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 certainly can my dear chap.’ ‘Oh and I forgot, can I get some Nike Air Force 1 basketball trainers?’ ‘The pleasure is all mine. I’ll get on to it right away.’ ‘Oh and I’m using Klynton’s phone because mine’s stopped working.’ ‘Gawd. So you need a new one?’ ‘Yep. Plus I need £100.’ ‘What for?’ ‘I can’t tell yiu.’ ‘I see. I’ll have a look at phones then, shall I?’

It really does give me pleasure to open the flood gates because they are good lads living by any measure below the poverty line. If it wasn’t for my dying largesse they’d get -bugger all, not even pocket money. Next week their father says he might be looking at a £650 fee to declare bankruptcy, which seems a lot of money to me to charge someone who by definition ain’t got none and can’t borrow any.

‘You do realise that this week you’ve asked for four hundred quids’ worth of stuff, which is a week’s wages?’ I asked one of the grandsons, plaintively, the other day. ‘Oh. Yiu don’t have to.’ ‘Sorry to carp, but it’s spelt YOU, not yiu.’ ‘What do yiu mean carp?’

The other day his school’s ‘safeguarding officer’ rang his father to inform him that Oscar was subject to a ‘serious’ safeguarding accusation of having touched a girl on the thigh. Never slow to censure Oscar, his father’s anger in this case was directed entirely at the unnecessary ideological meddling in the playground. I suppose I might have leveraged the controversy to reduce him from a reconditioned iPhone 12 to the cheaper iPhone SE, but being of the same mind as his father, I avoided mentioning the controversy altogether.

So I lie here in a morphine-coloured dream world searching online sportswear shops, all of which welcome me with a flashing sign and countdown clock urging me to use the passcode ‘CREDULOUS’ before midnight and get ‘up to’ 65 per cent off RRP. Otherwise I’m looking at scam texts saying the package I ordered last week can’t be delivered unless I send over my bank account details to pay a postage supplement. And finally the delivery man steals the package anyway and posts instead a photo of a parcel jammed between generic overflowing wheelie bins.

Sometimes I have the radio on, Radio 3 nowadays. And every half an hour comes the kindly, lugubrious Jamaican voice of Neil Nunes carefully enunciating the end of the world. And I reach out to the pile of foil strips on the bedside table and pop out another yellow one, or another red one, or both. And Catriona calls up the stairs: ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ And I shout down, ‘Darling I would love a cup of tea.’ Because a nice cup of tea is something that never fails to strengthen the soul, which in my case isn’t what it was. I’ve always imagined that that inner self, the spirit, the soul, call it what you will, would remain the same, no matter what the circumstances, until the end. But mine is dimming as the corruption spreads. I hadn’t reckoned on that happening and it’s the most disconcerting aspect of this entire cancer business.

Nevertheless one clings to small hopes. Every day now I take a taxi down to Marseille to lie under five million euros’ worth of radiotherapy machine. The oncology department is shabby but the machinery is the very latest. I lie with my arms raised and it aims a beam at three tattooed dots on my upper body. Half an hour later I’m back on the motorway. The purpose isn’t to cure but to reduce the pain. It’s a great bore, but I am very grateful to M Macron and the French state for spending a small fortune to try and ease the pain a bit. I’ve had five shots so far and if anything the pain has got worse.

Then I’m back upstairs in the cave on my back, with the iPad propped open, working my way through the latest requests. Liverpool FC has any number of strips: home, away, training, warm up, goalkeeper. And is Klynton a junior, a youth, or a ‘kid’? I baulk at a new phone for Oscar. ‘It’ll have to be a reconditioned phone and it’ll have to be your birthday and Christmas present combined,’ I tell him. ‘Thank yiu so much,’ he replies. And the thought of another Christmas gives me a little fillip of hope, and I reach out for my steaming mug of tea and take a reviving sip.