Grit

On our return from Millport yesterday, my son decided - in an unobserved experiment - to stick a fragment of Largs station plaform up his nose. He announced this a few minutes later with an air of detachment, if not outright self-satisfaction. He was in no obvious discomfort - apart from that caused by my sudden outburst of exasperation, but he resisted all my attempts to examine him closely.

I let it go. There wasn't much I could do on a moving train anyway and by the time we got home the incident was almost forgotten. He wasn't even sure it was there anymore.

But that evening his mother - dutifully informed of the incident - resumed my investigations and it was clear that the right nostril was tender and did not care to be touched. She phoned and it was agreed he would have to go to casualty in the morning.

Honours fell to me and - after brushing aside an unreasonable request (I mean, it wouldn't have conveyed quite the right impression to race up to the Emergency entrance on his scooter) - we walked to Yorkhill and presented ourselves to the duty nurse.

When we were finally invited through to the consulting room, the doctor peered through a specially constructed hand-held instrument that revealed the foreign object. And quite large it was too, she observed, if not quite as large as the drawing Jack had earlier sketched out on her pad. In fact she was - in a rather glorious digression - quite interested in its geological composition. 'Granite,' she pronounced, and began to describe the sparkle of the mica crystals she could see through her device.

But she must have sensed this was not the time or place, and in no time at all, she had ripped open a packet of sterilized tweezers and removed the villain, popping it in a urine specimen tube so we could take it away and show all our friends.