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I was 20, and in the recovery room of my local hospital, coming round from general anaesthetic after minor surgery. My mind was lost wherever our minds go in such conditions, steering itself gently back into its familiar harbour. But then, suddenly – or as suddenly as anything can be when you’re in that numbed nirvana – I became aware that someone in the next pallet along was addressing me. He was staring at me from his own fugue state, and slurring the words, ‘You’re that copper. You are. You’re that copper.’ Now, talk to any nurse, and they’ll tell you the very peculiar and often entertainingly uninhibited things that

For the past decade I have suffered from noisy neighbours in the flat below mine. First it was the stream of student tenants, thundering up and down the communal staircase day and night, banging doors, shouting to each other, playing their guitars. Then at last the flat was bought by a middle-aged owner-occupier, who completely gutted and refurbished the place; the deafening noise and pervasive dust from the months-long building works was almost unbearable. Now that his works are over, I have to put up with the day-to-day clatter and clamour of a neighbour with a lot of Gen Z house guests and a penetrating voice. Noisy neighbours are a

I love Roquefort, having been introduced to it when I was 16 by our French exchange student Geneviève, whose father was a producer of the cheese. She brought some in her luggage, wrapped in many layers of brown paper so that the unique, pungent smell wouldn’t invade her clothes. My parents, gourmet cooks and gourmands, immediately started incorporating Roquefort into their menus. Back then it was difficult to find a blue cheese on the US east coast (although Wisconsin had been making one for centuries). When a food shop called Amanda’s opened in Westport, Connecticut, my Swedish mother would drive the seven miles from where we lived to buy Roquefort