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Doctor Fortescue looked up from a folder as I came through the door.

He answered my bright, optimistic, quizzical expression with a brief shake of his head.

I thought to myself: Well this is well nigh useless; I won't even get a good dramatic moment for my website out of it; I know some medical professionals personally and not one of them will believe a fellow doctor would pass on news like this in the way he had just done.

There followed some stage business about medications.

"I'll email the prescription to the pharmacy," said the good doctor.

"How long will that take Doc?" quoth me.

"I'll do it straight away," he said.

We shook hands on it and I turned to go.

At the door I found myself unable to resist posing a question apropos nothing at all.

"Do you remember a conversation with me during the supposed pandemic a few years ago?" I asked.

"I do," he said.

"Do you remember I asserted that face masks don't work and that social distancing doesn't work, and that forcing people to stay in their homes under lockdown would damage mental health, and that the vaccines were not properly tested and should not be compulsory and that in any case no one should use the vaccines as they were made out of aborted babies?"

"I remember," said the doctor.

"Have you had any reason since then to revise your opinions?" I ventured.

"I'd probably agree with you on the first three things you said and not on the vaccines," he answered.

"Have you noticed Doc," said I gently, "an awful lot of people are getting heart attacks?"

He flinched.

It was the darndest thing.

He didn't flinch when he read my doom laden chart but he flinched at those simple words.

Instantly I felt strangely sorry for him.

"I know you haven't time to be talking to me all day about current events," I said. "I'll let you get back to your other patients."

As I clumped out the door I was struck, not for the first time, by the strange mystic pathos that gilds the vicissitudinous peregrinations of my effulgent existence.