As tensions in their marriage escalated (Mary Doll spending too much time on the Internet), Rab flew to Miami, where he had two drunken weeks in the home of a wealthy software developer. The details are unclear but --- reputedly --- the luxury house was raided by cops looking for crack cocaine. Rab fled the scene and disappeared into the night. Some shrewd-thinking chat room pals of Mary Doll tracked him down to Atlanta, where they found him unconscious in a bus station. No respectable airline would take him aboard without a laptop, so Mary Doll had to pay $7000 to get him home.

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He turned up drunk, dirty, and disheveled, with a "Hi, honey, I'm home" attitude, but couldn't remember the keycode for the front door. He kicked the door in anger, so she called the cops and told them that Rab was a psychotic drug addict (he isn't) and that he intended to assault her new workstation (he didn't). Rab has a congenial relationship with some of the cops here, mostly because their wives also spend all night on the Web and there has been a significant decline in cop sex. So, they shrugged off Mary Doll's dire warnings and drove Rab around town, looking for somewhere he could bed down. At 2 a.m. in Podunk, that ain't an easy task, so they offered him the comfort of a cell for the night. Next morning he admitted himself to the hospital for detox. They threw him out after two days, when he attacked an uninterruptible power supply that kept beeping all night in the hallway.

Mary Doll quickly came to the conclusion that she had to get as far away from him as possible, so on New Year's Eve she flew to Boston to stay at the home of a friend she found on the Internet. Risky or what? Turned out just fine though (he used to be chief mechanic at Website Garage, before they were acquired by The Borg) and Mary Doll stayed there for a month until she moved to her mother's house in Cupertino. She's still there, with no intention of returning to Podunk, because of cheap DSL service in California.

Meanwhile, Rab left the hospital and returned to the cottage, where he embarked on the Mother Of All Drinking Binges. At Mary Doll's PGP-encrypted request, I called in most days to check on the welfare of her floppies and CDRs. One lunchtime I found the front door swinging open, a glass pane shattered on the ground inside and outside the house. There was an amazing amount of blood all over the porch, with splashes on the walls. A blanket lay saturated with blood on the floor. I readied myself for whatever grim discovery awaited and ventured inside the cottage, but no one was there --- just the floppies. By the time I had walked back to the front door, uniformed police were at the gate. They asked me who I was and what was my relationship to Rab C. McSnortle? I had just replied to that question when the CID appeared and immediately sealed off the house for fingerprinting and scene-of-crime investigation.

It transpires that Rab fell in the house FIRSTLY, putting his head through a glass panel in the door, lacerating his forehead/nose and knocking himself out. Coming to, he was doubly bemused to see how much blood he had lost and, still bleeding heavily, decided to down a couple of pints at the nearest pub, to replace the lost fluid. Barman! A pint of Type-O lager, please! He fell again at the pub doorstep and had to be given mouth-to-mouth after hitting the back of his head off the kerb.