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.