Some things may stick with me forever. Not just the obviously memorable tragic-farcical things that hit us in the face last week (of which there were many, but the empty horse-drawn hearse and funeral procession that blocked our path outside the station for the London hospital being the most obvious, save the image on the screen we would see an hour or so later). It’s other things, irrelevant little scenes, colours, overheard bits of conversations, phrases printed on wall signs, that seem to have imprinted permanently on my mind. On the way out of the hospital: in the elevator, a man whose accent sounded Trinidadian and his two little boys, one sobbing into his dad’s shoulder. “He’s afraid of elevators,” the man smilingly explained to us. Somehow we managed to laugh and smile back. “It’s ok, we reach, we reach,” said the man to the little boy when the doors opened onto the main lobby. A few minutes later in the park next door: no idea what I said into the phone to my parents, but what sticks in my mind are the purple pansies and the pink and orange lilies and the little rose bushes, and the daytime drinkers’ cans of cider and lager glinting metallic blue and gold in the afternoon sun, and the brown squirrel that ran in slow motion towards me, stopping at my feet to beg for food. Then later, specific tastes: champagne in a waterbottle; a mojito without mint. The image from that Clive Barker book that made us laugh at our realisation of its perverse inappropriateness as a comforting mechanism for dealing with this. The next day back in Brighton: my bare tan legs and mauve toenails on the white hospital bedspread. Healthy-looking. Absinth-green odourless nail polish remover and one cotton ball to take away the mauve from my fingertips that would apparently interfere with the monitoring equipment if left in place. The “quick” crossword we started while we waited: eight-letter word for Freud’s term for the conscious mind; four-letter word for senile, 3rd letter is “R;” nine-letter word for “compelling,” also beginning with “C.” Did it call for a synonym or for some well-known example of something compelling, we wondered. Ken Loach’s Cannes winner: a recommendation from one of the anaesthesists upstairs who knows anthropologists study people and can be political and thinks it’s cool. His assistant is left-handed like me; we’re becoming more common in the OR apparently (too late to ask if as patients or workers). A green plastic thing being taken from my mouth as I woke from an instantly forgotten nightmare set in dark Kemptown alleyways. Downstairs again, and with the grogginess came clarity: the answer was of course “superego.” I always think better under the influence of something. We let the rest go; left the newspaper behind on the floor.