Disclaimer and etc.: See Chapter 1

NB – Yes there are a lot of Author's Notes; I am aware that Sherlock is very British based and I hope that the notes make things clearer (!) for non-British readers to understand the context of who is doing what and why. I also realise I forgot one from Chapter 1: 'Sweeney Todd' is Cockney Rhyming Slang for 'on your own'.

For 'The Hobbet'

Holmesian Logic

Part I

Chapter 2

"Thanks, Mrs R." he nodded and got up himself after Lestrade left; Mrs R. would never be so rude as to start clearing away his table until he'd left, but she needed the space and the crockery.

The 'Great British' Olympics construction crew that had been going at it round the corner for the past three weeks – and which ostensibly started work at six o'clock every morning – would soon be piling in for their 'Great British' full English Breakfast; Mrs R. needed all her equipment and attention to focus on the horde of Poles, Latvians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Czechs and Slavs trying to communicate their breakfast orders to a woman whose mother tongue was Gujarati.

Yesterday one of the heavy-booted, yellow 'hi-viz' jacket clad lads, a cheerful looking blond in his early twenties, had actually wished him good morning in a genuine Sarf Lund'n'r 'Del Boy Trotter'accent and he'd nearly dropped his tea mug in shock. A few minutes' general chit-chat with the youth who was indeed one of the barely handful of local native English labourers across the entire Olympics construction 'circus' had demonstrated that the kid was wasted in construction. The poor kid had been one of the millions of poor-but-bright utterly failed by the State Comprehensive system that amounted to indoctrination and crowd control rather than education and been skipping school 'navvying' for cash-in-hand since he was fourteen - the younger man had picked up a fluency across several of the most popular immigrant languages that would have been the envy of top UN translators – he confided it was how he regularly 'got jobs' that in practical reality were only open to Poles and Eastern Europeans, and he got 'an 'igher whack, mate' as he usually translated between the various nationalities on a building site without having to put in a lot of ''eavy work once they twig I can talk the lingo to everyone else, like'.

He drew in a deep breath of acrid exhaust fumes and damp from last night's rain, mingled with burned rubber, a discarded takeaway, aerosol spray and sundry other whiffs. Before the split his former sister-in-law Clara had wondered why Harry had vetoed resettling somewhere twee and bucolic like the Cotswolds or Berkshire – as far as Londoners were concerned, real air had a distinctive tang as strong as 1970s 'aftershave', and occasionally the consistency of a casserole. The air's too thin, anywhere else.

Speaking of thin, Sherlock's non-existent 'patience' would be worn to a nub if he didn't sort out Mrs Humphrey and get back within the hour. Most of the time he felt just like Man Friday to Robinson Crusoe – only without the advantages that the real MF had had of living on a sun-drenched paradise tropical island abounding with ready-to-hand juicy fruit, crystalline pools and a small, helpful tribe of largely nubile young lovelies all happy to make him look good to the beardo-weirdo hapless, clueless Crusoe –

Something small, round and very hard was jabbed into the base of his spine as a voice hissed into his ear from behind, "Consorting with the enemy, hey? Court martial offence; still punished with death by firing squad, Watson."

"That's Captain Watson to you." He turned towards the mouth of the alley and faced the loiterer so the small but impressive .32 calibre Smith & Wesson was pressed lightly against his stomach not his spine; this gunman might shoot him in the back, but would never look his victims in the face to do so. "What are you doing here, Seb?"

"Ah, 'Captain, My Captain'," 'Seb' taunted, showing a lot of expensively pearlescent white teeth in what some might have mistaken for a smile as the gun swiftly disappeared into the pocket of his overcoat. "Last I checked, I was Major Moran to you. And last I also checked the silly sheeple still believe this is a free country so why shouldn't I look up an old Fusilier?"

"No, I mean, what are you doing here?" he spread his palms to indicate the grey, grim day in London generally, not this particular spot of it. "Why aren't you in the Penthouse Suite at the Atlantis Hotel in Dubai or Monte Carlo? You mercenaries earned a fortune in Iraq. That watch is Piaget – and platinum – that suit you're wearing is handmade tailored-to-measure Singapore silk and that overcoat is pure Peruvian vicuña wool which retails at three thousand pounds per square yard, and I haven't counted your shoes, that exorbitantly expensive aftershave – you were ripped off there, by the way – and whatever 'product' you slathered all over your hair this morning…and which I would advise you not to light a cigarette anywhere near."

The mentioned hair was combed back, and the hue was a uniformly 'Bourneville' Dark Chocolate brown all over, unlike natural hair colour which was a myriad different shades of the general colour, meaning it was either dyed or the gel absorbed sunlight so it was evenly one shade – I have been hanging around with Sherlock way too long.

Moran's dark eyes matched his hair colour, and had a superficially charming brightness, unless you were astute enough to notice that the 'emotions' were shallow, like a puddle, rather than anything life-sustaining like a pond or a lake. Again, superficially his round face looked 'wholesomely handsome', like a twenty-something Christopher Reeve or that bloke who had played Superman in the reboot movie, Superman Returns – Brendan…no, Brandon Routh…or you could put him side by side with Jim Moriarty and try and spot the difference…

Now, Seb smirked at this recitation of wealth indicators, taking in the well-washed jeans, serviceable chain-store check shirt and black hip coat, where the only leather were oval patches on the shoulders and elbows, like a coal miner's jacket, "Wishing you'd been smart enough to join those of us getting something worthwhile for being in that sandpit flea-hole?"

"No," he answered honestly and his pocket began to beep. Taking out the smart phone – his smart phone now; the Harry Watson from Clara xxx engraving obsolete in more ways than one, which always caused him a tiny pang of guilt because he much preferred his sister-in-law to his sister.

He saw that it wasn't Sherlock; happily, it was Mrs Humphrey advising she was en route back home but would be about ten minutes late; which meant if he got his arse in gear now they should arrive at the same time.

"Back at Barts, are we? I heard about your little ta-ta in Gandahar, and being invalided out," Seb made it sound as though getting severely wounded in a Taliban terrorist ambush was merely on a par with a paper cut. "Now, if you'd quit all that duty, honour, sacrifice crap to be a private contractor during the Iraqi 'Reconstruction'" he grinned as he made the ubiquitous quotation marks with his forefingers, "you'd be retired in the Maldives and you wouldn't be eking out your Army pension tutoring the next generation of Dr Shipmans all just to afford some poky bedsit in the world's dirtiest and most expensive city."

"You didn't quit, you resigned your commission a half-step ahead of being court-martialled for a laundry list of war crimes and set up a freelance mercenary op in Baghdad," he corrected, unconcerned as Seb's face darkened with an anger that made him look harsher, uglier and truer to his real nature. "And I'm not back at Bart's. This is a private client."

"I don't believe it! You, a class traitor, never! Dr Watson of Harley Street: abandoning your working-class inverted snobbery? A private GP…" Seb looked him up and down again as if double-checking him for hidden designer branding or tailor-made attire and not finding it: nope, sensible store-bought 'Yeoman's Outdoor' type boots, non-branded jeans well-worn from dark blue to pale/white by repeated washing, lumberjack style mass-production checked shirt also well-faded from repeated laundering and above all that shoulder-and-elbow black leather 'patched' coal-miner type jacket that was defiantly working-class in look and off the peg in manufacture, a retro-style mimicking those that had been practically de rigueur outer wear for any mining Union official strolling a picket line or mouthing off to a news journalist in some anti-Government rant on TV during the many discontents of the 1970s and 80s.

"I'm not in private practice. I'm a…Consulting Physician."

"What's a Consulting Physician?"

Your guess is as good as mine, mate, I'm making the job up as I go because I've not long since invented it. Yet another thing to lay at Sherlock Holmes' door, because the notion must have been kicking around his subconscious ever since a certain sociopath airily confided during that immortal initial cab ride that he was the world's first consulting detective because he'd invented the job.

Although, in fairness, it was the breakdown of his short-lived romance with Sarah Sawyer that had led to him unintentionally first taking up the role and then frantically improvising his own little niche at it…Gah, Sherlock Holmes was everything mum would have complained to dad about being a 'bad influence on that boy, you mark my words Harry Watson…'

He had to force his hand to move to grasp the door handle. It wasn't that he didn't want to see Sarah. He did – especially as he was so grateful that after that whole Tong mess with the hairpin she'd actually quite serenely been willing to carry on their budding romance.

It was nothing short of a minor miracle that she hadn't instead taken out a restraining order and an injunction on him before putting herself into therapy for the trauma of their first 'proper' date and suing him through the civil courts to cover the costs – his own brief, useless therapist had charged him two hundred quid an hour until he realised she was more out of her depth than a nun at a BSDM party…

And Sarah was even taking Sherlock in her stride, which meant she should be a shoe-in for some sort of medal; as he himself had no doubt unwisely snapped at Mycroft last week, when the elder Holmes brother was being particularly pesky and pushy about yet another 'national security matter' (my arse).

But his being a locum at her surgery was just…not working out was putting it mildly. Half the time he was falling asleep in that poky, airless consulting room because he'd been up until the small hours, chasing around after a manic fizzing Sherlock, or in the middle of some crime scene/police briefing – read sniping session – between Sherlock and Greg Lestrade or Sherlock, Lestrade and Sundry Supporting Cast like Sally Donovan, DCI Anderson, Dimmock and assorted others, such as the other two senior members of Lestrade's team - Inspector Toby Gregson and, oh yeah, Inspector 'Al' Jones.

Sally Donovan had given him the Jones story on the QT – Inspector Jones was as Welsh as his name, and his hatred of one S. Holmes, Consulting Detective was vitriolic – "'the freak, sensitive as ever, declaimed in front of half the Met that Al Jones' real first name wasn't Albert as he had led them to believe but Athelney.'"

Her explanation had cleared up poor Jones' attitude, although neither Sherlock nor Mycroft could cast the first stone in that regard – if he ever met 'mummy' Holmes, he'd challenge her on what she was thinking (or not) when she dreamed up those two monikers…and if he ever met 'daddy' he'd ask him what he was thinking (or not) letting his wife lumber their kids with names guaranteed to give them a complex, facial tics and a host of neuroses. John Hamish Watson was boring, but at least didn't cause a lifetime of psychological trauma.

However, he avoided Donovan where he could – her own contemptuous nickname for Sherlock and her spiteful public announcements to all and sundry that 'the freak is here…' were unprofessional and childish; even had Sherlock Holmes been a stranger to him, her attitude would have been unacceptable in its petulant unprofessionalism. These days she seemed to have tarred him with the same brush, for ignoring her warning to avoid Sherlock Holmes, which to be honest, was probably extremely wise, but then prudence had never been his virtue. He'd been reliably informed by someone in a position to know that he had no saving graces, certainly not as either a brother, or a son…

And the other half of the time he was just so…bored…which was way too close to Sherlock's casual disregard for others. But there was no getting away from it - he'd left his school's Upper Sixth with four 'A' Levels straight for Welbeck Military Medical College at 18 and been transferred to Bart's at 20 and deployed in various euphemistically termed 'theatres of operation' in a non-medical sense from the age of 23, doing his intercalated additional degree as a 'practical course' in the most extreme sense of the phrase. His entire experience of 'medical practice' had always been in situations that qualified for descriptors like 'frantic', 'desperate', 'gory', 'bloody', 'heroic' 'nightmarish', 'primitive', 'frontline', 'battlefield', 'violent' and 'just plain insane'.

An endless merry-go-round of in-growing toenails, 'migraines' where he could smell the beer breath from across the room and 'I need another sick note for me back' by some benefit scrounger who'd never lifted anything heavier than a pen to sign his dole claim didn't exactly rivet the attention of a doctor who hadn't considered it a proper medical consultation unless there was tracer fire whining about a foot overhead and the smell of cordite in a morning.

And then there was the time wasted…talk about the En-Aitch-Ess being in a mess. Sarah had been apologetic, but this was what they got paid for by the Dee-Oh-Aitch, a.k.a. the Department of Health, or the Department of Hell; not seeing people who were sick and facilitating access to the best and newest treatments possible on the basis of illness not ability to pay, oh no, they got paid great whacking fees to target 'lifestyle' issues where they were 'incentivised' – bribed to you and me – to get as many folk on lifetime prescriptions of statins, blood pressure meds, nicotine patches and so on; it was a constant repeat-rinse-repeat cycle as they ran around metaphorically wiping the arses of people too lazy to use their common sense and eat sensibly, stop smoking, avoid drugs, drink moderately and actually work for a living, which would provide all the daily healthy exercise they'd need for a typical adult.

Sarah's surgery nutritionist, Chloe Reddish, earned forty-two thousand a year and spent her days toeing the political line about too much salt, too much fat, too much sugar and reciting the bollocks scam that was BMI. Outside the office, Chloe's delicatessen butcher husband cooked her a full English breakfast every morning, she had thick, rich, yellow Jersey/Guernsey milk, cream, butter and cheese imported direct from the Channel Islands, shook a ton of salt over everything she ate, had beef dripping most days for lunch, and was a tea belly who had pint mug 'with three sugars, please, John if you're mashing' every hour on the hour. She was a size ten, with flawless porcelain skin, more curves than the Nurburg Ring and was as healthy as those hideously expensive organic oxen her husband sold.

But brutal facts were brutal facts: He needed the locum's salary – even with Mrs Hudson's special rate, his half of the rent took ninety percent of his Army pension, so if he wanted to buy food, clothes, medicine and pay utilities he needed a second source of income that was at least a few hundred quid a week – especially as it had quickly become obvious that Sherlock Holmes' 'lucky' flatmate was also going to have to be his secretary, aide-de-camp, major-domo and general 'Fix-It' man. In short deal with all the 'trivial' matters – like buying food, making sure the phone/heating/water/broadband wasn't being routinely cut-off for non-payment and all that boring stuff that most people called the necessities of living.

But every day it got harder and harder to push open this door, to walk into the surgery and paste a fake, social smile on his face and grit his teeth against yelling a few hard home truths as these self-absorbed, self-obsessed, self-centred –

The commotion over the road had actually made him jump and he'd hurried over so fast he almost fell over himself. He'd helped the amply proportioned matron who'd had a fall, and kept his promise to do a follow-up call the next day, finding his cab pulling up at Kensington & Chelsea's most exclusive address – Campden Hill Square.

But on the way out, he'd encountered Mrs Humphrey coming in, who'd paused and stared at his approaching figure with the arrested expression of a Victorian Duchess finding a skivvy on the main stair, taking in his working-class attire…

"May I help you?" she'd gone to one of those schools where they taught you to talk like you had a mouthful of plums, which didn't actually bother him in the slightest.

He'd stopped any working-class inverted-snobbery sneering at Received Pronunciation speakers about ten seconds after his unit landed in Iraq and his upper-class commanding officers were the only people who actually articulated their words properly, ensuring that their orders were understand by their men – a fairly vital survival aid in cutting through the racket of a fire-fight with Alky Ada's thugs or just after an IED explosion when your ringing ears didn't matter because you could easily lip-read that precise pronunciation that he would have happily and personally bowed and thanked the Headmasters of Eton and Harrow and St. Paul's and Dulwich and the whole caboodle of 'em for drilling into their pupils. There was nothing like the terror of being on a battlefield to make you appreciate people who had learned to enunciate and speak properly instead of some trendy Politically Correct 'regional' mumble that could have been anything from 'yer oonifoms n fire' to 'Ahama owda fiver?'

"No, I've finished, thank you."

"I'm Mrs Cicely Humphrey, Chairwoman of the Residents' Committee, if there's some issue that – "

"Dr John Watson; not at all, just my after-call to Mrs du Lac. She fell, yesterday."

"Ah…I see…" she said in a tone that indicated she rather didn't. "I understood her GPs to be Ventham & Anstruther?"

"Quite possibly, I'm not in private practice."

"Mrs du Lac had an NHS doctor?" Mrs Humphrey looked like she was torn between laughing in his face and screaming for the police using words like 'escaped lunatic'.

"I'm not an NHS doctor," which was technically true, being only a temping locum on terminal leave from the British military. The words just shot out from some deep psychic bubbling pot, bypassing his brain's censoring function, "I'm her…Consulting Physician."

"I'm rather afraid I'm unfamiliar…'Consulting Physician'?"

I'm unfamiliar too, love, since I've apparently just this second invented the damn job…"I provide one-on-one personal medical consultations to those clients I…choose… to take on," he heard the words coming out of his own mouth as if some inner sprite had come up with the script and was taking charge, hearing that faint soupçon of challenge in his own final words that subtly hinted Mrs Humphrey was in danger of not making the grade.

"I'm on call for house calls to my clients." He summarised now for Seb.

"I see…similar to a retained solicitor?"

"What, like having an emergency on-call plumber, only for your personal plumbing?" Seb looked a mix of sceptical and amused.

"Yes, pretty much."

"Yes, an appropriate analogy. I engage on a weekly retainer and my clients are guaranteed personal consultations by email, text, phone or personal visit in an emergency only, twenty-four-seven, three-sixty-five." He blagged outrageously, actually starting to enjoy feeding her this steaming pile of bovine danglies.

She appeared to be a young, attractive, expensively dressed ash-blonde, and the illusion was so skilfully maintained that even up close it was in large part because he was a medical man that he could see the slight coarsening of the skin and the minute discolouration of her expertly manicured hand that showed the late 20s woman was a cosmetically preserved late 40s, possibly even around the big Five-0, and not in the Hawaii Five-0 TV reboot sense of the phrase.

"But why not simply have a personal physician?"

"They actually pay John H. Watson, the most mournful misery-guts to ever stifle a prank at Bart's, to make house calls to nag them about not eating enough tofu?"

"If you're referring to my quashing that stupid cherry-bomb plan that could have wiped out half the pathology wing and killed a hundred of our fellow students, then yes, they do pay that Watson to make house calls."

"But why simply have a personal physician?" he countered. "You don't expect your retained solicitor or tax accountant to follow you around everywhere every day. Who wants to be accompanied by a…killjoy…who looks like he's bitten into a lemon if you so much as look at a small flute of champagne, or who wrinkles his nose at a dram of fifty-year-old Scotch, or who puts you off your breakfast with tut-tutting and tongue-clucking as if every sausage was the work of Satan and eggs were cholesterol incarnate. Especially when you don't need him every day any more than you do your solicitor."

"Hum, I see your point."

"So being some rich hypochondriac old biddy's pet is how Dr Watson affords to live in London on an Army pension. Maybe some of that stuffy sanctimony is finally being leached from you after all. I'll call by for dinner and see your civilian place –"

"I don't think so. My room-mate doesn't like visitors."

"A room-mate as eccentric as me? Not again, surely?"

"Not quite," as homicidal…although there isn't a lot in it, I'll admit, "but yes I did think: lightning and twice."

"Oh well…in that case…how's dearest Harry?"

Yeah, like he was going to pick up that verbal hand grenade.

He didn't bother with an insincere smile. "Goodbye, Seb."

He deliberately began to walk on, forcing his muscles to relax – Seb was equally as likely to laugh at his back and disappear as swiftly as he'd arrived…or pull the trigger and send that .32 to smash into his spine. At that range and that calibre, it wouldn't kill him, but he'd spend the rest of his life a paraplegic wishing it had.

There came a loud juvenile snigger, and then nothing. He didn't turn back, knowing there would be nobody there – at least this time. Perfect, another self-aggrandizing psychotic with delusions of genius drops by… What is it about this city that seems to attract homicidal narcissists…to me - even Jim Moriarty seemed to want me on speed dial…

© 2012, The Cat's Whiskers

All rights reserved

Author's Notes:

Derek 'Del Boy' Trotter as played by David Jason (Sir David Jason White, OBE, b.1940) was the co-lead character in the long-running British sitcom Only Fools and Horses, created and written by the late John Sullivan, OBE (1946-2011). The other co-lead was actor Nicholas Lyndhurst, who played his 5-years' younger maternal half-brother Rodney 'Trotter'. The show was set in Peckham, in the southeast of London in the Borough of Southwark (pronounced Suthack). The series produced another popular spin-off, The Green, Green Grass and a prequel special, Rock and Chips.

The original canon character of Colonel Sebastian Moran first appears in the short story, The Adventure of the Empty House, published in 1903 in The Return of Sherlock Holmes anthology, set c.1894 and is described by Sherlock Holmes as 'the second most dangerous man in London', the first being Moran's employer, Professor Moriarty.

Ironically, Sebastian Moran is far more featured in the canon and has a much more detailed biography than Moriarty, who only actually features in two stories, as SACD introduced him solely as a plot device by which to kill off Sherlock Holmes, and he is therefore little more than a cipher than any actual character.

The original Sebastian Moran was born in London in 1840, son of the famous Sir Augustus Moran. Moran's position to Moriarty was akin to that of Watson's to Holmes – Chief of Staff, Executive Officer, amanuensis, chronicler, biographer, general companion and gallowglass. The difference being Moran was well-paid, whereas Dr Watson remained with Holmes out of loyalty and friendship and earned his living being a GP, not earning money via Holmes.

Moran was a brave soldier and a crack shot, and an author in his own right, having published two books about game hunting in the 1880s, according to SACD. Moriarty specifically tasked Moran with sniper assassinations, due to his skill with a rifle. SACD wrote that Moran followed Moriarty and Holmes to the Reichenbach Falls and attempted to murder Holmes. SACD gives no motive for this, but since no personal loyalty or affection was involved, presumably Moran was enraged at Holmes killing off his personal cash cow, Moriarty. In The Adventure of the Illustrious Client, set in 1902, Moran is still alive, and is referenced again in His Last Bow, again implying that Moran was still alive at the time, and possibly not in prison.

In Flashman and the Tiger, and Flash for Freedom! by George MacDonald Fraser, Moran makes appearances; Fraser turned the expelled bully, Flashman, from Tom Brown's Schooldays, into the anti-hero protagonist of his novel series.

Tobias Gregson was a Scotland Yard inspector who featured in four Sherlock Holmes' stories, including A Study in Scarlet (1887) in looks, personality, and professional rivalry, Gregson (tall, blonde) and Lestrade (shorter, brunette) were polar opposites. Inspector Athelney Jones features in The Sign of Four.

Navvy - A manual labourer, traditionally blue-collar (USA) or working-class (UK) employed exclusively in the excavation and construction of a road, railway, airport/airfield or canal/shipping lane/dockyard. Traditionally a 'navvy' was an uneducated manual labourer, but in the 20th Century the job was sometimes done by educated men unable to find middle-class or white collar work.

BMI – Body Mass Index, one of the greatest scandals and shames of the 20th Century National Health Service. Invented in 1835 by the Belgian polymath mathematician Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet (1796-1874) he used BMI as a statistical tool to calculate a person's racial superiority and inferiority according to their weight. At the time, as has been the case for many thousands of years, 'fatness' or large size, was an indicator of health, wealth, virility, desirability, sexual vigour, higher intelligence and positive characteristics in both men and women. In all ancient cultures, 'fatness' was a positive or a sign of Divine approval, and 'lean' or 'thinness' was a negative or sign of Divine disapproval or punishment.

A lifelong proponent of what came to be known as eugenics, now socio-biology, and the 'inferior/superior' races theory of 'Darwinian' evolution (admittedly invented by Darwin's cousin, Galton), Quetelet's BMI calculations were designed such that white Europeans were always assessed as statistically 'fatter' than black Africans or Arabs, Asians and Orientals, thus healthier, wealthier, brighter, superior.

In the 20th Century in Western countries such as Britain, Europe, America, and the Antipodes, the advent of Television from the 1950s and the rise of 'high-street fashions' for ordinary people, particularly women, has caused a massive overturning of the entire history of the human species for the 'ideal body shape'. A TV or movie camera 'adds ten pounds' and will always make a person look taller and heavier on screen than they are in real life, so actors began to regularly be 'underweight' to look normal on screen, especially women.

Additionally the vast majority of successful fashion designers were homosexual men, whose body shape ideal wasn't buxom breasts, wide hips and a plump bottom, but a flat chest, skinny hips and a small bottom – catwalk 'supermodels' and the clothes thus designed were aimed at this homosexual ideal, the body shape of Twiggy or Victoria 'Posh Spice' Beckham rather than the real life real curves of Melanie Griffiths or Christina Hendricks.

In the 1990s when the Polynesian kingdoms of Samoa and Tonga began to receive mainland US 'satellite TV' broadcasts the incidence of eating disorders amongst the juvenile and youth female population increased by 500 percent within the first five years of transmission. Traditionally buxom and curvaceous women were so highly prized in Polynesia and Africa that only royalty could marry them, and in some African countries it is still a custom in some tribes to feed young women as much food as possible whilst letting them lounge about all day in order to increase their weight – such women will typically marry a prince or king.

The NHS adopted BMI as a way of measuring a person's physical health, despite this perpetual flaw of being biased towards finding a person to be 'heavy'. Since BMI makes no distinction between dense muscle and lighter fat, or a person's sex (men tend to be taller and heavier than women), healthy athletes are classed as 'morbidly obese' and women are often listed as obese when they are not.

Despite a wide variety of scientific research projects proving that BMI is inaccurate at best and an outright scam at worst, the NHS consistently refuses to abandon the scam of BMI because it allows them to cut costs and save money by imposing an arbitrary ban on treatments. Any person whose BMI is over 30 is routinely refused treatments and surgery that will help their problem, whereas anyone under 30 BMI is allowed it, even if a person with a higher BMI is much healthier than the person with a lower BMI. Since for many people a BMI of plus 30 is a side-effect of a health condition that will disappear if they receive treatment, or because they are an active athlete, achieving a BMI reduction of under 30 to become eligible for NHS treatment actually makes the person dangerously unhealthy, even if they can achieve it at all, which some medical conditions do not allow for, and of course the person in question has already paid for the medical treatment they want or need through their taxes, so the NHS is in essence taking their money under false pretences at best, if not outright stealing it.

The reference to the Northumberland Fusiliers in Season 2 Episode 1 A Scandal in Belgravia is a mistake of accuracy which to be honest I find very surprising as an authoress myself, given Steve Moffat's obvious relish in writing ASIB. At Buckingham Palace, the equerry shakes John's hand and states that John was 'formerly of the 5th Northumberland Fusiliers'. I doubt it very much! In the canon - A Study in Scarlet – when Holmes and Watson first meet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had Holmes about 22 and Watson about 5 years older (27).

From A Study in Pink, it seems that Sherlock and John follow a similar pattern - Sherlock looks to be about 25 because he's graduated university, set up his Science of Deduction website, been consulting with Greg Lestrade for at least 2 years and met Mrs Hudson the year before meeting John, who in turn seems about 30-32. (I'd also suggest Irene Adler as also 30, Molly Hooper is 25, and Lestrade and Mycroft are both about 35).

2010 minus 30 years is a birth year of 1980 for John and Irene, 1985 for Sherlock and Molly and 1975 for Lestrade and Mycroft. In short, the earliest John could have joined the British Army on an officer candidate commission – a commissioned officer candidate was 1998 when he was 18. But the '5th Northumberland Fusiliers' had ceased to exist 30 years earlier when they were amalgamated to form the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers in 1968.

I'm not being picky; this is important. Another reason for the popularity of Conan Doyle's stories was that, when they were written, they were cutting edge and contemporary fiction - as poor Steve Moffat has to keep pointing out ad nauseum to those wittering about canonicity. Those original Victor-Edwardian Readers loved them because they could 'suspend their disbelief' and pretend that it might be possible to visit 221B Baker Street and find Sherlock Holmes 'really there'.

The current re-imagining is popular for exactly the same reasons: Sherlock 'could' be real! But it does not pay to despise the god of small things, and it is only respectful to get things right/take a minute or two to quality check, particularly when you are dealing with something like the British military and especially as Martin Freeman has gone on record as saying it was important that Watson be portrayed as confident and competent because medicine and the military are both 'vocations' rather than merely jobs.
It also feeds into the fans' ability to 'suspend our disbelief'. Remember that John didn't voluntarily return to civilian life in 2010 - as a 12-year-service soldier who'd achieved a captaincy rank he was clearly a career soldier and doubtless well-liked and respected; probably heading towards promotion to Major with the smart money eyeing him up for brevet Colonel.

If the 3rd or dare I say, 4th trilogy season does bring in Sebastian Moran as a sort of anti-John character as he was in the original canon, as Moriarty was the anti-Sherlock, you need to get their back-story right – John's approximate age meant he couldn't have had a 'history' with Moran that included the Cold War (1946-1989) which ended when he was only 9 years old (yes, I know that's an oversimplification) or the 1st Gulf War/Desert Storm (1990-1991) which ended when he was 11 years old, but an age of 18 in 1998 would have let him be out in the world in a medico-military context at the tail end of the Balkan Genocides, Northern Ireland and the IRA, 9/11, the 2nd Gulf War, 7/7, the Rwanda Genocide, Darfur, the intermittent Basque terrorist attacks and others besides and so on.

As a fan, my enjoyment of any show is lessened if I have to ignore a blooper so big you could pilot the QE2 through it sideways. I'm surprised someone of Steve Moffat's calibre made such a careless mistake. I presume a fair few fans of Sherlock are military, and that was a lazy, unnecessary error that will justifiably irritate them. It's especially annoying since the show went to the trouble to get other small touches right - notice John's favourite tea mug has a regimental crest on it for instance? The real 5th Northumberland Fusiliers featured 9 Victoria Cross winners, 1 George Cross winner and was one of the "Six Old Corps" of legendary repute entitled to wear the badge of St. George Slaying the Dragon rather than the simple royal cipher of other regiments. Getting the little details right does matter.