Thus the NHS became an important part of my life and the range of medical appointments inside a year exceeded those in the rest of my life put together: specialist consultations, GP consultations, urination tests, blood tests, manual explorations, MRI scans, biopsies — you name it. Perhaps I should have listened to my mother-in-law who regards the medical profession as the front line of the middle class plot to "get you". She often opines that if you get into the hands of doctors they'll never let you go until they've found enough wrong with you to kill you off. Incidentally, I did consider private treatment. But given my academic and literary forms of employment I had no institutional access to medical insurance and for the previous 50 years it would have been a waste of money to buy my own. I could have paid cash for treatment easily enough, but the specialist was scornful of that notion. If I was treated locally, he said, I would only get him and the treatment would certainly not be better. In fact, the actor Richard Griffiths died a few feet away from me in hospital, suggesting that even successful actors use the NHS. And comparing myself to other friends and relatives who have had similar problems to me and had them treated privately in this country or abroad, I must report that the treatment I received seems to have worked better than most.

The main rule in dealing with the NHS, if you can possibly stick to it, is "Don't stay overnight". The initial reason for this is that if you stay overnight you need a "bed". This doesn't literally mean a bed in the ordinary sense — they have plenty of those — it means a proper parking space for a bed which is staffed and switched on to all the facilities. The first time I needed a "bed" they rang me up the day before I was due to say that there were none so my operation was cancelled. The second time I stripped for action and met with the anaesthetist and surgeon and then waited . . . and waited. Then a charming administrator turned up and said that they'd had to cancel because wards had been closed because of the discovery of MRSA and there were now no "beds" for cases of our level of priority. I say "our" because there was another man in exactly the same position as myself. He was a factory worker who had had to take a taxi and who had run out of days of paid sick leave and feared the sack and he was pretty upset. I followed the rule that it isn't worth berating the guy they pay to be berated (a handsome young Afro-English guy in this case), but he didn't. We did agree, though, that the waste of resources was astonishing.

The third time I arrived at SODA (surgery on day of arrival) I saw my name with a big black X against it. "Urology list is cancelled today, dear," said the lady in charge; I said nothing, but thought only in expletives. Then we were told to wait until the situation was clarified and someone turned up with the urology list as if nothing had happened. My name was on the top and the surgeon and anaesthetist proceded to act with almost unseemly haste. "Let's get you in there," said the consultant and the unspoken thought was, "then they'll have to find somewhere to put you." Once inside the surgical ward everything seemed to be at a higher level of development from outside. I had an epidural so the bottom half of my body entered a different world from the top half. Down there, curtained off, there were screens and probes and equipment which looked very advanced, operated by men and women going calmly about their business. At my end there were, apart from myself, a male anaesthetist from Berlin and a pretty female nurse from Stourbridge. It took an hour. All was considered to have gone well and I was cast out into the other dimension of the NHS to be wheeled around the hospital by a muscular and friendly African male nurse. Briefly, it seemed that there really were no beds because we were parked for a time at a ward reception.