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 and the dry soles of my bare feet. On the bedside table is the heavy brass base of a first world war French 75 artillery shell. Even on a November morning the brass heats up until it is hot to the touch. I use the shell base as a handy pot in which I keep my daily foils of morphine and paracetamol. The empty foils I let fall into my bedside bin, a 1944 US 105mm brass artillery shell case, bought at a local car-boot sale.

Last week, while I was lying in a cubicle in the day hospital ward having another dose of chemotherapy dripped in, the young pain nurse, prénom Ludivine, popped in for a cosy chat, during the course of which she trebled my daily morphine dose. Instead of the familiar yellow and red ones, from now on I must take one bubblegum-pink capsule twice a day. She carried a pretty laminated chart supplied by the pharmaceutical company illustrating the different strengths and colours of their product. Catching a glimpse, I noted with relief that I had some way to go before I was up among the darker, more ominous navy blues and dun browns of act five. Then she made a solemn and apologetic speech. In essence she couldn’t promise, for the duration of our relationship, and in spite of her box of tricks, to keep me pain-free. She could only promise to reduce it to a minimum. The fingertips resting lightly on my wrist while she spoke underlined the seriousness of what she was saying.

Then she went off and I resumed my chemotherapy habit of reading randomly from the Book of Common Prayer. I closely read the Prayer to be said before a Fight at Sea against any Enemy and A Hymn of Praise and Thanksgiving after a dangerous Tempest. Neither prayer seemed wholly inapposite to this landlubber’s current plight; and both perfectly expressed his growing sense of powerlessness. A stand-out sentence was: ‘O suffer us not to sink under the weight of our sins, or the violence of the enemy.’

In the final of the 1985 UK snooker championship, Willie Thorne missed a blue, on which the match and arguably his whole career pivoted. As I lie here, day after sunny autumn day, in a state of inanition, I try to calculate at which point in the past few weeks I missed that metaphorical blue and this ineluctable decline into powerlessness became headlong. On which day, without knowing it, for example, did I first stay in bed all day, excused duty? Or, going still farther back, how strange to have felt no premonition, as the plane took off from Gatwick last summer, and her green fields tilted and receded, that I would never see England again? And on what trivial, unthinking errand had I walked down the hill to the village shop for the last time? How on earth have I come, in such a short space, to abdicate all hope and strength, power and responsibility, independence and ambition, socialising, shirts, socks and shoes, and to be lying here like this, a garland ox in its sun-filled stall, passively awaiting the unknown?

And having lost all power and direction, how God-like the well now seem! How full of vim and motivation are even the elderly by comparison! Catriona’s tireless energy, always remarkable, as she zips hither and thither, constantly in motion, unless instructed to lie still on the mat for a count of ten seconds by her online HIT gym instructor, now seems positively supernatural to one who pants uncontrollably after a flight of eight wooden stairs.

We still laugh. More, I like to think, than we did before. Yesterday Catriona threw back her head to laugh at something said and in so doing spotted a cobweb on a roof beam. No laughing matter, cobwebs. She sprinted off immediately for her special cobweb broom she calls the wolf’s head.

I also like to think that my lying up here on my last legs makes everyone else’s life – friends, neighbours, visitors – feel a touch more meaningful or significant. My dramatic failure gives everyone a fillip, whether they would care to admit it or not. So at least I’m of some use. Though beautiful and profound as these ideas might be, I must remember that my morphine dose has been tripled, and it is quite possible that I am no longer a real person in touch with realities.

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