Well, it nearly did. What the it was that nearly did it, mind, nobody knows for sure; but on the night of May 3, spotting me in the French moonlight, something bit me as I snored, could have been a gnat, could have been a scorpion, could have been a werewolf, it left no note, merely a breach into which a billion opportunist streptococci plunged and set up a colony called Septicaemia. It is an inclement little country, where your flesh falls off, thanks to the national sport: sassy newspapers like this call it necrotising fasciitis, the red-top tabloids prefer flesh-eating disease, but however you slice it, slicing it is what has to be done, and within a couple of hours that is what the surgeons of Hôpital Saint Roch in Nice were doing.

They put my conked-out organs on a lot of machines to do it, too, and kept me on them for ages, seriously threatening the French National Grid: a thousand kilometres away, Parisian diners would glance up from their soupe de poisson and wonder why the lights were flickering.

Now, I wouldn’t be banging on about all this were it not the time of year it is, because I didn’t want this to be the first Christmas in 45 that I failed to wish my readers a merry one, especially since so many of you had expressed concern as to my whereabouts: had I run off to Maracaibo with a sloe-eyed pole artiste, been snatched by aliens from the Planet Icke, fallen foul of Mr Putin? I should also quickly say to all those who so touchingly worried, that the illness did not shrink my head: the fact that it is much smaller than when we last met is due only to the recent change in this newspaper’s layout.

It might have shrunk my brain a bit, though. By Hollywood tradition, when a month-long sleeper emerges from his coma, he either cries: “Hallo trees! Hallo sky!” to his surrounding loved ones, or else explains to them that he had the near-death experience of floating through a long tunnel at the end of which (in my case, say) James Thurber and Bernard Levin were waiting with a dry martini to welcome him aboard and direct him to the wingmakers.

According, however, to Mrs Coren and my children, my first words were: “Get me a hand grenade!”, because, they discovered as I gabbled on, I had got it into my comatose head that I was in occupied France, and the Boche were at the gate, drawn thither by collaborators who had spotted the short-wave radio in the cardboard suitcase under my bed.

Fortunately, my clapped-out mind was eventually set at rest: where it happily remains, confidently in a position to wish you as merry a Christmas as it knows mine will be.

God bless us, everyone.

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