GETTING older has little to recommend it, other than playing with hordes of delightful grandchildren and splashing out on the winter fuel allowance.

The body which has served me well for six decades is starting to wear out and visits to the apothecary have become depressingly more frequent.

My main loss of acuity remains my ears, which are now little more than handy appendages on which to hang my glasses. As instruments to gather sound, they are about as much use as Iain Duncan Smith’s comb.

It drives Mrs Hextol up the wall, as she has to repeat everything at least twice, and even then, I don’t always pick up exactly what she is saying.

A non-committal grunt has become my most frequent response to her verbal sallies, but she does have a habit of speaking to me from two rooms away, and expecting me to hear what she says.

“I’ve got a disability, you know,” I will say in wounded tones, to which she’ll retort darkly: “You’ll have another one soon unless you start listening to me properly…”

I have been issued with hearing aids, but I lost one, and according to Mrs Hextol, the surviving one emits a constant squeal that only she and the dog can hear.

She also claims that the car is making a grating screeching noise on corners, but I remain totally oblivious to it, even though she says she can hear the car coming from the other side of the village.

Television is a bit of an oddity, because while I can hear all the soaps and quiz shows without too much difficulty, I cannot follow any of the dialogue in hospital soaps, nor make head nor tail of the earthy Cornish mutterings of Poldark.

But it’s not just aural challenges I have to endure as the years roll on – I have undergone several ventral traumas too.

I was recently assailed by such a pain in the belly I felt as though I had been impaled on Chaka’s assegai, and the old Zulu warrior spent the next six hours twisting it mercilessly. The agonising attack immediately followed consumption of an illicit late night fried egg sandwich, done in a teaspoonful of lard, and I deduced the two were not unconnected.

I assumed it was a recurrence of the diverticulitis I suffered a few years ago, and when a second attack left me writhing on the huffy bed for another night of unrelieved pain, I thought I had better check in at the surgery.

I had almost sent for the out of hours doctor, but theN remembered the three-hour wait I endured the last time I dragged a medic to the North Tyne, and though better of it.

He arrived on crutches and appeared to be in just as much pain as me.

I had to make an appointment at the doctor’s, a phenomenon I am still getting used to after years of just turning up at the surgery on the odd occasion I was off colour.

I still struggle with the concept that you have to know several days in advance when you are going to be under the weather.

And when I saw the GP, he reminded me that a scan I had undergone some months ago had revealed I had a gallstone, which I was advised to ignore as it was not causing me any problems at the time. I thought it might be about the size of a pea, but it transpired it was 18mm across – as big as a gobstopper.

He concluded it might be as well to check whether my little parasite had grown any bigger, so another ultrasound scan was booked.

This entailed a trip to Wansbeck Hospital at Ashington, where my jelly-smeared belly gave generous scope for investigation.

I winced a bit when the technician pressed on a little heavily, and she remarked: “Yes, that would hurt; it’s exactly where the stone is.”

Feeling like an expectant mother, I craned to see the little gastric asteroid, but the screen was just filled with wavy grey lines, like one of those Magic Eye puzzles where you have to stare for ages at a seemingly meaningless pattern, only for it to suddenly to leap into focus and reveal King Kong riding a bike or some such phenomenon.

I could make nothing of it, but the technician said Roger the lodger appeared to have increased in size significantly since he last had his picture taken.

Surgery beckons ...