It turns out I have shingles. I remember at various points in my life people talking in a tone of great pity and sympathy about other people who had shingles but I don’t think I’d ever properly considered what it was. Now I know. What happens is a furious stoat somehow gets inside one half of your body without you noticing and gradually begins to chew all your flesh and nerve endings. You never see the stoat, but after a while the scars from its interior work begin to show on the outside, then begin to blister. At night, it’s a little different to that: you wake up at 2 a.m. feeling like you and the stoat have been involved in a fire at a biochemical factory. I’ve got quite a high pain threshold but, even so, I’m finding it all surprisingly nasty – particularly the bit where the stoat bought some hot chilli sauce as a dressing then ate my bellybutton from within. What is also startling is that shingles is actually a little bit of chickenpox that’s been sitting dormant in your body, waiting patiently to come back and get you. My chickenpox was a bastard in 1977, when I was seventeen. Like me, they look less punk rock than they did back then, but they’re still a bastard and have become more bitter and cynical with age. I will still walk, though. This afternoon, five miles. Everything is gold and green and brown down the deep lanes, with the one exception of the bright new red berries on the rowan. Every day, the sun thins a little more. Reka and I haven’t played Scrabble for ages. We must. It’s Scrabble weather. I heard Reka singing the song again, late at night, and then I thought I heard it again, at about 3 p.m., but it might have been just my half-dream state. I’m that kind of ill where songs spin in your head as you try to sleep. Hallucination, I suppose. Last night my pillow was a rock I tried to carve but a hand kept stopping me. I looked up and the hand belonged to Kath on reception. ‘You look tired,’ she said. ‘Are you OK?’