“Your egg this morning—was it satisfactory? This time I cooked it myself.” Simon lies. To do otherwise would be unpardonably rude. “Delicious, thank you,” he says. In reality the egg had the consistency of the excised tumour a fellow medical student once slipped into his pocket for a joke—both hard and spongy at the same time. It takes a perverse talent to maltreat an egg so completely.
