'Do you smoke?'

'Of course she doesn't,' said her mother, with a face like a taxidermied hamster. I smiled politely but looked pointedly at Apricot, who was fiddling with her nose stud and trying to read a text on her phone. 'Do you?' I asked, in Waffen-SS tones. 'No,' quoth she, looking sideways at her mother.

'Ah,' I said, 'but have you ever smoked?'

'No,' she said hiding her yellow fingernail, 'not never not ever, and anyway the nurse asked me that last time and that was only last week.'

'I know,' I said, but that was in another QOF year and you might have changed your mind. 'Can I do your BP?'

'Look, doctor,' said Mrs Posh, 'this isn't why we've come.'

'Bear with me,' I said archly, conjuring up the new patient template and opening the RAGE questionnaire. Actually it was a CAGE questionnaire, but by the second question rage seemed more appropriate.

'Of course she doesn't drink', roared Mrs Posh, while Apricot checked there were no tell-tale Oddbins receipts poking out of her bag, 'she doesn't drink and she doesn't smoke and she certainly doesn't ...'

'Chlamydia kit?' I asked winningly, waving my Tempt-a-Teenager pack of free banana flavoured condoms and preparing to notch one up on the latest PCT audit.

Mrs Posh pulled the kind of face I last saw on a wall beneath a pair of antlers - angry, but fixed - so I tried to rescue the consultation with a bit of HPV vaccine promotion, tucking 15 leaflets in beside Apricot's Hot magazine and pointing out that it was most useful before sexual activity.

'For goodness sake, doctor. All we wanted was her passport photo signed.'

I looked at the wealth of information I now held on her daughter, most of it almost certainly untrue. 'I'm sorry', I said, 'I don't know her well enough.'

• Catch up with Mary's Road to Revalidation blog here