When I begin to think of an unusually full session, I can remember nothing. This makes me wonder if my wish for his co-operation leads me to exaggerate what he did.

He came into the room handing me his cheque. He lay down from the end of the couch. He speaks. “I wondered whether to write it standing up. I couldn't find a lavatory or a train in which to do it. If I did it downstairs it would keep you standing.” Now I am not sure that he did not say, “If I wrote it in the waiting room it would keep you standing”, or if it was that if he wrote it downstairs it would keep me waiting. The point is that I suspect that from time to time he speaks with, from his point of view, great precision, and that if I treat it conversationally I am guilty of splashing the good food about, as it were.

Perhaps I should consider schizophrenic precision – a meticulous accuracy – and schizophrenic destructiveness.