We have ‘crises’ galore in Britain just now: not only terrorism, but also housing, social care, British Airways and the underfunded NHS. I’ve been a minor victim of the last of these, having had to wait 18 weeks for my surgery to be scheduled. This week, at long last, it has come up. That is, if there’s not another nationwide computer breakdown, or a terrorist bomb at the hospital.

I can’t say I’m looking forward to it. They say it’s ‘routine’, but there is a sentence in the bumpf they give you, warning that you might die – though I imagine that’s only for legal reasons: ‘you can’t sue us. We did warn him’. And the nurse at the hospital told me ‘we haven’t lost one yet’, which should be reassuring. Friends who’ve had the same op tell me I’ll be in pain. I rather wish they hadn’t. ‘But it’s best to be prepared’, they say. Oh no it isn’t.

I also don’t know how it’s going to affect my activities afterwards. I have Kajsa and other friends to look after my physical needs, and a great pile of books and DVDs to go through while I’m in bed. I probably won’t be blogging much, though I’ll still be following things on my laptop – especially of course the General Election, held exactly a week later. It would be nice to come out of the anaesthetic to be told that Jeremy had overtaken Theresa in the polls; so long as I don’t burst my stitches in my joy.

This Thursday is Der Tag. I might fit in another post before the op, but can’t guarantee it. And there probably won’t be many for a while afterwards. If after a couple of weeks nothing is posted here, you can probably assume I’ve pegged out. That will be a shame; but in the words of Emmanuel Barthélemy, a French refugee and notorious atheist, publicly hanged for a gruesome murder in 1855, spoken from the scaffold: ‘at least now I’ll find out if I was right’. (That strikes me as class!) It’s a pity I won’t be able to blog about it posthumously. (Do they have wi-fi up – or down – there?) That will be frustrating. I may try haunting…