Feeling lucky always, I assumed that chemotherapy would be the piece of cake that some had predicted for me. They said they knew people who were treated with chemotherapy for years and years and meanwhile managed to live a relatively normal life. But by only the fourth cycle of my second round of it, I realised that this wasn’t going to happen in my case. I felt so rotten that it seemed to me that death would have been easier to bear and was probably preferable.

Of course I told myself to get a grip, to put on my metaphorical tin hat and sit it out. No doubt the feeling of being poisoned by novichok or similar would pass eventually. I also reminded myself that chemotherapy was in fact part of my medical treatment, a cure, and that I had a lot to be thankful for. I was warm. I was comfortable. Catriona was up and down the stairs like a sprite with trays, mugs, kisses and good cheer. I had books to read, also delivered from the letterbox to my lap by the hand of Catriona. Thick-paged hardbacks, a hundred years old some of them. All I had to do was lie and read and be patient and pleasant while the church and state village bells struck off the passing hours.

Unfortunately this time chemotherapy affected my mind as well as my body. Result – self-absorption of the crudest sort. Despair. Paranoia. Even rage. No longer the cheerful, doughty, modest, philosophical old sort I’d been aiming to be when the going became soft to heavy in places, but a silly old bastard. And this is the creeping tragedy of dying slowly (or quickly) from cancer. No matter how tough you are at the beginning, or impervious to pain, or courageous, or how stiff your upper lip, these qualities are not imperishable. They get used up over time. ‘Oh, he was a battler,’ you hear said of some poor sod come the end, as though his levels of determination and fearlessness and stamina had remained constant from start to finish.

But one is not in a fair fight. Cancer’s leisurely undermining and hollowing out of a person is like the old Chinese execution method of Death by a Thousand Cuts. Far from getting used to the pain, the more you are subjected to it, the more it saps you. The more it saps you, the greater the fear of it coming again and the more it hurts when it does come. Which is all most unfair. It is as unfair as the law of nature that says the agony of the devoured is always greater than the pleasure of the devourer.

About the time of the nadir of my rottenness, Michael came round in the evening for a drink and a natter with Catriona. Since his beloved wife Joy died three years back, Michael can be lonely. However as a neighbour and an all-round good egg, he has an open invitation to come up the path for a drink whenever he likes. The understanding, when he’s here, is that I might totter down in my pyjamas to say hallo if I feel up to it; if I don’t, I don’t – and that’s fine.

My mental state was pretty bad. Paranoia. Catriona was plotting behind the arras, treacherously telling everybody that I wasn’t doing enough to help myself by at least engaging in some light exercise. Utter nonsense, but to me very real. I put the accusation to her. She was dumbfounded. Then she was nettled. Then she burst into tears. That was during the afternoon. Now it was seven in the evening and she and Michael were two thirds of the way down their first bottle of wine and the deranged beast in the attic could hear them laughing pleasantly together down below. He decided he would descend the creaking wooden stairs and join them for perhaps half an hour, just to be sociable, his scaly tail concealed beneath his new Ralph Lauren flannel pyjamas.

I refused wine. I’ve developed an aversion to it, I explained. Michael was horrified. Surely alcohol was the answer. He suggested I try beer. I said with bitterness that I would happily smoke heroin if I thought it would help. ‘What about cannabis?’ he said. ‘Poleaxes me,’ I said. ‘That’s probably because you put too much in the joint,’ he said. Michael is an old hippy and knows whereof he speaks. ‘Look, let me show you,’ he said.

He cut off a piece of oily hash no bigger than a grain of rice and made a single skinner with it, lit it, and we passed it between us. Talk about a shape changer! My paranoia dissipated instantly and a new, cheerier perspective asserted itself. I offered my most heartfelt apology to Catriona. She put on some music – Bob Dylan’s wonderful latest – to welcome me back.

Yes, nature is unfair, but it offers some excellent remedies and compensations.