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. Gilles smashed the steering wheel with his palm, shouting ‘Tout à fait! Tout à fait!’ Then he turned and smiled craftily at me, as if to say, ‘How do you like my impression of a passionate southern Frenchman, Mr English?’

He dropped me off outside the hospital doors and I went inside and when it was my turn I climbed up on to the radiotherapy machine. The three technicians manhandled me into position and left the room. ‘Ne bouge pas! Don’t move, Mr Clarke,’ warned the last to leave. Radiotherapy here involves a five million quid external ionising radiation beam machine and a £20 portable FM radio tuned to a music station at full blast, the latter having by far the greater effect on the senses.

Today it was KC and the Sunshine Band – ‘Do a little dance, make a little love, get down tonight’. As it’s a particular favourite of mine, I sang along tunelessly with the chorus as the giant machine circled and buzzed. Twenty minutes later the technicians emerged from their dug-out and said I could lower my arms now; it was finished. ‘I enjoyed KC and the Sunshine Band,’ I said. ‘My epoch.’ ‘That was a great epoch for music,’ observed one of the technicians, speaking gravely and respectfully of a cultural phenomenon pre-dating his birth. I dressed and nipped upstairs for the neatly timed consultation with the oncologist.

Our wildest dreams had come true – the biopsy had revealed only our good old, boring old friend prostate cancer. Above the upper seam of his mask the oncologist’s eyes blinked happily at the prospect of having to deal with one less spinning plate. With the facts now before him he got on the phone right away to book me in for another course of chemotherapy – one every three weeks until Christmas.

‘Christmas!!’ I said, immediately thinking of all the stuff I could order on Amazon for my two grandsons between now and then. And with luck I might last out until the half-term holiday next February. Last summer, faced with the prospect of cancelling four flights and losing the money, I had rung up easyJet and shifted three return flights wholesale and randomly forward to that fantastically distant week. And now there was perhaps a very real possibility that we would use them! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

Beyond that, he only had to scribble out a sheaf of prescriptions for another couple of pallets of morphine capsules to keep me going and to wish me a very good afternoon. I found Gilles, perhaps exhausted by the emotions stirred up by Lola’s funeral and France’s ‘Floyd moment’, fast asleep in the driver’s seat with his mouth open. It took him a minute to come to his full senses. ‘Ça va, Jeremy?’ he said, reaching forward for the ignition key. ‘Oui, ça va,’ I said. ‘Ça va.’