Andrew Marr’s notebook: Rescued by Jonathan Ross

We live by simple stories. X has a stroke. X recovers; or doesn’t. But we live inside more complicated stories. Recovering from a stroke is a long haul; I still have an almost useless left arm and walk like a wildly intoxicated sailor. In my mid-fifties, my stroke has been a special excursion ticket into old age — socks and toenails a bewildering distance away, walking sticks with minds of their own — that kind of thing. But here’s the odd bit. This is an old age whose effects (if you do the physio) lessen as the months pass. I’m living backwards — what a rare privilege! I am getting out again, walking, drawing and even shopping. But it still takes an hour to get dressed, and I still fall over. I was trying to sneak discreetly out of a showing of The Butler (don’t bother) when I took a terrible tumble. Very embarrassed, I was picked up by a great bear of a man who more or less carried me out of the cinema and offered to walk me wherever I was going next. He couldn’t have been nicer. And who was my good Samaritan?  That demonised fellow Jonathan Ross. You never know what people are really like until you meet them in person.

During this year of recovery, I have enjoyed the turn of the seasons more than ever before. This has been a spectacularly beautiful autumn, with brighter colours going on for longer. London is brimming with beauty and magic: there’s the new bridge by Thomas Heatherwick coming — a kind of Hanging Gardens of Battersea — and a new indoor Jacobean theatre by the Globe, lit only by wax candles, for the long winter nights. But this is also a city being hollowed out by global investors.