My book group meets every six weeks. We decide by raffle what fiction to read. We each suggest two titles: one classic, one contemporary. The time before last my choice of the new translation of War and Peace by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky provoked a couple of anxious glances. ‘I knew it,’ Y hissed as my number was drawn from her beret.

I felt guilty. I am quite new to the group and don’t want to drive the stalwarts away.

Because of the book’s 1200 pages our chairwoman decided on 300 pages-a-go over four sessions.

At the meetings we say what we will, then vote out of ten on content, then style, then enjoyableness. Last time three of us, with only 900 pages to go, chirruped ten ten ten as we tried to describe the scale and vision of the journey we felt ourselves to be on – how truth accumulates, how illusory personal freedom proves to be…

The other three were fed up. Two two two they intoned, like Amy Winehouse declining rehab. It was heavy in every sense, all that French, and all those unpronounceable names and all those battles and padding.

It was felt that the ayes should go it alone – we’d stay late after the next session to discuss 300 more pages between ourselves. I’m glad I’m with the ayes and not the nays. Absorption into this epic stops my own life racing away. But it’s strange for me, moving from the Napoleonic wars of 1805-12 to - as research for Edith Cavell - the erupting of Europe a hundred years after that. A continuum of carnage, destruction, grief and pain. Old wars elide with new wars, the war appetite stays, the cost’s not counted and new approaches aren’t made.

Talking with a friend about the breaking of relationship, she used the metaphor of hitting an ice floe and how you see that ice floe looming. And I said yes, and that crashing into it wasn’t because of lack of love or intelligence, but often had something to do with childhood catastrophe and the learning that love and disaster elide. And we sort of agreed that once it had been hit, there was no drawing back from it, no counselling would work, there was no route round.

Then going over this with a wise gay friend he said that our generation – his and mine – in our formative years had our deepest desires met with homophobia, scorn and silence. There was no one to talk to. It meant we internalised pain and were on our own. He said thank goodness it’s easier now.

Then he gave me a very good bit of advice: You should put a rubber band round your wrist and every time you find yourself thinking of the person you know you must forget, twang the band and make yourself think of something else. It gives a sort of sharp Wake-up-snap-out-of-it feel. It’s curiously effective, though these days, for myself, I’m far too grown up and busy for such twanging.

Paul Whelan being hauled from the stalls to the wings of the ENO the other night to sing Raimondo in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, while Clive Bayley who had lost his voice mimed on stage, is a reminder of how fraught live performance can be. It can all get worse than drying, falling over the furniture and breasts bursting from cleavage. There was a Dutch production of Grease where the car with the lead lovers Danny and Sandy drove into the orchestra pit. One was concussed, the other had a broken arm but the musicians were all right. I remember Stephen Moore dangling from wires centre stage at the National Theatre for a quarter-of-an hour as he failed to fly in Peter Pan. He quipped about it being quicker by tube. Judi Dench as Cleopatra - was it again at the National - got her robe ripped to bits by a lump of set, but womanfully, and half-naked, went on about having immortal longings in her. The stage caught fire on the press night of The History Boys in 2004 and apparently that year too a lump of ceiling but not the chandelier fell on the stalls’ audience at the Haymarket in When Harry Met Sally.

I’m at an age where hospital tests figure in conversation with friends: breast, heart, tongue, liver, kidneys, brain – it’s all rather meaty for those of vegan tastes. Often, usually, pills and the proscribing of pleasures keep them on the road – down with butter, alcohol, nicotine, sloth, up with muesli and the treadmill. Thus they carry on, almost as whenever, though they now take the stairs one at a time and creak as they rise from their chairs.

Fathers of course are long gone, then mothers one by one, but can it be that friends the same age as I, Sylvia from school, Sheila from university, Douglas from my first job ever, have actually died.

Despite a bit of cancer ten years back I do not often think of myself as mortal in the transitory sense. I am here and that’s how it is. As that’s how it was with them and seemed to me it would for ever be.

Stretchered out in an ultrasound cubicle fully-clothed and with my boots on, just my jumper pulled up and the waist button of my jeans undone, smeared with some sort of KY jelly, a nice doctor slithering an elaborate mouse over what I might call my torso, I watched with confused detachment as my inner self googled to the screen. I didn’t at all understand what was where, in much the same way as I’ve never known where Mongolia ends and Kazakhstan begins, but there was a student sitting in, to whom the nice doctor addressed a commentary, so how could I help but overhear.

I took in very little. He was a conscientious tour operator, but it was an unfamiliar journey without recognisable landmarks. That’s her liver. No fat. That’s a bit of her spine. Did he mean that fuzzy little knobble. That’s her something or other. A landmass, or was it an ocean, lurched then disappeared. That’s her right kidney, and can you turn on your side, that’s right, that’s her left kidney, and oh, what’s that. A crater loomed. It’s very small. It might be a stone, it might be a cyst. He worried at it, went in on it from this angle and that. I said I’ve learned to be wary of little lumps that might be something else and he said Yes. He magnified it until it became planet earth from space, took pictures. Clearly this was the high spot of the tour. A little lump, a satellite, a coral reef, the Rubicon stream.

That was it. The film show over. I said, What now. He said Keep your appointment with Doctor Y. I worried the jelly stuff might stain my smart Armani jumper and rubbed myself with scrunchy blue paper but the student told me it wouldn’t - stain. I went to the ground floor café, had a double espresso and a piece of toast, then home on the circle line.

That was a week ago. What to make of it one way or the other. Nothing original. Only the time-honoured wisdom gleaned from books and music and loving friends and forest walks and conversation over one-to-one suppers in cheap Italian restaurants. I have my own book to write, a holiday in July – Greek Islands on a private yacht – very posh. And next week, or this weekend, or tomorrow, or rather today – a birthday dinner, my desk to tidy, email to answer and the tame blackbirds outside the window both waiting to be fed.