Wilfred De’ath

avoids the hairdresser’s. She gets her hairdresser friend Jim to come over and style it instead. I look forward to Jim’s visits. He knows everything there is to know about Judy Garland. I once tried to impress by telling him how she had died on the loo, but Jim already knew about that. He also knew all about the stories of her being molested by Munchkins.

And he shares the Aged P’s interest in true crime. While he cuts Betty’s hair at the kitchen table, I sit mesmerised as he regales us with his knowledge. He refers to murderers in a way that can seem borderline affectionate. ‘Charismatic but wicked Charlie Manson was, making that rubbishy Family do his nasty work for him… Silly brainwashed hippies they were, stoned out of their heads, y’see…’ This month, it was all Ted Bundy: ‘Good looking boy Ted was…’ Snip, snip, ‘But evil as anything, nasty piece of work…’

Mr H F has given up pretending he has any hair left; so he has had it all shaved off. He thinks this makes him look like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, but he’s more like Donald Pleasence in You Only Live Twice. When he returns from the barber’s, he has taken to examining his bald pate in the mirror before muttering, ‘The horror, the horror…’

He’s clearly pleased with his severe new look, but I find it slightly sinister. And now son Fred is so paranoid about going the way of his father that he has taken to washing his hair with porridge oats (don’t ask me why). And buying expensive ointments that make mad claims. He regularly asks me and Betty to check his crown. ‘Well? Am I going bald?’ ‘No!’ we chorus. The Aged P doesn’t understand why so many men have a problem with losing their hair. ‘I find bald men attractive. Don’t you remember my crush on President Sadat?’

In his recent autobiography The Cutting Edge, the Beatles’ one-time hairdresser Leslie Cavendish reveals that John Lennon also feared losing his hair. After a magazine article in 1969 misquoted Cavendish claiming Lennon could go bald, the hairdresser had a call from the anxious Beatle. Fearful of being on the receiving end of Lennon’s temper, he babbled denials that he had said such a thing. After a long silence, seemingly the calm before the storm, Lennon asked worriedly, ‘Am I really going bald?’

Fifty years on, Cavendish admits that John was indeed beginning to lose his hair and would almost certainly have gone bald had he lived beyond forty. Yoko may not have liked that, but the Aged P would surely have approved. The brutal surgeon, who was intent on amputating my left foot – then only my big toe – warned me not to drink orange juice (my preferred tipple) at breakfast time.

‘It’s full of sugar,’ he said. ‘You should drink either wine or water instead.’

I pointed out that even French hotels do not normally serve wine at breakfast. He seemed to accept this. Then he asked me a highly impertinent, not to say embarrassing, question: ‘Is your penis still working?’

Well, I told him cagily, it all depends. For purposes of urination, its most common usage, it is operating perfectly well. (As a diabetic, I have to ‘go’ several times a night.) For the other act, it is a bit, well, up and down… I have even heard myself, while in bed with a girlfriend, resorting to that most hoary of excuses, ‘I’m so sorry, this has never happened before’. The doctor seemed to accept this as well.

Speaking of the other act (and who isn’t?), one of the nurses in intensive care, Megan, was a young woman of quite staggering beauty and sexuality. In my fantasy life, Megan and I headed down to the Côte d’azur together, booked into a six-star hotel on the beach, swam in the hotel pool and the Med, ate a Michelin-starred lunch washed down with a gallon of rosé, then made love in the bedroom…

I told her all this, and naturally she took it with a pinch of salt. I expect no end of randy old Frenchmen in intensive care have tried it on with her.

As for the planned amputation, I am currently scouring la belle France to find a hospital doctor who might come up with an alternative solution. One of the doctors in Saumur said my lower body was ‘in bad shape’ but they would still do their best to save my foot or toe. That gave me hope.

Visitor report. The charming woman (the wife of Prefect François, my voisin in the next bed) who smuggled milk chocolate and copies of the Times and the New York Times into the room shared with her husband, turned out to be, on top of everything, a deeply religious woman. She got my rosary repaired for me, gave me another to replace it, and arranged for a Catholic chaplain (female, surprisingly) to bring the Eucharist to her husband and myself one Sunday morning.

François and I shook hands at the Peace, and I felt that we were comrades for ever. (I really missed him – and her – when they left.) All this gave me hope, too. I believe there is such a thing as ‘spiritual healing’ and I am shortly heading down to Lourdes in search of it.

As the late, great Jeffrey Bernard, who suffered from diabetes, as I do, once said, ‘You can still function, even with your leg off.’

I am sometimes known, flatteringly, as the ‘Jeffrey Bernard of The Oldie’, but I should still prefer it not to come to that.