One day when I come back i won’t be able to open the door. ‘Too much rubbish in there, dear,’ my mother will say. ‘There’s not even room for a pound of jam.’ Then I suppose I will give up travelling, or running or whatever it is that I am doing and stay at home.

Below me today the sea is a startling silver colour; in fact, it hurts my eyes to look at it for more than a moment or two. Like a huge animal it crawls with white lines of foam moving across its wrinkled back. Then i shut my eyes. I feel the touch of the sun’s April warmth and then the cutting edge of the bloody east wind blowing from God knows where; the Steppes of Russia we have always been told, but I make a point of not believing everything that people say to me. I could stand here with my eyes shut for a long time, if it weren’t for the east wind. It carves through my clothes and presses its knife edge against the scars, the visible signs of my mutilation. I pull my coat around me. I listen to the sounds of normal life behind me; the calls of mothers to their children, the barking of dogs, and the brisk thudding along the path of the occasional jogger.

At such moments in the last few months I have sometimes become engulfed in a frightening fog of self-pity. i really hate this. I have never intended to be that sort of person. I have always tried to be well balanced, resilient – cool, they call it now. Self-pity is not cool.

I did speak to my doctor about this.

He laughed. He is an old family friend, so he has the right to laugh. ‘For heaven’s sake, Clara, you are post-operative. Give yourself a chance.’

He then wrote something on my case notes; probably a memo to himself, for future use. Remember to send Clara to a shrink if she carries on like this. Maybe not, of course.

He then repeated what he had already said. ‘Give yourself a chance.’

I am doing just that.

Now when I feel the edges of my mind beginning to mist over with despair I fill my head with music. I sing – mainly in my head, but sometimes also aloud. I conjure up such singers as Callas, Jessye Norman, Kathleen Ferrier – I give them the acoustic in my head and let them rip.

I open my eyes again and stare into the wind and then down the coast past Bray Head to the little snout of Greystones leaning into the sea. The wind buffets me, quite gently. It is veering now to the south, not so disagreeable any more and inside me the voice of Benita Valente sings with a charm that at this moment I find very seductive.

Wenn auf dem höchsten Fels ich steh’,

In’s tiefe Tal herniederseh’,

Und singe:

German was never one of my best subjects.