Sergei and Nadia, lovely people, but their native hooch was strictly for a digestive system that had been prepared for it over years.  Over there they probably start in infancy with dry cleaning fluid and work up to it.  Lucky they had made it clear that they wanted me to leave when they did, another shot might have meant hospital.

The day after I lay sweating, aching and musing.  I’d noticed it a few days ago, but now it suddenly assumed a grim importance; the musky aroma that had accompanied me in varying degrees of intensity since puberty had recently disappeared, in its place a sweet malty fragrance wafted from my intimate regions. I began to think that this might not just be some kind of anomaly but something altogether more sinister.

It took every bit of strength I had to reach for my mobile phone and type the symptoms into Google.  Blearily I took in the terrible words that appeared on the screen, the words that deep down I had been expecting; ‘degenerative brain disorder’.  I wheezed a tearful ‘dear God why me?’ as my head thumped back onto the pillow, drawing a reproachful glare from the cat snoozing next to me.

There it was then, the end, and much sooner than expected.  Shocking really that I would never achieve anything remarkable after all I thought bleakly, I honestly believed that eventually I would.  Then it came to me; write a book about it!  It became clear that my entire meandering, feckless underachieving life could only have been a preparation for this one glittering opus.

The diving bell guy who blinked out his memoirs in morse-code and that bald bloke from the Guardian, they’d both done it, to acclaim.  Of course I was going to have to read their books, not my first choice of entertainment for my last precious days of lucidity, especially when there were pitying sexual favours to extort, but what price immortality?  At least I’d find out if he was always bald or whether it was the chemotherapy, I’d always wondered about that.

A healthy active enquiring mind trapped inside a deteriorating useless body is tragic enough, but what could possibly be more poignant than an active enquiring mind turning to tapioca pudding inside a healthy body?

Alerted to my condition I realised that my mind had already declined sharply in just the last couple of weeks.  Better get cracking on the first few chapters and knock out the plucky philosophical insights that would make the decline into incoherent babbling even more heartbreaking.  Not only that but I was going to have to negotiate a large advance from the publishers while I was still compos mentis; if I was going to slide into a future of drooling, gibbering incontinence then I meant to do it in style.

After snoozing fitfully into the late afternoon I felt sufficiently strong to further research my condition, ‘degenerative brain disorder affecting children from three to eight’ I read.

Bugger.