothed in a noisy, strange-looking machine that it looked as if he had made himself. He handed the drink to me, saying: “Download this; I think you’ll enjoy it.”

“Download? That’s a strange word.”

“Oops, sorry, that’s something else that belongs to my past but not yours.” Vincent was beginning to intrigue me. “What else do you think is different about your past, compared with mine?” I asked.

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