Shortly after that we were joined by an older man witha walking stick, a dicky leg and a gruff manner. He looked darkly at us all, nodded the most tinily precise of acknowledgements, and fell heavily into his seat, where he spent the next twenty minutes manoeuvring his leg this way and that, as if positioning a heavy piece of furniture. I gathered that these people were all longterm residents.

 A sitcom came on called My Neighbour is a Darkie. I suppose that wasn't its actual title, but that was the gist of it that there was something richly comic in the notion of having black people living next door. It was full of lines like 'Good lord, Gran, there's a coloured chappie in your cupboard!' and 'Well, I couldn't see him in the dark, could I?' It was hopelessly moronic. The baldheaded guy beside me laughed until he was wiping tears from his eyes, and from under the towel there came occasional snorts of amusement, but the colonel, I noticed, never laughed. He simply stared at me, as if trying to remember what dark event from his past I was associated with. Every time I looked over, his eyes were fixed on me. It was unnerving.

 A starburst briefly filled the screen, indicating an interval of adverts, which the baldheaded man used to quiz me in a friendly but confusingly disconnected way as to who I was and how I had fallen into their lives. He was delighted to find that I was American.

'I've always wanted to see America,' he said. 'Tell me, do you have Woolworth's there?'

 'Well, actually, Woolworth's is American.' 'You don't say!' he said. 'Did you hear that, Colonel? Woolworth's is American.' The colonel seemed unmoved by this intelligence. 'And what about cornflakes?' 'I beg your pardon?' 'Do you have cornflakes in America?' 'Well, actually, they're American, too.' 'Never!'

 I smiled weakly, and begged my legs to stand me up and take me out of there, but my lower body seemed oddly inert.