I rather enjoy my chemotherapy sessions

With a French health card everything is free for us cancer patients, even taxis to and from the hospital. ‘This is the longest taxi ride I’ve ever taken in my life,’ I said to last week’s driver, Virginie, on the outward leg of our three-hour round trip to the hospital at Marseille. ‘Your poor French state though,’ I added. ‘Good for us taxi drivers though,’ she pointed out.

She was around 50 years of age. Her summer frock revealed a powerful upper back. She wanted to talk about her four girls aged between 13 and 19. The first three had been always obedient and polite, but the youngest was a terror. She’d had more trouble with the 13-year-old than with the other three put together. It’s like being in a war, she said. When I tired of hearing about her youngest, I put on my new noise-cancelling headphones for the first time and listened with wonder and attention to the clear-as- daylight sound of blind Ray Charles singing about enjoying sex with this particular woman in spite of the travel involved.

You learn eventually to sit lightly on the question of how much longer you have to go

Arriving at the oncology department day ward for my three-weekly dose of chemotherapy, I was shown immediately to a bed next to the window. The window was ineffectively barricaded against the fierceness of the Provençal afternoon sun with grubby improvised sheets of Perspex and frayed gaffer tape. Three weeks earlier the nursing team had emerged sleepy and morose from lunch at three o’clock in the afternoon. Today they seemed galvanised — surely by a massive bollocking — and I was prodded, poked and punctured by a quick succession of doctors and nurses with an almost military level of briskness and efficiency.

‘Any problems since the last?’ said a young female doctor.