Feeling lucky always, I assumed that chemotherapy would be the piece of cake that some had predicted for me. They said they knew people who were treated with chemotherapy for years and years and meanwhile managed to live a relatively normal life. But by only the fourth cycle of my second round of it, I
All was well and all would be well. Aren’t drugs wonderful?
I woke up in the wake-up room (salle de réveil). The clock on the wall said half past ten. I’d been out for a couple of hours. What lifted me to the surface was the sound of the wake-up team persuading someone to wake up who was absolutely refusing to do so. The entreaties increased
Standing at the door was a hospital porter. He was resting an elbow on the back of a heavily padded wheelchair. A strapping lad, wholly masculine, a credit to us all. He regarded me levelly with a sort of Byronic boredom. I was fetching in a paper shower cap, paper gown, knee-length stockingettes and paper
I remember my first day at South Benfleet County Primary School with rare clarity. My mother left me at the school gate and I hadn’t been in the playground five minutes when a supervising woman trotted up to me, suspended me in the air by my arm, and slapped my leg, hard. Apparently I ought
He is ideal reading for the ecstatic diseased
Throughout the flat, post-Christmas limbo I lay languishing after another dollop of chemotherapy and read my Christmas present, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, in the later Everyman translation by John E. Woods. Set alongside H.T. Lowe-Porter’s sturdier pre-war translation, the difference was more marginal than I’d been led to believe by John E. Woods’s online
Then dear old Dolly drove down from Essex to pay her respects. It was a brave effort because she hasn’t been anywhere for years and only once before to France, in the 1970s to pick grapes. She arrived at midday and immediately piled into the wine. The day was pleasantly warm enough to sit outside
Sometimes, when the weather is fine, Treena calls up the stairs: ‘Why don’t you sit out on the terrace and get a bit of sun?’ Our little terrace faces nearly due south over the village pantiles and a succession of forested ridges as far as the littoral mountain range. It’s a sheltered, sunny spot with
The sunny, growing month of November is the British expat’s Provençal dividend. Every morning the meridional sunshine comes in through the left-hand bedroom window, lighting my face as I sit up in bed with the breakfast tray and the daily paper. By 11 o’clock it has moved across to the right-hand window, warming the blanket
With Catriona away it was back to self and banality and bacon and eggs
Catriona went to England and Scotland for ten days. The last thing she said to the lean and slippered pantaloon as he stood on the doorstep to wave her off was: ‘Please eat healthily, darling.’ Pretty much the first thing I did after I’d watched her disappear down the path and rubbed my hands together
A dear friend came to stay for two nights. Could I be persuaded, wondered he and Catriona, on the first morning, to venture out to a restaurant for lunch? Descending the stairs to welcome guests these days takes a bit of effort. Bare feet, boney ankles, flapping pyjama bottoms; the guests look up in fascinated
After commuting to Marseille for nine days of radiotherapy, I spent the week alone in the cave, in bed, in a mess of morphine foils and empty coffee cups. Sister Catriona was in the UK overseeing the birth of her first granddaughter. Friends and neighbours kindly kept me supplied with staples. Every day the sun
The day British media commentators were christening Rishi’s coronation as Britain’s ‘Obama moment’, French ones were calling the particularly horrible murder of a 12- year-old French girl by an Algerian woman staying in the country illegally as France’s ‘Floyd moment’. Gilles turned his phone to ‘landscape’ and we watched the TV coverage as we sped
The grandsons are putting two and two together. Grandad is always lying down and groaning when they video call and he has suddenly become a soft touch when asked to stump up for their material acquisitiveness. ‘By the way, Grandad, can I have the new Liverpool away kit? With Mo Salah on the back?’ ‘You
Our neighbour Michael is a keen and knowledgable attender of vides-greniers, the equivalent of our car-boot sales. His focus is on old bottles, full or empty, and old china, but he’ll pick up anything that piques his fancy. Some months ago, for example, he bought for €1 a glass tube of opium tablets issued to
At eight o’clock in the morning a nurse injected me with a radioactive marker and told me to go away and amuse myself for three hours. The metal chairs in the waiting room were uncomfortable and there was nothing to rest my head against. So I wandered outside the 19-storey hospital to look for somewhere
Two football friends, brothers, Mick and Pete, came to visit last week. We’ve been going to matches together since 1969, aged 12, in the good old skinhead days when the police enjoyed a punch-up as much as anybody. We used to travel all over the country on Lacey’s Coaches for away games and looked up
We were four round the little table in the nunnery kitchen: a 90-year-old German lady and her man; a nun called Sister Mary of the Angels; and me. We had just come in from the early morning mass. The German lady’s man was a Spaniard of about 35. It was impossible to tell but interesting
