Proper medicine, I mean. You know the thing: carefully worked-out treatments, tested on scientific principles, applied by highly-trained health professionals. Stuff that works.

OK, some of it is a bit harsh and has left me tired and occasionally feeling quite sick. But since it is also stopping me from dropping dead from brain cancer, I have to wholeheartedly regard it as A Good Thing.

But there is also the other kind of medicine, which ain't.

As usual, there was a fair bit of hanging about as the bloods were tested before word could come back that yes, I could have my next batch of harsh chemicals; but given that they take enough to fuel a small black pudding factory, I suppose that's only to be expected.

All fine, thanks for asking - still red and packed with platelets and white cells and other circulatory stuff in all the right quantities.

It's the old radiation fatigue. It's not going away, and it's becoming a nuisance.

It seems to have been hanging around me like a lead cloud for weeks, like I'm swimming in jelly while wearing an Aran sweater. And the haircut isn't making me any more streamlined.

It will go away, of course. Probably. But I don't know when, and the unpredictability is the worst bit. I can't plan my day.

So as I write this, Clare and I are sunning ourselves in the gentle low-to-mid 20s of Gran Canaria. It's very nice, thanks.

I usually regard hotels as places to sleep, not really to be revisited between breakfast and midnight, but since I'm weirdly gubbed at odd times of the day and have to break off from whatever I'm doing to go and sleep, Clare insisted on going for a cut above my norm, a hotel with a pool with sunloungers and a room with a balcony.

Which was nice of her, I thought, as I paid for it. Still, it is very pleasant.

Not the most practical of modes of transport, but let's go with it for now.

When he got back, he broke his back…

I'm surprised he made it at all, what with the confectionery-based aircraft and everything.

And that was the end of Crackerjack.

The answer is 'with very little'. But that seems to be working, which surprises no-one more than me.

Boredom, or the fear of it, is what had initially bothered me the most about having all this time on my hands. I find it all too easy to slip into that Sunday afternoon torpor Douglas Adams described as "the long, dark tea-time of the soul", where ennui and inertia combine into urrggh.

I'm now into the second full week of my treatment, and I'm starting to feel it, with days where I feel completely washed out and quite sick. I knew to expect this – nausea is the main side-effect of Temozolomide, my particular flavour of chemo, and although it is controlled with anti-emetics I was moved to milder ones after day five, so I anticipated a certain queasiness –  but I hadn't anticipated such an impact. The nausea has been mild, but it ruins my concentration and leaves me oddly devoid of ideas. And that is buggering up my day, to be frank.

I realise that at the moment my profession sits somewhere between kitten-blinding and child vivisection in the popularity stakes, and that people currently doubt the integrity and even the skill in what at least some journalists do. But there are skills involved, and I have been very pleased to have them over the last few days.