'Ahm goin hame.'

'Ready to roll, ma'am.'

'Thanks, Gerald.  Just a minute.  Kate, turn round.  I'm serious.  This is serious.  Do you want to stay here for the rest of your life?  Well, do you?  Kate: what do you want to be when you grow up?'

'…Hairdresser.'

'Do you think you'll get to be one?'

'Mibby.'

'Kate, do you know of all the other things you could be?'

'…Ma pal Gale wants tae be a air hostess.'

'Mon, Katie.  Ahm freezin.'

'There's nothing wrong with being a hairdresser or an air stewardess, Kate, but I think there might be a lot of other things you could be, if you wanted.  If you knew.  Let me talk to your mother.  May I talk to her?'

'Katie, ahm fuckin freezin, so ah am.'

'Missis…you're no a bad wummin, are ye?'

'No, Kate.  I'm not a saint, and I've used my share of Irish pennies in my past, but I'm not a bad woman.  Am I a bad woman, Gerald, would you say?'

'Certainly not, ma'am.  Always been very nice to me.'

'Katie, mon…'sfuckin brass monkeys oot here, so it is.'

'Ye could gie us a lift, then.  Zat okay, aye?'

'Really?  Well, yes.'

'Aye.  Come oan, Simon.  We're get tin a ride home in this wummin's braw big car.  Wipe yir feet.'

'Eh?'

And that is how I met Mrs Elizabeth Telman, a Level Two executive in the Business, one rainy Saturday afternoon in the autumn of 1968, outside Coatbridge, to the east of Glasgow.

Mrs Telman was one of those people who always seemed about six inches taller than she really was, to me.  Even now when I think of her, she appears in my memory as a tall, elegant woman, as lithe and slim as my mother was wee and dumpy, yet the two were within a couple of inches of each other in height and not really that different in build.  I suppose Mrs Telman just held herself straighter.  She had long, raven