Photo by Innis McAllister/ Millennium Images, UK I have been thinking, lately, of the power of regeneration. This of course has been on my mind ever since William Hartnell regenerated as Patrick Troughton in Doctor Who in 1966, I think, but lately because of my disappearing pain in the neck. How did it just go away? When I was a student, I wrote a dissertation on Beckett from scratch in four sleepless days and nights. This was fuelled by those over-the-counter cough pills called “do-dos”, pronounced like the extinct bird, which were packed with, if memory serves, pseudoephedrine (they weren’t quite over-the-counter; the pharmacist would give you a searching look when you asked for them) and I contracted Crohn’s colitis as a result. This is meant to be a lifelong, incurable if treatable condition, and occasionally it would flare up – funnily enough, whenever I had to visit my in-laws – but it has now not troubled me for two decades.…