But having a part of me with someone else’s DNA was a bit of a challenge, not least because my immune system tended to view this alien intruder as an enemy, rather than as a friend, and would happily destroy it.

Rejection is what it is called, and even though my conscious brain had warmly welcomed my transplanted hand’s arrival, my unconscious physiology never gave up the struggle to rid me of it.

To prevent this, I took a daily cocktail of drugs specifically designed to suppress my natural immune system. While they allowed my new hand to be tolerated by the rest of my body, it had the unfortunate side effect that it made me more vulnerable to infections. A common cold could render me sick and in bed for a week, while flu was to be avoided at all costs.

The trick was to balance the giving of just enough of the drugs to prevent rejection of the transplant, while leaving enough residual protection to ward off infectious diseases.

Covid-19 has been particularly dangerous for donor-organ recipients. In the first year of the recent pandemic, some 40 per cent of unvaccinated transplant patients who developed Covid-19 died from the disease, against a mortality rate of less than 2 per cent of infected people in the population as a whole.

Hence, in the first lockdown, Marina, Sassy and I had shielded, keeping ourselves away from absolutely everyone. Since then, I had been jabbed with all sorts of vaccines, and with regular boosters, to try and stave off infections of any kind, and, so far, the balance had been pretty good. But I had to remember to take my medication religiously every night. Even leaving it for one day could result in rejection problems, as I knew only too well.

Early on, just after my transplant, I’d been forced to miss taking my daily pills. We had been on our way back home from a holiday in Australia when our flight was delayed for twenty-four hours at Singapore by an engine fault.

All the passengers were put up in a hotel, but I’d only kept a single dose with me and the delay meant the journey would now take two nights. By the time we arrived in London, when I was finally able to retrieve my medication from our checked baggage, my hand had gone bright red and the skin had begun to itch mercilessly.

Thankfully, the damage had not been permanent and my hand had soon recovered, but the experience taught me an important lesson: make sure I had plenty of backup doses close to hand. Even Marina had taken to keeping some of my pills in her handbag, just in case.