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Because my neck was unstable, they needed to secure the vertebrae at the front with a small metal plate. Before the operation, there were chats, which I only very vaguely remember, with both the anaesthetist and the neurosurgeon. The operation was tricky because my neck had swollen so much that from the ears down my neck flared out towards my shoulders, like some monstrous steroid-happy body-builder. It looked so grotesque Dave did not allow Dougie to visit me for several days.

‘You made an international prop forward look swan-necked.’

So swollen was my throat that the act of intubating me for the anaesthetic was risky and the operation, to plate the front of my sixth cervical vertebrae, took several hours. Afterwards they were worried that my throat would close up with the additional trauma, so they kept me on a ventilator to breathe for me, a big fat air tube in through my mouth and down into my lungs, and I was even more sedated. I couldn’t speak. A drip fed my body with fluid; a catheter drained it out. Of all this I was oblivious. I also had a nasal-gastric tube up my nose and down my throat, through which they passed the ground-up drugs into my stomach. When I was with-it enough to cry, the tears ran into my ears and soaked the tape securing the feeding tube to my face. I could do nothing about this; it was the same exquisite misery as when you have a streaming cold but are unable to blow your nose. The only thing to do was try not to cry. Christine had told me things would get better and she never let me down – I just had to take shelter in my head and hang on.