Francis Coles

‘You need to get yourself tested’, my wife said after yet another of my lapses, ‘you’re fast becoming a marble-free zone.’ I couldn’t disagree. Perhaps the relentless ‘mental ’elf’ craze had alerted me to my own flaws, though groping for names and words is, surely, excusable by 67. But I would often devour a book and, days later, struggle to remember not just title, author and plot but whether or not I’d actually read it. And could I reconstruct last week’s events, even in outline? No, of course I couldn’t. The health insurer confirmed they do indeed ‘provide support for that’, the cost counting against my annual limit. I therefore fixed an appointment with the GP: ‘Very sensible to come in about this.

‘I really do think you should think seriously about that operation,’ my urologist told me about a year ago. The plumbing had deteriorated further and, in a calculated gamble for more tranquil twilight years, I eventually capitulated, submitting in early December to a so-called TURP, a transurethral resection of the prostate. Two days later, he sent me home with a reassuring message: ‘It’s settling down nicely, but don’t be alarmed by a little blood in the urine in a few weeks’ time. Expect a sort of “dry rosé” colour when the scabs start to fall off.’ I took that as a green light for a family Christmas in northern Spain, a plan marred only slightly by my Spanish wife Marina’s wrist fracture (she tripped on the stairs) shortly before we set off on Brittany Ferries.