My week in a mess of morphine foils

After commuting to Marseille for nine days of radiotherapy, I spent the week alone in the cave, in bed, in a mess of morphine foils and empty coffee cups. Sister Catriona was in the UK overseeing the birth of her first granddaughter.

Friends and neighbours kindly kept me supplied with staples. Every day the sun shone. The astounding insolence of the mosquitos and flies in this Indian summer has to be seen to be believed. Maybe I ought to change the sheets. The martins who live up here on the cliff are enjoying the unseasonal airborne feast, circling and swooping just outside my permanently open bedroom windows. Far below, the village celebrated its annual quince fair. From up here I could hear music and cheering.

So how did I spend this invaluable time of end-of-days solitude? Reminiscing? Praying? Making my soul? Officially apportioning my little all to whomever? Sadly none of the above. Never quite fully at the helm of my consciousness, I’ve lacked all powers of concentration – even for the papers. Closely following the news stone-cold sober these days must be a surreal and depressing experience; but the spectacular rise and fall of Liz Truss, for example, on morphine, reads like a terrifyingly dystopian science-fiction novel.

I only wish I could settle into a deeper, more satisfying reading or thought life than that offered by Mail Online, exciting as that is. If I could read novels and history books with as much absorption and pleasure as I did pre-morphine, I could be perfectly content right to the end. Instead I lie here surrounded by teetering piles of books of one sort or another, but on morphine I can’t read more than half a page before drifting away into silly daydreams. Books arrive in the post box at a rate of one or two a week still, ordered impulsively on the strength of a rave review on the radio or in the books pages. The top six of my bedside table pile, the first one still unopened in its package, are these: Matthew Hollis – The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem; Damon Galgut – The Promise; Dominic Hibberd – Wilfred Owen; Gwendoline Reilly – My Phantoms; George Dangerfield – The Strange Death of Liberal England. I reach out with a grunt, open one or the other, read a sentence or two, shut it, and chuck it back on the heap. What’s the bloody point? The last book I read with total absorption was the Book of Common Prayer.

At first, a legal prescription for morphine was a novelty, a bit of a laugh. I would offer my foil of red capsules like a bag of sweets to anyone and everyone. ‘What about one of these little red chaps to go with your glass of wine?’ I had some waverers but no takers. To begin with, a licence to be slightly off my head all day and all night was a pleasurable bonus and compensation for all the rest of it. Rambling, incoherent, half-fantastical thoughts and a sort of warm feeling in the diaphragm were a happy holiday from reality. But suddenly the thought of being subject to the mental modifications of an opiate 24 hours a day until the moment I die, and not reading another book, or thinking clearly, or ever again being quite in my right mind, is no longer attractive. But then I miss a dose or two through sleeping long and – ouch! – I’m abjectly thankful that I live in a time and place where they pass you a sackful over the counter on the strength of a prescription written in Dr Deville’s small, shaky fist.

Other occupations this past week: writing ‘thank you’ emails and letters to those readers who have kindly sent cheers of encouragement. To all those who haven’t yet received a note of acknowledgment – sorry! There’s one on the way.

And then there was crisis arbitration, via WhatsApp, between my son and two grandsons and their real mother over the grandsons’ sensational decision to desert their father and go and live with her. At my son’s house they were well fed, warm, clean and well organised but they felt unloved and oppressed by their stepmother. So after spending the half-term holiday with their rackety old mother at her flat, where one could make a documentary about the insecurity and bad choices of poor whites, but where there is also love and laughter, and outings, they rebelled and refused to return. In spite of passionate appeals for my support from all the interested parties, muddled old grandad simply could not decide who had right on their side.

I think I have probably been lying here alone, in a litter of broken foils, slightly detached from reality, staring out of the window, for too long now. Catriona! Haste ye back!