1086He was told this unfortunate quote in the course of his job as a reporter for the Sentinel newspaper in Stoke-on-Trent, when interviewing the mother of a girl who was about to undergo major surgery. The quote was, he said, rather unexpected and certainly unforgettable (he wrote out on the sketchbook how the conversation started).

He was then asked to stand next to the payphone in the Old Brown Jug pub in Newcastle-under-Lyme, symbolic as he heard his quote via a telephone. Without prompting, he picked up the receiver and gazed at it.