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 to the older hooligans as gods. Those dockers were good honest scrappers, kind, fearless and very fun, in an era long before the sociologists or politicians started paying attention or hooligans wore designer jumpers. Mick still goes with Arthur, his son. Me and Pete haven’t been to a game since the team moved to its soulless new stadium.

They were staying in Languedoc and made a day-long detour to see their old mate, whom they’ve always known as Clarice. Both Spectator readers, they were under the impression, I think, that they would be just in time. They were expecting to pay their hushed last respects to an emaciated, delirious individual breathing his last. To see me not only up and about but toddling joyously down the hill to meet them – shorts, long hair, tan – confounded them, I think.

I suppose the reason I don’t yet look like a chap on his last legs, and am possibly a disappointment, is that I have an appetite still and Catriona is a wonderful cook. The cancer is presently on manoeuvres in the upper storey only, and everything lower down is still operating freely and making hay with her wonderful daubes, lasagnes and chillis. I eat up my dinner and ask for seconds. What makes people with a terminal illness truly look the part, I’m guessing, is malnourishment.

Look closely at me, however, and I’m wheezing like a punctured football. The Grenadier Guards’ funeral marching rate of 75 paces a minute is now my idea of a sprint. Every new scan reveals something worse. The last one, for example, showed lesions in three spinal vertebrae and a new cancer, colon cancer, in my lung. Oh good. So now I’ve got two different cancers, which complicates some possible treatments and rules out the wilder shores of the experimental ones. My poor oncologist is reduced to wielding the mallet at a whac-a-mole stall. Most of the pain originates in my upper skeleton. Next week I begin radiotherapy on the three largest bone tumours to reduce it. Beginning next month, he’s offering chemotherapy to delay the advance of the colon cancer in my lung.

But my, how well I look! My appearance of wellness is staggering. And last week the oncologist granted my petition for morphine sulphate! Morpheus! Huzzah! A bright red 10mg morphine sulphate capsule and a Mexicana magic mushroom microdose with my early-morning cup of amphetamine-strength coffee and I’m all set for attacking the newspaper in bed. Confounding my critics still further, I now not only look well but I’m mostly cheerful and relaxed. I might not last long at a dining table before falling silent and keeling over, but the tablecloth patterns are captivating.

What the sceptics are dying to know, but are too polite to ask, is how long the oncologist reckons I have left. They want a date. If I sense the question suspended in the air, I say: ‘The last time I went to see the oncologist, I asked him flat out: “Doc, how long?” And after considering for a second or two, he said, “Ten.’’’ Here I pause to watch the consternation on the faces of those busting to get some sort of a figure on it. ‘Ten what?’ they say, deeply frustrated. ‘Weeks? Months? Years?’ I then demonstrate how the oncologist lifted his wrist, studied the second hand of his watch, and counted down: ‘Nine… eight… seven… six…’. An old joke but it gets them every time. The reality is that he’s not once offered me a prediction. All he will say now is that it’s up to me. How long do I want to go on dragging this out? It’s a question I keep putting to one side.

Early this morning Catriona left for a short visit to England. As I kissed her goodbye on the step, everything hurt and I’d just shit myself. My friends of 50 years’ shared devotion to a football team had departed, perhaps never to be seen again. As a gift they’d brought me a signed copy of Cass Pennant’s latest hooligan history You’re Going Home in a F*cking Ambulance, already shortlisted, they said, for next year’s Booker prize. The first chapter was an account of the scenes at West Ham vs Manchester United in 1967, the match, according to hooliologists, where it all began. We were there, aged ten. It wasn’t the Somme. But nobody there that day aged ten will have forgotten it. After 50 years, we were fond of one another.

‘I’ve had enough of this,’ I blurted bitterly to Catriona, surprising us both. ‘There’s fresh coffee in the pot,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you later.’