Radio and television appearances include Start the Week and The Culture Show, and he has also acted as the historical consultant on TV adaptations of Jane Eyre, Emma, Great Expectations, the BBC drama series Dickensian, and the feature film Enola Holmes. While many patients have had to travel abroad (often to Mexico) to receive this radical treatment, he discovered that AHSCT trials were being conducted in London, for which, following tests, he turned out to be eligible. But he knows there are few better places in which to be ill than an Oxford college (he has been at Magdalen for 20 years).

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. In that environment you’re just an object to be filled with drugs, and drained, poked, prodded, moved around. In his new book, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst likens his diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in 2017 to the opening of a trapdoor on which he unfortunately happened to be standing “like Wile E Coyote” at the precise moment when the lever operating it was pulled. In essence, it is a way of rebooting the body’s faulty immune system, like a computer being turned on and off again.As it turned out, the second scenario was closer to the truth, but at the time it was difficult to be suitably terrified because I simply didn’t know what, exactly, I was scared of. This ought to be a very depressing book since it describes the onset and development of multiple sclerosis in an Oxford don. Thanks to a faulty immune system response, the nerve cells of someone with MS are gradually stripped of their protective myelin sheaths, which means they can no longer carry instructions from the brain to the rest of the body without some of this information being lost along the way. No one would be able to enter his room without first disinfecting themselves in a decontamination area. He struggled to find words that were not ‘ungenerous or ungrateful’ for a Facebook post, which I remember seeing, in which he says that ‘the line between sympathy and pity is one I’m especially keen not to cross.

It’s not so much that he’s an Oxford literature professor but that, from childhood onwards, he looked to books for companionship and for lessons in how to live. He had the latter, with no effective treatment, it seemed, let alone a cure: “My body was like a dying coral reef. But now he began to see them as part of a sinister jigsaw: a fiendish puzzle that would, he soon gathered, forever remain unsolvable. For me the funniest moment arises from a wholly unfunny circumstance; one of the symptoms of his condition is urinary ‘urgency’.But he is kind and practical and generous, and those are the things you need if you’re ill – and my book, in part, is a love letter to him. He has bought himself a whizzy, state-of-the-art wheelchair, which may yet be deployed in the summer, heat being “kryptonite” for his MS.

A series of boxes had to be ticked – involving MRI scans and a lumbar puncture – before he was accepted for treatment. As he says to his students at the end of his introductory lecture at the beginning of each academic year, literature is not a mirror, rather it is ‘a lens we could use to refocus our understanding of the world. At times he felt like Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days, buried up to her neck; or like Prufrock (“how his arms and legs are thin”); or like Robinson Crusoe (“No rest all night, violent pains in my head”).As a fellow Primary Progressive MS survivor, it was heartening to read an account of this condition from such an articulate, well regarded author and academic. This is a beautifully written memoir- the story of a devastating diagnosis but it is so much more than that. Weak, vulnerable and permanently attached to a drip, he would be barrier nursed for a month at least. Within weeks, he deteriorated further – had blurred vision for an hour when he woke up, fell over in the street by the Bodleian Library, felt electric shocks tasering his spine if he bent his neck. But it’s also level-headed and informative: ignorant himself about MS at the outset, Douglas-Fairhurst clues us in to the terminology and treatment, with everything from neutropenia to the chilling “expanded disability status scale” (a one-10 measure of dysfunction), clearly explained.

For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. He has also acted as the historical consultant on BBC productions of Jane Eyre, Emma, Great Expectations and Dickensian, and both of the Enola Holmes films for Netflix. And there is mischievous laughter breezing throughout the book, forbidding any maudlin false sentiment.

The description on the jacket of Cummings’ book describes it as ‘joyful and despairing, self-lacerating and witty. Elsewhere the giggles bubble up from fantastical figurative language, comparable to Dickens’ zany similes and metaphors. A few seconds later I found myself peeing into a bush, just outside my front door, while an elderly neighbour walked past tutting and her dog looked back at me with a new found respect.