O frabjous day! My new tumour is just my old prostate friend

The day British media commentators were christening Rishi’s coronation as Britain’s ‘Obama moment’, French ones were calling the particularly horrible murder of a 12- year-old French girl by an Algerian woman staying in the country illegally as France’s ‘Floyd moment’. Gilles turned his phone to ‘landscape’ and we watched the TV coverage as we sped down the motorway. Lola’s funeral, live, was shown on one half of the screen and various sonorous old geezers in dark suits queued up in the other to say that the psyche of France had been so grievously wounded by the horrific details of the case that she would never be the same again. I didn’t actually hear the word ‘guillotine’ mentioned but twice Gilles turned to me and swiftly decapitated himself with his fingertips.

We were cruising down the A8 to Marseille for number eight of nine consecutive turns under the radiotherapy machine. I haven’t yet had my head cut off as part of my cancer treatment. But the week before last my throat was cut, leaving a thick three-inch horizontal scar just under my epiglottis. From here the surgeon had probed downwards with his Opinel No 7 to extract a piece of tumour to send to the lab for analysis.

After being zapped by the radiotherapy beam, I was to toddle along the corridor to discuss the lab’s findings with the oncologist. He and I were pinning our hopes on this new tumour being an outpost of the prostate cancer rather than some other type of cancer. Colon cancer was being offered at 2-1 and something unsurmised at 100-8.

The oncologist would also have before him my latest upper-body scan results: other new tumours, pieces of shrapnel, a small foetus – nothing would surprise me now.

Meanwhile Lola’s mourners passed through the sunny courtyard into the church and another stratospherically intellectual political or cultural figure took to the TV witness stand to say now look here you lot, we can’t possibly go on like this.