At 10:45am on Monday the 20^th August 2023, I was sat at the desk in my teaching room, thinking about what electro-junk to pack for a family holiday in Greece. All of a sudden, I came over queasy.

“I don’t feel very well,” I said to Mrs Gabb.

“How don’t you feel very well?” she asked.

The answer was that I was feeling queasy, and then queasier than ever I could remember.

I am told that I lurched forward and stopped breathing. My own recollection, between looking down at a USB stick and sitting in a different position with an aspirin in my mouth, is of absolutely nothing. There had been no blackness with a continued perception of time. It had been like no kind of sleep. There had been a minute or so of nothing. As I began wondering what had happened, my wife was shouting into the telephone, arguing with the emergency services. I blinked and suggested that I was perfectly fine. I promptly blacked out again. This time, I remained semi-conscious. I was aware I had stopped breathing, and I told myself to start again. My wife tells me I was taking in terrible gasps and looked as if I were dying.

Almost at once, an ambulance arrived, and two women gave me an ECG examination. They said my heart was going at about thirty beats a minute, and that my blood pressure was dangerously low. I asked if there was any evidence of a stroke or heart attack. They said there was none, but that I might die unless they took me straight to hospital. I thought about this. I had suffered no pain in my chest or left arm, nor any confusion or loss of vision. But the assurance of possibly immediate death was alarming. So I went off in their ambulance to the nearest main hospital, where I spent eight hours with my women and a shifting cast of kind and attentive but broadly incompetent persons of diversity. At last, someone who spoke English came into the room to confirm I had suffered neither a stroke nor a heart attack, and that I showed no signs of diabetes or anything else in the blood tests. After this, I announced that we were going home.

No holiday to Greece the next day. Instead, my women lectured me on how everything was somehow my fault, and that I should drink less coffee and sleep more. Over the next week, I visited half a dozen medical specialists. They all confirmed that I was in apparently perfect health. After the last set of tests, they agreed with my own explanation, and told me to be more careful in future.

We did eventually get to Greece, for a very nice fortnight at the end of October. The weather was more like a good English summer than my usual experience of the Mediterranean. There were almost no other tourists. We drove about the Peloponnese on empty roads, and walked for hours through empty museums. We climbed to the top of Mistra with no company but a busload of Chinese students, to whom I gave a lecture on Byzantine history.

But this is a digression. I have mentioned my own explanation of what happened. I suppose I should give this now.

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