I’ve got a bad back. Bottom two vertebrae more or less locked. Grim. A pain where you can’t stand up after sitting, sit after standing, or do anything much at all, except stay where you are, feeling nauseous. It makes certain things, twisty or bendy things mostly – like locking the car, doing up one’s shoes, putting on one’s trousers, wiping one’s arse – practically impossible (though achievable with an effort of will – do not imagine that I am sitting here naked from the waist down, smelling terrible and merely keeping my fingers crossed that nobody will steal the car).

I get it every time I play fives. It lasts about a week. I play fives every Tuesday night. This means that during the season, which lasts from October to May, I am relatively mobile and comfortable only on Tuesday afternoons. If you want anything from me in winter – a lift to the airport, a loan, a nice review of your restaurant, a piggy back – then it’s pretty much Tuesday afternoon or nothing.

And today is Wednesday. I woke up paralysed on my back like Gregor Samsa (you remember him, out of Kafka’s Die Verwandlung, who found himself in his bed into a horrible insect metamorphosed) and wondering if I will ever feel human again. Probably not. But I have to file my review of Olivomare. So I’ve dragged myself to the little desk by the bed, climbed the chair, hand over hand, and have parked myself in it until the job is done. Standing up will be such a rigmarole, now that my spine is set, that I will not do so until the piece is finished.

This may not be good for Olivomare.

Also, I quite need the loo. But fearing the palaver that that will represent (see above), I am happy enough to hold it in. This is not as hard as you might think, because the drugs I take for the back are so full of codeine that they constipate me for days at a time. This is one of those days.

This may also not be good for Olivomare.

Furthermore, this is not the hour at which I normally write. It is a quarter past seven in the morning. Because, you see, the builders on both sides of the place I’m staying in (which is not my home) started two hours earlier with the heavy machinery than they are strictly allowed to by local law, on the grounds, no doubt, that it is already nine o’clock in Poland.

This may also not be good for Olivomare.

For it might make me focus on the negative aspects, which I do not normally do. To do this, and I intend to, I will have to review the place backwards, because it was only towards the end of a perfectly nice lunch that things started to go a bit pear-shaped.

For example, as we left after a quite acceptable meal and were exchanging goodbyes with the staff, I asked the restaurant manager if I might please have a copy of the menu.

“Actually, no,” he said.

“Oh go on, please,” I said. “I’ve had such a nice time I’d love to be able to remember everything I ate and recommend it to my friends.”

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