Look away now anyone who’s known me a while – you’ll have heard this drivel before. Everyone else, well, let me tell you about my doctor. In the early days of living in London, a dampish basement flat in Kentish Town, I was often ill and almost always miserable. Confronted with adult life and having a job, as well as being skint and lonely in a London that seemed to be stuck in a three-year winter, I had to get myself a doctor, the better to provide my suspicious work with a sick note to prove I really had had flu again for the third time that year. The doctor I ended up with operated (not literally) out of what was little more than a broom cupboard in Tufnell Park. The doctor’s name was… wonderfully… Dr Colonel Fleming.

You couldn’t make an appointment, you just had to wait for hours and hours with the poorly and dispossessed of Tufnell Park in a tiny window-less waiting room. But you couldn’t be bored because the decor which Colonel Fleming had selected for this practise was intricate and eccentric. Huge pot plants twisted and curled, desperate to find some light, making the place feel like a minuscule prehistoric jungle. Colonel Fleming had put up humorous cartoons and random press cuttings. He had three clocks above the door to his surgery set to different international time zones (with hand-written place names beneath) and – most unsettling – a large collection of gonks had been attached to the wall by their hair.

After hours of waiting in this mind-bending environment you were eventually summoned in with – yes – a hacking cough. Dr Colonel Fleming was sort of Orson-Welles-esque. The sort of doctor who makes you more worried about his health than yours. He was from South Africa, and obviously nearing the end of his doctoring career. The whole of his office was covered floor to ceiling with novelty items with pharmaceutical branding – random stuff sent out to promote pills, everything from model planes to giant watches. In the centre of this mayhem Dr Fleming turned out to be warm, sympathetic and not reluctant to prescribe something that would make work believe you. For many years after I moved to south London I had my health-based post sent to my friend’s flat in Finsbury Park, and travelled the hour or so up on the tube every time I was dying of this or that. Until one day the receptionist asked me point blank if I still lived in the area, and I had to confess I didn’t. Dr Fleming sadly explained that I’d have to find another doctor nearer where I lived, and I never saw his fabulous medicinal grotto again.

Why am I bothering you with this? Well I’ve been looking at images from a new book called Basement Stories, a set of images taken of the lairs of New York building superintendents. They work and often live in the basements of big apartment buildings, looking after the running of the place, and this book examines the ways in which these workers – often from immigrant backgrounds – have decorated these subterranean spaces. With their plastic pot plants and rag-bag styling they reminded me of Dr Fleming’s gaff. A germ magnet, certainly, but a waiting room that gave you plenty of food for thought.