Things went downhill frighteningly fast last week, after I wrote a piece confessing to being slightly estranged from reality.
Me and reality came to the end of the road. We parted and it wasn't amicable. There is no chance of reconciliation. We're through.
You don't want the details. You'll need to wait for the film, if you do. Suffice it to say that a paperwork cock-up left me, on the way to an important meeting, standing at the roadside among the former contents of my car, namely two computers, a travel bag, three shirts, a paperback copy of Middlemarch and my shattered dreams of ever being a grown-up.
Standing beside me, looking as shell-shocked as I feel, Rachel shakes her head, opens her mouth a couple of times, like a goldfish at feeding time, and utters a few broken words.
"Only an idiot ... ," she says. "Why on earth didn't you...." She punches my arm gently. "Words fail me," she says.
"That's good," I tell her. "I'd hate to see your usual chatty, cheery self at a time like this. It would be insensitive."
"Can I hit you harder?" she says.
"You should," I say. But she doesn't. Never hit anyone in her life, the soft southern nancy.
Later that day, having been rescued and sent on our way by a sympathetic Susan, I get chatting to my son inside his flat, among the creative ferment of a sculptor at work.
It is somehow soothing. Chaos inside and out. The last thing I need, with my brain in turmoil, is neat and tidy surroundings.
"Don't worry about it," he tells me. "It's genetic. Your dad was smart but dopey. I'm the same. Get over it."
"I'm worse than either of you," I say.
"You're not," he says. "What's the dopiest thing you ever did?"
"Where do I start?" I say, trawling the memory banks. "I went to Paris once. Took a woman but not the address of the hotel we were booked into. Or its name. Beat that."
"Easy," he says. "My mind wandered in chemistry class once and my body set itself on fire."
"Jeez," I say, in sudden alarm. It's 15 years since he was at school and he's clearly fine, but a dad's instincts don't die. "What happened?"
"We were using these wee meths burners," he says. "I spilled some on my hands and it caught fire. Funny stuff, meths. It flows easily and burns kinda cool at first.
"So I wave my hands around, not too bothered. But that doesn't help. So then I try to smother the flames."
"Does that help?" I say.
"Sets my armpits on fire."
"Bloody hell."
"It's getting toasty by this time. And I'm not sure what to do next. So I scratch my head and guess what?"
"You set your head on fire?"
"Correct," he says. "My lab partner Cathy Small is running around now, screaming like a banshee. So the chemistry teacher, a big bugger we called Moby - can't remember his real name now - he strolls over with a basin of water, hurls it at me, which puts the flames out, then sends me to the nurse.
"She rubs cool stuff on my hands and head and says I'm fine. I go back to class and the guys give me a big cheer. Moby, the bastard, gives me detention."
He scratches his chin and grins. "The day I set my head on fire. I think I win," he says.
"I think you do," I tell him.
My dad had a great saying, the exact wording of which I can't remember now. Something like full-blown insanity being rare but stupidity being all around us.
Frank Zappa reckoned there was more stupidity in the universe than hydrogen. Einstein said only the universe and human stupidity were infinite. "And I'm not sure about the former."
You've maybe guessed by now that I'm playing for time with this preamble, because today's topic is one I'm reluctant to delve deeply into. Stupidity. Specifically mine.
As the first graduate in our family I used to be told I was clever but lacked sense, an allegation I dismissed at the time as sour grapes. The suspicion has grown since that the grapes were fine.
And yet it's not sense that's been lacking all these years. It's the close connection with ambient events that ordinary folk take smugly for granted. I walked in front of a swing when I was three, into a lampost when I was ten and through a plate-glass window when I was 25, in all cases sustaining cuts, bruises and contusions but lasting damage only to that aura of sophistication I aim at all times to project.
"Of course I don't think you're stupid," Rachel tells me in Waverley Station, as we're headed home from a morning meeting we have travelled to Edinburgh to attend, only to discover that the day was accurate but the week was only approximate.
"You are fairly smart most of the time," she tells me. "But every now and then you become - what's the word? - challenging. You don't seem to know what's going on around you. You're annoyingly dopey."
My mind wanders back to a lovely, dark-haired woman called Rosemary, who often called me that. "It's loveable," she said. No one since has found it so, assigning my dopeyness instead to various places along the annoying spectrum, from 'challenging' all the way to 'infuriating'.
"You are doing that stupid act again," my wife used to say. "It drives me insane."
Little did she know how hard I found it, all those centuries we were together, to seem nearly normal sometimes. The relief when we split was immense, like taking a tight-fitting bra off at the end of the day.
"Watch where you're going grandpa!" a young punk shouts, as I bump into him in the information centre, stepping on his foot and dislodging one of his essential earpieces.
"See what I mean," Rachel says, taking my arm and leading me towards the cash machine in the corner. "Stand there," she says. "I won't be a moment. Then I'll show you where the platform is for the train back to Glasgow."
Suddenly I'm the one who's annoyed. "You're talking to me as if I'm a ten-year-old," I say. "I've been all over the world without you. I've interviewed astronauts in Houston and eaten fruits of the forest from tall, slim glasses in Helsinki boardrooms. I don't need you leading me by the hand and showing me the right bloody platform in Edinburgh, thanks very much."
She steps aside and I push my card into the slot, punch the code and press the option to withdraw £50 in cash. When the card reappears I shove it in my back pocket, turn on my heel and flounce off towards Platform 7.
"Hey!" Rachel shouts at my departing back.
"What?" I turn, still annoyed with her.
"Don't you want this money then?" she asks, waving the five ten pound notes I've left in the jaws of the cash machine.
Having recently celebrated her ruby wedding, Molly is reflecting on her enduring marriage to my oldest friend Iain.
"We are very different people," she tells me, as the two of us are sat in the front room of the house in Bradford that I've visited for not far short of their forty years together and now feels like a second home to me.
"I noticed," I say. "He's a bit of a prat for a start."
"He is," she says. "Which is why the two of you get on."
"He and I have a lot in common."
"But he and I don't," she says, giving the cat that's just wandered into the elegantly decorated room a tickle, and getting a rumbling purr in return. "That's my point."
On my last visit, when this hairy moggy had wafted into the room, his tail held high, a friend of Iain's had blurted out, "What a wonderfully fluffy pussy."
I'd spluttered drink and sprayed the feline with an aromatic mist of fine Ardbeg. He liked it and has rubbed against my leg with greater ardour ever since. It's a memory that makes me smile but a dangerous distraction from Molly's conversation.
"Sorry?" I say.
"I said take cooking dinner," she repeats with a tinge of asperity. "With me it's fast and functional. I make the meal and clean up as I go. Iain is different. He turns it into a major production. First he puts on that terrible, wailing blues he listens to, like Arabs burying their dead. Then he dives into the kitchen.
"Five hours later he surfaces with something that smells and tastes incredible and is laid out like a gorgeous work of art. But behind him he's left a scene of terrible devastation, like a Scotch invasion of the football pitch at Wembley."
"Bottles of whisky have never invaded Wembley," I say and instantly regret it. But it's too late to back off so I chunter brainlessly on. "The word you're groping for I suspect is 'Scottish'."
"The word you're groping for I suspect is a clip round the ear," she says, reminding me she is not a woman to be taken lightly, something Iain learned long ago and one reason, no doubt, that their relationship lasted.
There are others. Complementary qualities seems to work in a marriage. Molly is a kind, chatty, no-nonsense homemaker and former career woman in a man's world. Iain is philosophical and funny, with bulging brains but a tenuous grip on everyday detail.
He once drove all the way to Scotland to scatter his mum's ashes, but forgot the ashes. I could just picture her, back on his living-room mantelpiece, shaking her head in long-suffering resignation.
"You're not listening any more, are you?" Molly says.
"I'm getting nostalgic," I say. "I like it here and I'm a bit strapped for cash right now. How about I move in with you until I get back on my feet again?"
"What?" she says, her complexion, always pale, going several shades paler.
"Iain and I are very alike, as you said, so you wouldn't even notice there were two of us. When one came into a room the other would leave. That way you'd only ever get one prat at a time."
"I need a whisky," she says, standing up and clutching her forehead.
"You don't drink," I say.
"Only in emergencies," she says and totters theatrically out of the door.
