There are manic passages in this book. For instance: “I discovered I was sat next to Geoffrey from the old TV programme Rainbow on the train from Clapham Junction to Waterloo. He looked as pale and ill as I did. Maybe Geoffrey was mentally ill as well. That was such a pity. Zippy, George and Bungle hadn’t been real people and all that time Geoffrey hadn’t known. No wonder he was so depressed now that he had found out.”

The author has done all of us a service by writing about how it feels, not just to be manic depressive, but to have a life of fraught and edgy encounters with just about everyone.

“Doctors just didn’t listen to me. They didn’t have enough time, there were too many patients, they had too much paperwork.”

A few more books like this (thanks to Chipmunkapublishing, which is dedicated to getting people with mental health problems into print) and maybe we’ll all be listening.