In response to the critical rough-housing of his newest play, Peter Jameson fell into a rut of deep despair. It was a familiar rut, comforting in a way; a rut which over the years had been molded by the contours of his frequently falling body. He lay on his bed, and stared intently at the ceiling. Where did one go from here?

Peter lived in a one bedroom council flat, on the third floor of an unimposing five storey tenement block. What small living space there was had been eroded with the passing years by stacks of hoarded furniture, old newspapers and abandoned DIY projects.

Once upon a time, when Patty was alive, the flat was kept in an immaculate state, or "party ready", for Patty was gregarious, big-hearted and exceedingly popular. Each week she and Peter would entertain at least once, and sometimes even twice or three times: large, simple dinners of goat curry, or lasagna, or shepherds pie, to which a dozen guests would attend.

Peter and Patty had only four chairs, and the kitchen table only really sat six at most, but room was always made, somehow. Wives sat on their husbands' laps; husbands occasionally sat on their wives' laps. Once, even, the kitchen window was flung open on a warm evening in early Autumn to allow a guest to perch on the sill, with his feet in the sink. That dinner had seen no fewer than fifteen crowded into the little kitchen for a gigantic risotto, served from a large mop bucket which Patty had spent a fortnight sanitising for that precise purpose.

Patty, a lady of substantive girth, with personality and humour to match, was beloved by all in the neighbourhood, and her invitations were seized upon jealously. Everybody knew her. Peter, by contrast, was socially rather awkward, and although he enjoyed the dinners, the parties and the dinner parties (and also the party dinners, held annually for local paid-up Liberal Democrats, of whom there were sometimes one or two), he enjoyed them as an admiring wallflower in a greenhouse filled with elegant, creeping wisteria, and boisterous lily blooms.

With Patty's departure to that "banquet hall in the sky" (the version of the afterlife which she had propounded was a raucous, gluttonous affair, a sort of Valhalla for rotund social democrats), following a mercifully brief battle with complications arising from diabetes, the parties stopped. Peter had neither heart nor will to continue her legacy of entertaining, and retreated from public life.

Patty's other love, besides eating with company, was the theatre. Their first date, as giddy undergraduates of Leeds University, some thirty years before, had been to the West Yorkshire Playhouse to watch a production of Waiting for Godot, which Peter secretly found incredibly tedious. 

"They just wait!" he had complained to a friend the next day. "They literally stand around waiting for some fellow who doesn't turn up, and there are about three lines of dialogue repeated over and over...On the upside, the storyline is easy to follow because nothing happens." 

But over the years which followed, what had begun as a means of courtship became an adopted and authentic love of Peter's. Skepticism gave way to an appreciation of the theatrical art form. He became an ardent fan of Arden; a devotee of Dewhurst, and a tourist of almost every theatre of note in the country. The assiduously collected and annotated programmes piled up in towers, firstly in his bedroom, and at last in their bedroom.

An enthusiasm for all things thespian was likewise manifested in Peter's and and Patty's support for community amateur dramatics, the quality of which in Merton had a tendency to vary between very poor, and quite poor.

It was in the company of such motley dramatists that Peter was first inspired to pen a script himself, in the mid-1990s. His first attempt, a re-working of the traditional Easter Passion, in which the case against Jesus is thrown out of the Sanhedrin on a technicality, was dismissed by Charlie, his godson, who had offered to proofread it.

"The sacrilege is actually the least of its problems," explained Charlie, who worked in television. "The 'court scene' satire is quite laboured, and the storyline kind of fizzles out once we discover that Jesus's lawyer is actually the leper he healed two years before in Samaria."

Peter, whose attitude to criticism was healthy, and borne of much practice, asked what he might do to improve the script.

"Make it snappier - cut some of the dialogue. Sex it up a bit," replied Charlie. Peter was not familiar with the phrase 'sex it up', and took the advice quite literally. The re-re-worked Passion script now climaxed, in more ways than one, with a love scene between Jesus and Pontius Pilate.

Sacrilege now became the greatest of its problems, and the play was promptly and quietly jettisoned by the Church of the Holy Trinity from its Eastertide schedule. 

Patty had done her best to comfort Peter following the disappointment. If truth be told, she had had her own reservations about the subject matter of Peter's play, but had thought it best to not obstruct the creative process. She was firmly of the view that people should be allowed to make mistakes - for otherwise, how should they learn?  

It was, tragically, about that time when her own dietary mistakes came back to haunt her, and acute renal failure saw her movement drastically curtailed to wherever her dialysis machine could be dragged. Her death, months later, had a quite understandably profound impact on Peter. Gone was the joy from his life. But in another way, too, was he affected. Before her soul was plucked and carried off by Valkyries (unlike the pall bearers at her funeral they suffered no strain, for a soul - and an innocent one at that - weighs nothing) she had urged Peter, who kept a vigil at her hospital bedside, to persevere with his writing. Or that, at least, is how he interpreted her coded blinking.

"I'll make you proud, Patty," he promised her, fighting back tears and squeezing her enormous and beautifully soft hands. She died a short while later.

Soon after her funeral he began his relentless and somewhat ill-fated campaign to write and direct a masterpiece.