‘So trousers down, up on the couch, lie on your side and take a deep breath,’ said the young Indian nurse as she put on white latex gloves and lubricated her fingers ready to examine my prostate.

‘We haven’t even had dinner and a date,’ I said in a weak attempt at a joke. She didn’t laugh. I guessed she’d heard similar from embarrassed patients all the time. A year ago, someone close to me died of prostate cancer. He made me promise to have regular check-ups and I wanted to honour that. ‘Prostate cancer is treatable if it’s caught in time,’ he said. Sadly it was too late for him by the time they diagnosed it, and it had spread. They tried everything – hormone treatment, chemotherapy, various clinical trails – and he cursed that he hadn’t taken heed when invited by his local surgery to have regular checks, or seen someone when he’d started needing to get up to use the loo four times a night. ‘Like most blokes, I thought it won’t happen to me. I’m going to live for ever,’ he said. His passing was a shock. First of my inner circle to leave the party. I missed him sorely and his death was part of the reason I’d been taking stock of life and making some changes. He had a lot to say before he went, urging friends and family not to waste time with people they didn’t want to be with or doing things they really didn’t want to do. ‘Life is not a rehearsal,’ he said. ‘You only get one crack at it.’

*

So much for a great start to the New Year, I thought after the nurse had taken blood for the PSA test and I’d left the surgery and headed for my car. What would I do if I had bad news? Maybe this wasn’t the time to try and convince Bea Brooks that I was the one for her; maybe I’d wait to get the results or else it might be a case of ‘hey Bea, I want to be in your life, to love, cherish and the rest of it. And oh … just one thing, might be that none of the equipment will work if I have to have surgery or radiotherapy or whatever, er, sorry about that, bad timing eh?’ I was looking forward to a chapter or chapters with Bea, had it all planned out – how I was going to woo and win her, but now I felt it might be best to leave it a while, see what the outcome of the tests were. It might not be the end of the world, I might even get the all-clear, but I’ve done my research. Even if you do have to have treatment, some chaps are lucky and sail through it, and some recover all the necessary in time.