Two nights running I was incontinent of urine and woke up with warmly weighted pyjama bottoms. Former nurse Catriona didn’t bat an eye. When she first came to France she was a carer for three geriatric English expats, a lady and two gentlemen, and both gentlemen wore nappies in bed. Less than an hour after I’d confessed, she had run down to the chemist and returned with a ten pack of culottes/broekjes/cuecas/pants for medium urinary leakage.

Though elaborated with decorative frills around the elasticated leg holes, the pads were not of the same thickness and high quality that her two gentlemen wore. She was apologetic about it. But if my incontinence was due to all these new tablets I was on – including antibiotics and corticosteroids – the inconvenience would be only temporary. And in the meantime we could all have a good laugh.

Last week I met Dr Deville the oncologist to collect the latest scan results. They were a mixed bag: some tumours had disappeared, others had shrunk, new ones had taken the stage. A merry dance. My lung photograph showed a ramified network of lines resembling a road map, which the radiographer, after lengthy consideration apparently, had identified as nothing worse than an infection. Not a bad result, all things considered. We were cautiously pleased.

But that same night I found a new and sensitive mass lying just beneath the skin of my throat, which in my amateurish and pessimistic way I automatically identified as a new tumour missed by the scanner. The following night I wet the bed for the first time. Catriona thought that perhaps the new antibiotic had a diuretic effect. Though a short-term dose, Catriona said that in all her nursing experience she had never before encountered such a massive one. Also around this time I began to notice that the 12-hourly morphine dose was insufficient to control a hot, sharp pain in my right shoulder. The pain reached an unsurmised level and put the arm largely out of action. So what with one thing and another, my decline felt suddenly accelerated; my outlook foreshortened.

Never mind. Lurid February sunshine day after day, and the almond blossom coming out and the delighted hum of the bees lifted the spirits. Moreover – O frabjous day! – my two grandsons came to stay for their half-term holiday week. Aged 12 and 13, they’ve been unseen in the flesh since last summer. Result: my leaky coracle is slowly revolving in uncharted waters as a typhoon approaches, yet this has been the happiest week of the year so far.

First impressions of the lads after half a year: coltish, permanently famished, football-mad, prone to violence, massive feet. Both full of snot and catarrh and glued to their phones. Giggly Klynton’s shorn Peaky Blinders hairstyle is familiar to his local barber as a ‘skinfade’, he tells me. Senior Oscar’s hair is a foot long and falls down over his face in a curtain. They are humorous lads, subject to manic outbursts of gaiety, with a stock of catchphrases and standing jokes. A typical standing joke, for example, is that Grandad is a ‘pouf’. Also the feebleness of Grandad. Also Grandad’s inability to remain stationary and awake. The catchphrases are mostly football commentators’ clichés such as, ‘he’s fluffed his lines’ and ‘he sent him to the shops’. After taking an evening shower, and otherwise naked, I danced before them in my frilly incontinence pad like David before the Lord. Catriona adores them but makes no concessions regarding their personal hygiene.

The morning after their arrival she drove us all to the village football pitch for a kick around. We none of us had been there before and were amazed at the quality of the facility: astroturf, tall floodlights, goals with nets, spectator seating, everything spick and span. A tolling monastery bell on the hill above lent a religious flavour to our lazy knockabout. I hadn’t kicked a football since last Easter.

Kicking a football has been one of the joys of my life. That feeling of curling the inside of your foot around the ball and sending it in a high curve into the top corner of the old onion bag. The lads know it and feel it and love it too. Inside of the foot. Outside of the foot. Back heels. Flick-ups. Half-volleys. Volleys. Strokes. Caresses. Oscar with a ball at his feet on astroturf is beautiful to watch. ‘You taught me well, you pouf,’ he said to me after I’d complimented him on an elegant half-volley that hit the net still rising.

All things pass. Puffing grandads kicking footballs with their young grandsons especially. But the low hum of the bees foraging among the delicate almond petals and the tolling monastery bell spoke contrariwise of renewal and refreshment.