I watched her drive off in her car and I felt depressed and ashamed. I went back to bed, gave up the fight and dreamed of Louise.

April. May. I continued my training as a cancer specialist. They got to call me the Hospital Ghoul down at the Terminal Ward. I didn’t care. I visited patients, listened to their stories, found ones who’d got well and sat by ones who died. I thought all cancer patients would have strong loving families. The research hype is about going through it together. It’s almost a family disease. The truth is that many cancer patients die alone.

‘What do you want?’ one of the junior doctors finally asked me.

‘I want to know what it’s like. I want to know what it is.’

She shrugged. ‘You’re wasting your time. Most days I think we’re all wasting our time.’

‘Then why bother? Why do you bother?’

‘Why bother? That’s a question for the whole human race isn’t it?’

She turned to go and then turned back to me worried.

‘You haven’t got cancer have you?’

‘No!’

She nodded. ‘You see, sometimes people who have been newly diagnosed want the inside story on the treatment. Doctors are very patronising, even to highly intelligent patients. Some of those patients like to find out for themselves.’

‘What do they find out?’

‘How little we know. It’s the late twentieth century and what are the tools of our trade? Knives, saws, needles and chemicals. I’ve no time for alternative medicine but I can see why it’s attractive.’

‘Shouldn’t you have time for any possibility?’

‘On an eighty-hour shift?’

She left. I took my book, The Modern Management of Cancer, and went home.

June. The driest June on record. The earth that should have been in summer glory was thin for lack of water. The buds held promise but they didn’t swell. The beating sun was a fake. The sun that should have brought life was carrying death in every relentless morning.

I decided to go to church. Not because I wanted to be saved, nor because I wanted solace from the cross. Rather, I wanted the comfort of other people’s faith. I like to be anonymous among the hymn-singing crowd, the stranger at the door who doesn’t have to worry about the fund for the roof or the harvest festival display. It used to be that everybody believed and faith was found in thousands of tiny churches up and down the British Isles. I miss the Sunday morning bells ringing from village to village.

God’s jungle telegraph bearing the good news. And it was good news insomuch as the church was a centre and a means. The Church of England in its unexcited benevolent concern was emphatically to do with village life. The slow moving of the seasons, the corresponding echo in the Book of Common Prayer. Ritual and silence. Rough stone and rough soil. Now, it’s hard to find one church in four that still runs a full calendar and is something more than a bit of communion every other Sunday and the odd parish event.