How are you today?

How am I? Very well, thank you. Actually, now you ask, I do have this stubborn pain in the small of my back, and my right knee isn’t what it might be, and I think I have a little arthritis in my left foot, and… what do you expect? I’m in my late forties, and I may be even older by the time you read this. I still have my hair and my teeth, but my days of niggle-free, hangoverless, unthinking good health are gone forever.

Tim Parks was a couple of years older than I am now when he started to experience acute pain in his bladder region. He also needed to pee three or four times a night, which, as all hypochondriacs will know, suggests a problem with the prostate. Ugly little word, prostate. Of all the manifold ways in which our bodies can fail us, prostate cancer seems one of the cruellest and most random. Parks, prolific novelist and longtime Italian resident, went to the doctor, underwent tests. They couldn’t find anything wrong with him. The pain got worse. He had to work standing up. The nightly visits to the lavatory became more frequent. The flow became a dribble. A friend of his, a urologist, suggested unpleasant-sounding surgery, but Parks didn’t fancy it. He realised how little he had ever thought about his body, how he had taken it for granted, as healthy people tend to. Of course, like many writers, he was a world-class worrier. ‘Do I write stories, I wondered now, because in general I have such a weak grip on the story of my own life?’ Sitting in a waiting room, he suddenly remembered that, twenty years before, he had suffered from acute prostatitis. How on earth do you forget such a thing? At the time a friendly doctor had shown him a passage in a textbook, which he now realised he could recall verbatim: