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The first was to offer him a voucher for a free tea or coffee, with a choice of croissant, toast or scone, after his busy morning of medical tests.

And the second was a word of advice that got slightly lost in translation and briefly led to the Midlands man thinking he’d just been the recipient of the greatest prescription for long life that any man had ever been given.

The nurse, it should be said, was Asian but after many years in her profession and in Dublin, her accent was completely comprehensible – unless, it seems, you’re a resident of Ireland’s Hidden Heartlands.

“You can go as soon as you’ve had a snack – but when you get home, you’re to drink loads and loads of water,” she told him.

Only he heard her telling him that he was to drink loads and loads of porter.

And even from the other side of a curtain, you could sense the sheer delight in his voice as he thought about heading home and then straight out to the pub to down his own bodyweight in Guinness…purely for medicinal purposes.

“Wat-er, wat-er,” the nurse interjected, utterly shattering those thirty seconds of unadulterated joy she had unwittingly bestowed on our........

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