One crisp winter’s evening in 2008, as temperatures plummeted to their lowest average in 10 years (a figure only a meteorologist or local journalist is likely to know) I found myself strolling home in my shirtsleeves looking at a purple polka-dotted sky and thinking, you know, David, something isn’t quite right.

As the sleet failed to settle around me, I noted I was unusually warm. On and off I had been getting ‘visual aberrations’ for years without really paying them much heed. It’s hard to look directly at something that’s only ever in the corner of your eye. Suddenly, these flashing disks were too large to ignore.

Christmas loomed, and I lost my appetite. Completely. The doctors were mystified. There were blood tests, and I was poked and prodded and bits of me were squeezed quite hard by a nice lady doctor with very cold hands.

Eventually, she worked out that like my father, and his father before him, I’m diabetic. Because I’d stopped eating my blood sugar levels had dropped and that had made it harder to detect.

It’s hard to explain how the tablets helped. Readers over a certain age will remember when televisions took two people to carry and looked like squashed steampunk armoires. Imagine turning all the little knobs on the front of one of those sets up, volume, brightnes, contrast. That’s how I saw the world.

And then suddenly the meds kicked in, and the world was a quieter, duller place. As, perhaps, was I. It’s impossible for me to know. Some of the decisions I made before my diagnosis were as colourful as my then view of the world. That, however, is best left for another post.

As for my health, ironically, it’s now better than ever. My sugars are low. My weight is down. I take a couple of tablets a day, and all is well.

I’d still love a doughnut right about now though.