Stone Walls do not a prison make; nor iron bars a cage - Richard Lovelace (1618-1657)

My fat friend from Knaresborough - who, to protect me from his animosity, I shall call Lewis Watson - is living in a private nursing home. Well, that's how it is described in Yellow Pages, but he has likened it to Colditz Castle. Not that he was ever an inmate of that 'escape-proof' prison, or any other of the lesser-known PoW camps.

He was never 'bagged', and survived World War Two unscathed as a captain in an infantry regiment that had battled its way across North Africa and into Italy, via Sicily. But he knew several Army officers who had spent time in various camps and, from what he says they told him, they seem to have had no worse a time than he is now having in an expensive nursing home. Who's kidding whom?

It's Lew's 80th birthday tomorrow, which means he is one of those people who is likely to know what they were doing on the day President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated.

Lew was celebrating his 43rd birthday, drinking Scotch with business colleagues, in a posh pub in Leeds, when their convivial evening was disturbed by a radio news bulletin reporting that Lew's favourite US president had been shot dead in Dallas.

Thirty-seven years on, Lew's only pleasures - apart from eating - are reading the recently-deceased Patrick O'Brien's stirring sea stories and the cases of the long-dead Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, or watching, when he's able, the investigations of DCI Endeavour Morse on television, while imbibing copious draughts of what he calls "the best thing to have come out of Scotland".

Now Lew has lost another hero; Morse is mort, and his creator, Colin Dexter, insists that he is to stay that way. Mind you, however good a detective he was, I found it hard to believe that the Thames Valley Police would let him continue serving much past 60.

Knowing that Lew would be upset by the death of Morse, and anticipating that he would probably fall asleep after overdosing on Glenfiddich - taken to ease his grief - and miss half the programme, I taped Morse's last case, with the intention of sending it to Lew as a birthday present, to watch in the residents' lounge when his period of mourning was over. However, his communiqus from the 'castle' suggest the other inmates, I mean residents, are not fans of Morse, or even Frost. The men would rather watch cricket, golf and snooker, which puts him at odds with them. As for the women residents, no matter what's on the box, they prefer to talk incessantly about their ailments, the weather, how their great-grandchildren are doing at school, and the best method of making Yorkshire puddings.

There'd be no point in Lew buying a VCR for his room; he could never operate it. He's a complete technophobe, who has difficulty operating any technical gadget invented since 1950; even an electric toaster is a challenge for his technical know-how.

So what do you do in an old folks' home at 80, when you've sold your house, your car and most of your possessions to pay your fees; have no relatives and few friends to visit you; none of your fellow residents want to play chess; you're useless at cards and crosswords; there's little you like on television, and your favourite authors are either dead or retired?

To give him an interest in life, I once jokingly suggested that he form an escape committee and assume the role of 'Big X'. At first Lew was enthused over the idea, seeing it as a form of escapism from his dreary existence; he even asked me to send him 'Red Cross parcels', enclosing tools and document making materials. But he was soon to ask the rhetorical question: "Where would I go when I left the tunnel?"