When I was a student, I wrote a dissertation on Beckett from scratch in four sleepless days and nights. This was fuelled by those over-the-counter cough pills called “do-dos”, pronounced like the extinct bird, which were packed with, if memory serves, pseudoephedrine (they weren’t quite over-the-counter; the pharmacist would give you a searching look when you asked for them) and I contracted Crohn’s colitis as a result. This is meant to be a lifelong, incurable if treatable condition, and occasionally it would flare up – funnily enough, whenever I had to visit my in-laws – but it has now not troubled me for two decades. (It was a very good dissertation on Beckett, by the way.) I had a wheezing, hacking cough a month or so ago, and a lung capacity so reduced that I got short of breath even from sitting down.

That’s gone away, and these days I go “tsk” behind people walking slowly up the hill in front of me on the way back from Waitrose. I wonder whether this is inherited: tomorrow (as I write) my mother will be 99, and, although her short-term memory is somewhat ruined and frantic (to borrow a phrase of Beckett’s), she remains reasonably hale. The other morning, after an early night suffering from a mystery bug from which I have subsequently recovered, I noticed five missed calls from an unknown number, the first of which was at two in the morning.

I initially thought of N—, whom I had alluded to in a column a couple of weeks ago, and is the only person I could think of who might be calling me up that late and that often. But for various reasons – including advice from the police and several friends – we are no longer in touch, which is a shame, but there you go. It wasn’t her, it was from my mother’s care service, for she had fallen over in the middle of the night, couldn’t get up, and activated her help alarm.

There was little I could have done, in the middle of the night, in another city, with no car, but I suppose they wanted to keep me in the loop. She now seems to have recovered – touch wood – and has been prised off the bedroom floor. It is disturbing to think of someone falling over and not being able to get up again.

It is, unavoidably, a Beckettian plight – just the kind of thing he’d put one of his characters through. I also think of my friend M—, whom I also mentioned a few weeks ago, as he was about to undergo bypass surgery following a heart attack. He also has recovered, although is a bit cross with me for making him out to be older than he actually is.

I suppose we shall patch this up eventually. Healing, healing… But the most remarkable example of regeneration occurred at the beginning of the month, when the bailiffs were expecting a payment from me about an old gas and electric bill from 2020 that I had forgotten about. So I called them up, preferring to speak to a person rather than a chatbot, and I quoted the reference number.

The person said: “That account has been closed.” “So you mean I don’t owe you anything?” I asked. “That’s right,” they said. Later that day, having filed this under the “too good to be true” category, I rang them up again, this time quoting another reference number they had given me.

“That account has been closed,” they said. I pressed them on the point. “Does this mean I don’t have anything to pay?” “That is correct.” Well, that was good enough for me.

The £350 or so I had earmarked for the payment I then spent on other, nobler causes. At one point, temulent and in the middle of the night, I bought a T-shirt in olive drab with a trident on it to designate support for Ukraine; this is the kind of thing I do when I’m drunk. It was £26 – I really hope some of the money went to that country.

And yesterday, while I was feeling low, a friend invited me to an early supper at the Regency, my favourite restaurant in Brighton. This friend is actually rather famous but I won’t name him or her, especially as he or she is an absolutely marvellous gossip and raconteur. Suffice it to say that before we had even ordered our starters he or she had told me an anecdote about the famously inebriate sometime television host and writer Rowland Rivron, the anecdote ending with the words “… and the piano was never the same again”.

This, among other stories, and that he or she paid for a dozen oysters, a plate of spaghetti alle vongole, a carafe of the house white, a brandy, coffee, and a dessert item that the menu calls “Spotted Richard” cheered me up immensely. All good things must come to an end. Today I have heard some grievous news from two different friends – and the bailiffs called me up to ask me where my money was. Enjoy life while you can. [Further reading: A forgotten theory that explains Trump’s psychosis]