Today she had no anecdotes to wrap around her miseries, just splashes of discrete memory: circulation socks, operation gown, baggy hospital knickers; when she asked the anaesthetist if anaesthetic was dangerous, he countered by asking her if she had ever crossed the road. Yes, there was no denying it, she had crossed the road. ‘Well, that’s more dangerous!’ he said triumphantly, getting up, tripping over the neighbouring chair, and almost falling over, without any comment or discernible sense of irony. Perhaps he wanted to show that almost everything was more dangerous than anaesthetic and she was lucky to be having a break from a hazardous world. Due to a ‘traffic jam’ around the pre-op room, she had to be put to sleep in the operating theatre itself. Looking around, she saw a dark green piece of medical equipment that reminded her of a butcher’s block.

‘Is that where you are going to put me after I’ve gone to sleep?’

‘Yes,’ said the nurse. ‘It’s really important that your head doesn’t move, even a millimetre, during the procedure. The margins are tiny – so we have to clamp your head using that equipment.’

Horrified by that thought as she went under; waking up shaking with cold, her teeth chattering; holding back tears of gratitude as nurses rushed over with heated blankets. The pause between deciding to make sure and then making sure she could still move her arms and legs.

It was as if she had woken from fifty years of sleep rather than two hours of surgery and had been mysteriously catapulted into decrepitude, with wrists and ankles that might snap, a body that might bruise and a skull that might crack with only the flimsiest pretext. On the morning of her departure, she took a shower, although she was not allowed to wash her hair for a week and had to wear a cap. In the shower, the bottle of gel slipped from her hand and triggered a seizure as it thumped and clattered around the floor. She tried to stay calm and not to pull the red emergency cord, but afterwards, when she mentioned the incident to the registrar, he said it was ‘perfectly normal’ for her seizure-threshold to go down after surgery. On the terrifying drive to Howorth, his prediction was fulfilled, although it was the most imperfectly normal drive of her life.