I’m playing with the grandchild, Sylvie. It’s early in the morning. I’m a bit sleepy, a bit slow. She brings me her polar bear, Sidney.

She calls it “Shiissh”. I call it “Shidney”. She’s 17 months. She’s doing well. I’m 71. I’m doing badly. I have another go. “Hello, Shidney!” I make myself a strong coffee. I can’t get up off the sofa.

“I must snooze,” I say to Jill, the wife.

Sylvie gets a book.

“Spot,” she says. “Where Spot?”

Indeed. Spot the dog. I must read.

“Spit the dog.”

I’m struggling to say it.

“Where Spot?”

I don’t quite know. This is daft.

Can’t say Sidney. Can’t say Spot.

“You’re hungover,” says the wife.

I pick up Spot again. No. Can’t read it. I can see the words, I just can’t say them. My head hurts. My brain hurts. After 10 minutes, Sylvie wants a song.

“Row, Row, Row the Boat,” she goes

“Row, Row, Row the bit geny dun the streee … Murrily murr mur mur lif is but a dr …” I slur.

I phone my chum Michelle.

“He .. ll ..O aaa.” Pause. “Aaaaa … er.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“I might be aavving a str- strike.”

“Ring an ambulance! Now! You’ve got four hours,” she says strictly.

The ambulance is round in two minutes.

Two paramedics. One asks me my name, date of birth, address. I slur again. I have several goes. Each one is worse. My head hurts more. I’m miles away. My blood pressure is about a million.

“Let’s go!”

I say goodbye to Jill and the mightily indifferent Sylvie, and we go to the ambulance. Four hours. How long have I had it? I already sound like Shane MacGowan.

The ambulance has finally come for me – like those dread Larkin lines.

“Closed like confessionals, they thread

Loud noons of cities …

They come to rest at any kerb:

All streets are visited.”

We go speeding through the traffic. Quick. Quick. Out of my way! I’m fading fast. Come on.

I’ve seen the ads – FAST (Face. Arms. Speech. Time). Your face slips, your mouth goes skewwhiff, you catch fire and blur into a gargoyle.

We’re at Charing Cross hospital in about four minutes. Special delivery. VIP. Medics everywhere.

“You may be having a stroke,” says a man a white coat.

“You’re going to be all right,” says a nurse, who looks like a Vermeer.

I get bundled into a tunnel for some scans of the brain. Or what’s left of it.

“Knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door.” I think of that Dylan song.

It creeps up on you and goes off like a bomb in your head. I imagine brain cells dying, letters turning into sand, dust falling down a tablet, piano notes disappearing, typing keys vanishing, the alphabet collapsing, a computer screen wiping, no back-up, no recovery, all language packing up, all things going for ever – memory, childhood, consciousness and identity – irretrievable, irreparable, irreversible, irrevocable.

A fast forward to extinction …

Ah, the treachery of a stroke, a lightning in the skull and you’re gone. Will I speak again? Will I be able to write again?

How many words have I still got? 200. 100. 10. None.

Have I gone already? Can I come back?

Fade.

I wake up in bed in a hospital dawn, hooked up to machines. My head’s been rinsed. Medics surround the bed. The doctor pronounces my fate. It’s his job. I brace myself. He is clinical, calm and professional.

“You’ve had a stroke.”

I was still hoping I somehow hadn’t.

“It might not be so bad.” Oh.

“Did you get it in time?” I can’t say.

How much of my mind is left?

A nurse asks me my full name.

“Ian Willie Wobbie Wigwam,” I slur after about 10 goes.

My tongue still doesn’t work.

“Date of birth?”

This is astrophysics. Neuroscience. I know the answers – but I can’t say.

“What day is it?”

Ask me another.

“It will probably get better tomorrow.”

They go.

The family visit. Jill, daughter Anna, Sylvie and brother Duncan. I’m too zonked to respond. I dread not speaking to them. I feel sorry for them – how frightened and apprehensive they must be. How sad they’ll be, but they can’t let on. I stay silent. Jill keeps a bright, straight, dreadful face on. Anna too. They’re on eggshells. No one wants to give me the opportunity to be a vegetable.

“How you doing?”

Massive pause.

“I’m al … rite … I thin … a bit gro … grog,” I approximate.

I make some superfluous noises. The rags of language. I try to smile.

The family go.

I’m so sorry.

That evening I go to wash my face in the mirror. I’ve postponed this. Quasimodo and Nosferatu beckon. Go on. I gaze at myself. My non-speaking, absent-minded visage looks back. It’s haunted, jagged. Empty? The lip slipped, eyes not quite level, face not quite straight, not quite gargoyle. Could be worse. Still, I don’t shave. Cover it up.

Next day, I am a bit better.

“Name?” says the doctor.

“Ian,” yes.

“Date of birth?”

It takes a dozen syllables.

When Jill comes in, I’m twice as good as yesterday. Half a moron.

They tell me I can go the next day. Nothing more they can do. My speech should get back slowly over six months. Or not. The doctor says I must just keep talking out loud – to myself and to my family.

We better get the will settled. I may wake up dead. It’s no way to live.

In the meantime, I must talk and talk and blather and blether to anyone willing to listen – Jill, Anna and Alice, Sylvie, the cat, the wall. They can’t tell me to shut up like they used to.

Nouns are the worst. And names. This is where language goes to die. Words are like phantom limbs. An absence. I’m going Samuel Beckett. Mind you, Jill doesn’t have to listen and it is a comfort that she is going deaf.

She deaf, me mute. What a way to end our days.

And I’ve been wearing my friends out. I take them out for a meal. They can’t say no because it might be the last supper. They pretend to listen to my maunderings.

I must self-help. I say the alphabet backwards, recite Subterranean Homesick Blues, remember the QPR back four, dialogue from Bogart and Bacall in The Big Sleep, Howlin’ Wolf’s guitarist, the running order of Astral Weeks or John Donne’s A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy’s Day.

It’s working slowly. It’s coming back. Meanwhile, it’s no booze, no coffee, no salt, no dramas, and lots of Zen. Meditation. Or breathing deep. Tuning out. Letting go. Listening to the silence.

The family are extremely patient, but my best therapist is Sylvie, who’s now 18 months. She can’t be doing with my tawdry histrionics, my inarticulacy. She hasn’t noticed my brain damage. She thinks I’m a bit slow. Her language is making exponential leaps. Mine isn’t. She’s going forward. I’m catching up. We can both get to the end of Spot. We can both pronounce Sidney’s name. And I’m on top of that “merrily merrily” dirge.

I must just avoid that bomb in the head and we’ll be fine. So far, so good.