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 socks inside claret slippers decorated with the West Ham football club logo of crossed riveting hammers. The slippers – a Christmas present – arrested his survey.

‘West Ham,’ he said. ‘We sold you Payet.’ ‘You did,’ I said. ‘Fat and moody, but what a player.’ At La Timone hospital in Marseille everybody supports Olympique de Marseille or OM. You sometimes see hospital administrators in the replica shirts. ‘Marcelo Bielsa made him the player he is,’ said the porter. ‘Before Bielsa he was a crazy man.’ ‘I didn’t know that,’ I said. He looked pensively at me for a while, then motioned me into his bathchair, as if such ignorance should be passed over.

I lowered myself in and he deftly span me around. Now facing the window, I noticed the first glimmering of daylight edging the mountains to the north. Although it happens once every six months, I look forward to the kidney stent replacement less and less. It’s a day procedure, all done through the end of my willy. Theatre, recovery room, scanner, three hours’ repose on the day ward micturating blood and razor blades, a spot of lunch, then home in a taxi.

The porter propelled me down the corridors of the vast hospital at a purposeful lick. In the lifts he lounged, a pasha, a voluptuary, and winked pacifically at the nurses coming and going. Soon we arrived at the key-coded electronic gate of ‘le bloc’ or surgical unit. At this point he made me step out of the wheelchair and hop up on to a trolley bed with retractable sides like a cot. Then he punched in the code and the heavy door slid back.

On the other side, milling about, was a noticeably young crowd of nurses and doctors exchanging pre-shift greetings and banter. The atmosphere was of a cocktail party half an hour in. The porter’s arrival on the scene was acclaimed with merriment. For these doctors and nurses on le bloc this particular young porter was a magnifico, a beloved king, and they his adoring public. In fluent and apparently telling argot he announced his arrival with a one-line joke that made them shriek and stagger. Then he inserted me into the midst of his adoring subjects horizontally, head first. Two other patients on trolleys were there ahead of me, tethered sacrifices humbly awaiting the priestly blade at sunrise.

Having divested himself of his charge, the porter loped across to a nurse logging arrivals in a book with a Biro. She was writing standing up. He took her savagely in his arms, bent her backwards and pressed his lips against hers. ‘Je refuse! Je refuse!’ she wailed, but with the intelligent irony of one parodying the code word for an enlightened woman denying penetration to an enlightened man. Laughter. Cheering. Congenitally up for a party, even in this lamentable condition, I looked across at my nearest fellow patient, an elderly lady with a wispy shock of snow-white hair, and I waggled what’s left of my eyebrows at her in a convivial greeting. But she had retreated from the rowdy scene behind lowered eyelids.

Now a young nurse came and leaned comfortably over the rail of my cot and placed a hand on my wasting forearm. Her dark eyes communicated an immediacy and an intimacy and perhaps even a sauciness which took me by surprise. And what was my name? Thinking she had come over to chat up the wallflower, I told her eagerly. But she wrote it down on a piece of paper, sadly putting our conversation on an official, medical footing. And my weight in kilograms? I told her. Any allergies? Crabmeat, I said. ‘Now tell me,’ she said cosily. ‘What is your star sign? No, wait! Let me guess. You are Aquarius the water carrier, are you not?’

‘Amazing,’ I said. ‘Yes, I am. How can you tell?’ ‘Oh, I can always spot an Aquarian,’ she said. ‘He’s one,’ she said, pointing at the porter, who now had the nurse in a headlock. ‘And so is she.’ A few feet away, through an open door, a Michelle Obama lookalike, though softer and rounder, was studying her computer screen. My fellow Aquarian distracted her attention, and, pointing at my head, said: ‘Aquarius.’ Michelle studied me for a moment through the open door before conceding a fraternal nod.

It wasn’t until I was lying on the slab and all rigged up, and the chatty anaesthetist was inadvertently pressing the rubber cushion of an oxygen mask hard up against my eyeball, that it occurred to me that my date of birth was printed in bold on my hospital wristband.