'Is your husband dead or has he had a stroke?' South Edinburgh's uber-bitch asked my wife yesterday at a charity sale.
'He's alive and well, actually,' Annie replied.
'Well, there's something wrong with him,' the u-b persisted.
'He has a rare muscle-wasting condition and his mobility is limited, but he's been told that something else will kill him,' my wife said cheerily.
When she told me, I thought this was hilarious, but if my wife had been recently widowed, she'd have been devastated ('At least I hope you would,' I said). It was a truly terrible remark, all the worse because there is no particular ill-feeling between the two women.
How many writers would have the confidence to put that scene in a book? People don't really behave like that, one might think. But yes, they do. We have been given imaginations and should mine every ounce of precious metal they hold, using old-fashioned thought to fashion the unlikely ore into something credible.