Where it all started / finished

The health visitor was a guy, quite a sexy guy in a gay way. You can find him on facebook if you know the name, a comical sort of name and uncommon enough to be unique, unlikely the rest of the lexicon of male names, each of which has apparently been appropriated by 300 bald, square-shaped Americans. I grew quite fond of him in the weeks that were to follow, when he came round to my home in the company of one young lady or another, who wittered while he sat on my sofa and stared, hopefully feeling guiltily responsible for inflicting this shit on me. I became familiar with the gluey sheen spray-painted all over his face, perhaps to stick on the permastubble - a look that suggested "park bench" rather than "caring health professional".

He spoke then as ever in a breathy whisper like Baccara breathing "Yes Sir, I can boogie." The expression of his face and voice said, "I care. I'm worried about you." His actual words were, "I think... that you've lost your identity."

He had just done this amazing card trick where by he had given me an exact read-out of my state of mind based on some outward clues and his own acuity. I was unhappy; I was crying out for help; I had lost my identity. He was off-track with some of this. Only that morning the baby and I had trundled happily around a kid's zoo, scoffed some tomato pasta and most excitingly of all spotted Prof. Brian Cox in the park, whereupon I had pushed the baby into his vicinity and taken a couple of photos with the two of them in the same frame. But like a child in the courtroom I haplessly agreed: yes, yes, I am unhappy.

Are you a danger to yourself, he asked, and more importantly (he didn't say it in words but he said it with emphasis and tone) to your children? From there on in, in the midst of social service referrals, psychiatric chitchats and all the rest of it, every talking head I encountered was clearly intervening for the sake of the children. Don't get me wrong. Good for them, fair play and all that. But all in all they rubbed and chipped away at my identity until what was left of it was gone.