The Doctor

The Royal Marsden hospital with its tasteful interiors and its panoramic views of central London tries visibly hard to make its patients feel cared for by the best specialists in the country. It's what all the brochures said, a stack of leaflets insisting that if you wanted to breeze through your treatment like you would through a holiday cruise in the Caribbean, all you had to do was check yourself into the oncology department of London's finest cancer hospital.

( Sitting in a chair in the fourth floor patient common room of this posh establishment . . . )