Memoir: George Melly, an expert on surrealism, fly-fishing and singing the blues in the manner of Bessie Smith, at the age of 79 has been described in the London press as "a national treasure" and "a living legend". He has been praised for the stylishness of his prose and the originality of his newspaper criticism of the popular arts.
The candour of his public self-revelations of early homosexuality, later bisexuality and eventual heterosexuality may have seemed stridently exhibitionistic. But that was just good old George being George, the man whose flamboyant bespoke suits for so long have brightened Soho.
He has published many intelligent and entertaining books about himself and his other favourite subjects without ever being boring - until now. However, the medical confidences that make up much of Slowing Down, his fourth volume of autobiography, are very boring indeed.
One of the people that Melly most admires, the late Spanish film-maker Luis Bunuel, admitted in his last testament that in his 70s he enjoyed "playing at senility". "In my late 70s," Melly writes, "I am still able to play at senility, enjoying supportive friends, singing, albeit seated and wearing an eye-patch, drinking Irish whiskey, fishing for trout, looking at works of art and listening to Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues."
But what a game! He has reached the age he calls "Old Fools' Time", after Philip Larkin's dismal poem The Old Fools. In that state of decrepitude, Melly has realised recently that he shares "some defects with most of my generation" - increasing deafness and the increasingly frequent inability to retrieve information from "that jumbled filing cabinet we oldies call our brains".
He is a "sleepaholic". He suffers from the lingering effects of psoriasis, which causes inflamed skin to flake off. Afflicted by miscellaneous aches and pains and having difficulty walking, he rides about on a small electric vehicle he calls his "granny-mobile", on pavements as well as roads, and even the wrong way up one-way streets whenever he feels like it, at a maximum speed of six miles an hour.
There is a certain endearing pathos in the image of a superannuated open-marriage swinger, "a figure of fun to passing youngsters", footling along on his granny-mobile down Memory Lane or, as one of his "old mates" once nostalgically punned, "down Mammory Lane".
Now Melly is impotent, he says, but still has an "actively erotic imagination". In one of his few mentions of Diana, his wife for the past 40 years, he writes: "Our marriage began passionately and is finishing with compassion . . . and I still love her very much."
He goes on at length about his long years of heavy smoking - once up to 70 cigarettes a day - and the major ailments the addiction has caused: a bleeding ulcer, bronchial pneumonia and emphysema, and defiantly declares that he "will remain a true and happy smoker".
With "all lines and blemishes" covered with make-up for a record-cover photograph, he recalls, he "looked like a painted cadaver after the attentions of Mr Lovejoy in Waugh's cynical Californian masterpiece, The Loved One. In the book, the cosmetician's name is actually Mr Joyboy. Melly is betrayed once again by his jumbled filing cabinet. The loose and broken lines of the dozen drawings by Maggi Hambling that illustrate the book make him look like a cadaver unpainted.
Melly's sense of humour veers towards the scatological, but some of the scatology is serious. "For several years before my general physical degeneration," he discloses, "I have been occasionally caught by an unexpected attack of violent diarrhoea." He now has to wear nappies.
For laughs, Melly now apparently has to rely mainly on recycling old jokes, particularly those the late Ronnie Scott used to tell introducing performances at his Soho jazz club. Then, the jokes' antiquity was what made them funny.
Melly has been singing old songs and telling old jokes at Ronnie Scott's every Christmas for 30 years. Ronnie usually concluded his monologue by saying the audience had made a happy man very old. George Melly in old age, long sustained by atheism, may be happy to look forward to absolute nothingness.
Patrick Skene Catling is a novelist. He also writes children's books
Slowing Down By George Melly Viking, 220pp. £17.99