There’s Nothing Quite Like Lying Down And Thinking About Death

Whenever I get a secondary illness, I always think of the phrase: “once the transmission goes, the whole car goes”. This can apply to both bodies and institutions as well as cars – specifically automatics; the phrase is from America – but you have a certain amount of leeway as to where your metaphorical transmission lies. In my case, it’s the gallbladder, which I might have mentioned before, but since then there has been a cascade of physical failures that I won’t go into in any detail, in case you are eating. Let’s just say that on top of everything else, I have been very, very tired.

It’s also stopped me from visiting my mother, because I have a bug that I really wouldn’t want to pass on to her, although I can think of a large number of people who would be vastly improved by it. She, too, has been subject to a cascade of failures by the NHS, meaning she’s been having to stay in hospital well past the point at which it stops being amusing. Meanwhile, I have been too busy dotting back and forth between Brighton and London, and too asleep at 8am to call the surgery and make a doctor’s appointment to ask my GP if there’s a way I can get my gallbladder seen to before the US midterm elections, and ideally at a hospital that isn’t under investigation for allegations of medical negligence (I have started referring to the Royal Sussex County Hospital in my thoughts as the Sweeney Todd County Hospital. I could have sworn I saw a pie shop in the vicinity the last time I was there.)

The mood has been considerably lifted by a Mr G— S— of Gloucestershire, a reader who has sent me a care package of Johnnie Walker Black Label and a very nice card explaining why he had done so. Believe it or not, I haven’t even opened the whisky yet: I’ve been feeling that rotten. Mr S— is not the first reader to have sent me Scotch in the post to soothe my pains, and I very much hope he will not be the last. Come on, you lot, pull your fingers out. If he has the wit and resources to get a parcel to me at my home, then I bet you do too. You are, after all, reading the same magazine, which means you are both brainy and kind. I sometimes wonder if other writers for this magazine get sent presents in the post but I suspect they don’t. After all, they don’t have the editorial freedom to wallow in 900 words of self-pity every week, and anyway, they don’t need the stuff as much as I do. I bet some of them don’t even drink. This magazine has a long historical connection with the Fabian Society, and while I am a great admirer of theirs, up to a point, people didn’t go to a gig by the Fabians in order to get blotto. (My father joined the Liberal Party when he was a student. Why? I asked, genuinely baffled. Because they held the best parties, he said, and had the best-looking girls.)

And really, the booze helps with the pain. The condition is either getting better, or I am becoming more used to it. In the last few days I have been able to lie on my side – and a couple of nights ago, even managed to lie on my right side for a bit. Seriously, when you spend about 50 per cent of your life in bed even when you’re at the top of your game, not being able to lie on your side gets really boring, really quickly.

The whole business of being ill has made me think of something even more boring than not being able to lie on your side: my mortality. The big day, or rather, the second year on the tombstone, plaque, or Wikipedia entry, does not recede into the future with age. Luckily, because I am fundamentally immature, I have been able to ignore these intimations. But sometimes you can’t ignore the signs. I have just checked, and I am now almost exactly – two months out – the same age as Christopher Hitchens was when he died. He liked Johnnie Walker Black Label too, as I recall.

He was born in 1949… In my childhood bedroom, the one I have been staying in when looking after the c-a-t (I must spell it that way to avoid triggering my ailurophobic editor), I saw on an upper shelf a small black-and-white framed photo I hadn’t noticed before. In it is a group of young women, dressed as if for the beach, in an attitude of choreographed abandon, their arms spread wide, their faces beaming, behind them a stylised theatrical background: palm trees.

I recognised it instantly: a picture of the chorus line from the original Broadway production of South Pacific, which means the photograph was taken in… 1949. Second on the right is my mother, and it is no confession of Oedipal yearnings, just a simple statement of fact, to observe that my mother is the most attractive, and most abandoned (in a good way) of the lot.

The other week I brought her the papers, as usual: Guardian and Telegraph. The latter had a full-page interview with Harry Enfield, who is very good at what he does. There was a large picture of him. He is only two years older than me but my, he looks about 70. My mother, who I think is immortal, notices this, and looks at my surprisingly, well, comparatively youthful features.

“Good genes,” she says.

[Further reading: My year-long quest to find London’s best nightclub]