This man is 42, he has a cold. He has a headache and he doesn't have much energy. The thing is, he thinks the cold is pneumonia, the headache is meningitis and the lack of energy is ME.
I thought he was having me on when he said he had to cancel a long-standing meeting. There were four of us trying to raise some money for a good cause and this guy not only couldn't join us because he felt poorly, but he also didn't seem to think there was much point in rescheduling since he was on the way out and who knew when he might be well enough to communicate ever again?
He wasn't pretending, he wasn't just trying to get out of it, that wasn't the issue. The puzzlement was that he didn't realise he just had a cold.
If it were 'flu, and that might be too mild a diagnosis, then it would have to be a very special 'flu with a foreign name, an epidemic, a virus, something that had begun in the Galapagos and had decimated the penguin population.
He is, as far as we know, a normal man. The others on the little committee weren't a bit surprised. "He's a man," they said. "Of course it can't be just a cold."
Now I've never really gone along with this sort of reasoning, the pat-them-on-the- head, bless-them-they're-such-sillies sort of attitude. And anyway, among men I have known in my own family and friends, I have seen true heroes who made light of what could well have been heavy weather, from transplants to cancer to disability.
So I won't go down a road towards any male hypochondriac stereotype, I say bravely.
Yet there is something about men and the common cold that would take you up short. Maybe it's because they're so used to rude good health that they are gobsmacked when anything puts them off kilter. Could it be that because they don't have periods, pregnancies or menopauses as part of the norm, that they honestly expect their default position to be feeling absolutely fine?
Could it have to do with the left side of the brain, the bit that makes women react one way and men the other? Women know colds come and go - men don't?
Could it be the way they are brought up? Was more care taken historically of a man with the sniffles than a woman because the breadwinner couldn't be allowed to collapse on them?
"Do mothers make more fuss of little boys with a temperature because they look somehow more bewildered and vulnerable than little girls would? We know that men aren't able to hold hot dishes as well or as long as women can, could it be the same about a cold?"
I asked people who should know - a selection of nurses. They tried to be honest. They didn't really come across too many men who tried to admit themselves to hospital with a common cold, but one had a man who came into Emergency last week with a slight temperature.
What did she do for him, surrounded as she was with people who had broken heads, appendicitis and heart attacks? She confirmed that his temperature was indeed just a little above normal and urged him to take a hot lemon drink and an early night. He phoned the next morning to leave a message that he had survived the night and the fever seemed to be lifting.
Other nurses confirm that men in hospital are desperately anxious about temperatures, always wanting to read the thermometer themselves in case anything is being kept from them. They don't accept that it's part of normal hospital routine, they think it symbolises something more dangerous and invasive.
Doctors wouldn't commit themselves about any sexual difference in terms of hypochondria.
One doctor admitted that by the time he saw his male patients they may have driven their wives and families into a frenzy with their imaginations - and what if it did happen to be this or that incurable plague or virus?
But by the time they arrived at the surgery, some veneer of stoicism has settled on them.
A dentist told me he can't say hand on heart that men are cowards in the chair. They "open wide and rinse please" with the best of them. But he agrees there is always the suspicion that before arriving, these men may have subjected everyone at home to terrible things: fear that this was perhaps a case of tumours in the gum, the source of inoperable ear infections leaving possibly a short time to live, rather than just a neglected molar with a bit of decay, or a loose filling.
So it's not really from the professionals out there that the complaints come, it's more from the women who are family, or colleagues, that the story of male malingering originates.
It still annoys me, the whole head-patting, patronising, poor old love bit that has crept into sitcoms, soaps and advertising, where the male is meant to be some gormless clot who can't understand anything from making gravy to buying a car to choosing an insurance policy when the vixen-like female partner has got it sorted out in two minutes.
The ship seems to have listed too far to the other side in the effort to redress the years of presenting women as brainless bimbos forever changing what passed for their minds.
Still, it's amazing that having taken out and dusted down a certain stereotype, just how often it re-occurs. Yesterday in a bookshop I met a man who was wondering if he had a sudden severe spinal infection. His wife said he had sat in a draught by the door of a pub during the World Cup. And in the supermarket I heard another man say he was having dizzy spells, his eyesight kept clouding over and he was asking the girl at the checkout if she had ever heard of anyone getting brain damage over a weekend.
The man's daughter had put some paracetamol in the shopping basket and she and the checkout girl raised their eyes to heaven at the madness of men.
It's still only a cliche, I said, and got a postcard from a man who has gone to a hot climate and thinks he may have got skin cancer.
He has sunburn, that's what he has .