The death of Anthony Clare was reported this morning and so, stuck in bed, I was unwittingly cast back twenty years to a celebrity lecture on sexual abuse and schizophrenia that I attended one frosty morning in north London. I recall leaving the lecture hall with the impression of a man in dialogue less with his profession and more with the media. I then recalled my excitement as this passing observation incited a rather frightened blonde into arguing Clare's defence. I bought her coffee that day and before the working week was over, we'd slept together. I remember her as training in psychiatry and having, in particular, an intense interest in sexual abuse and mental illness that made me wonder, as I held her spasmodic back in my hands, that perhaps she had decided, in a somewhat tragic manner, that random sex was both a symptom and the salvation to her condition, as underwritten by the towering authority of the little Dubliner. A year later I bumped her into her at a Jung symposia and noted, with quiet gratification, that she did not recognise me.