Apparently there has been fevered speculation surrounding my absence during the past month. According to the rumour mill, I’ve resigned/been sacked/gone on strike.

In last Friday’s letters page, Mail reader Ken Howell, from Tewkesbury, in Gloucestershire, joked that I was taking more holidays than Beatrice and Eugenie.

I should be so lucky, Ken. The truth is more mundane. I’ve been under the weather.

As regular readers will know from my last couple of columns at the beginning of July, I’d been in the States for the World Cup, so I could watch the games at a civilised hour rather than the middle of the night back home. While I was there a debilitating knee condition which had laid me low during Covid flared up again with a vengeance.

(No, I didn’t do it ‘taking the knee’ to Black Lives Matter back in 2020.)

Returning to Heathrow at 5.30am after an eight-and-a-half hour transatlantic flight, it seized up completely and the long march from the plane to border control was agonising. I was doing my best Douglas Bader impersonation.

As many of you will know from bitter experience, when your immune system is fighting off a specific, painful problem, it has a knock-on effect.

In my case, it was brain fog and increasing grumpiness. Frankly, I didn’t feel I could do myself, the newspaper and, more importantly, you the readers justice until it had been fixed. After six years of treating the condition with exercise and the occasional, increasingly ineffective, steroid injection, I was staring down the barrel of a knee replacement.

After six years of treating a debilitating knee condition with excercise and steroid injections, Richard Littlejohn decided to try a new treatment called Arthrosamid

I had the treatment on Tuesday and was in and out in an hour and 20 minutes. The actual procedure takes around 15 minutes under local anaesthetic and consists of six small injections

Fortunately, I knew that an American friend in his 70s, who’d had one new knee and was anxious to avoid getting another one, had flown to London last year for a treatment which had just become available. It was a simple, minimally invasive procedure and he was back playing pickleball in a couple of weeks.

That rang a bell. I remembered reading something in the Mail’s Good Health pages about a new gel, developed in Copenhagen, originally designed to treat lame horses and which had been adapted for human use. So I called my consultant, the excellent hip and knee specialist Tim Waters, at Spire Elstree, and discovered he was now able to offer the gel, called Arthrosamid.

Long story short, I had the treatment on Tuesday and was in and out in an hour and 20 minutes.

That includes a course of pre-op antibiotics an hour before the actual procedure, which takes around 15 minutes under local anaesthetic and consists of six small injections into the affected area. Tim Waters told me I might experience some swelling and stiffness, but when the anaesthetic wore off four hours later I was entirely pain-free for the first time in six years.

Pain-free, pain-free at last!

My brain fog lifted immediately. The treatment achieves its full potential after a minimum of two weeks, but I gained full mobility again overnight. Tim said I’d be able to hit the gym again on Friday – that is, today. Miraculous.

Anyway, enough about me. There’s a broader point here.

Right now Arthrosamid is only available privately. It cost me £2,700 and was worth every penny, but I’m well aware that not everyone with a gammy knee is able to afford that amount. The NHS has yet to approve it, even though it is available in Canada and across Europe, where 15,000 patients have already had the treatment.

What is ‘our’ NHS waiting for? Health chiefs are always keen to embrace expensive new medical procedures, even while neglecting the basics.

But in the case of Arthrosamid, there’s a strong financial case for adoption. Currently in the UK, there are 110,000 knee replacement operations performed on the NHS every year, costing between £8,500 and £17,000 in more extreme cases. There’s also, at least in my neck of the woods (North London/Hertfordshire), a one-year waiting list for the op.

If the NHS decided to approve Arthrosamid, it would buy it in bulk and so it would cost less than it does privately, probably around two grand a pop.

Even if it was only appropriate in, say, 80 per cent of cases – which consultants believe it would be – it would still save the health service a small fortune, somewhere in the order of £70 million a year as a basis for negotiation.

But that isn’t even the main benefit. It would in future spare hundreds of thousands of patients the trauma of a painful knee-replacement operation, which can take up to six hours from pre-op to discharge from the recovery room, or an overnight stay in hospital, maybe longer. Not to mention months of post-op treatment, painkillers and physio.

Plus, a doctor on an eight-hour shift could treat anything up to two dozen patients a day, slashing waiting lists at a stroke.

The average age of someone needing knee replacement surgery is around 70. Research in Denmark found that patients who had just a single treatment of Arthrosamid were still feeling the benefits four years down the line.

What’s not to like?

Sorry to disappoint all those who were hoping I’d resigned/been sacked, etc. Thanks to this miracle jab I won’t only be back in the gym today, I’m back in the paper.

Normal service has been resumed.

The far-Left defenders of fantasist Cambridge professor Jason Arday have had the rug pulled from under them following his resignation. Prominent among them was the odious LBC Radio rent-a-gob, bitter failed Fleet Street journalist and former ‘Suits You, Sir’ inside-leg-measurer James O’Brien.

Predictably, he spat his usual ‘racist’ smears at Arday’s critics who pointed out, correctly, that the prof’s CV was a work of fiction.

Still, O’Brien’s never met a fantasist he doesn’t like. He was the main cheerleader for Nonce-Finder General Tommy Watson’s smear campaign against senior Tories and war hero Lord Bramall, based on false accusations of rape and murder made by child molester Carl Beech, who was subsequently jailed for perverting the course of justice.

More recently, he was forced to make a public apology after reading out on air a fake email claiming young Jewish children are being taught that Arabs are ‘cockroaches to be crushed’.

If he’d been a Right-wing talk show host, he’d have been sacked unceremoniously years ago. Why does LBC continue to allow this vile smear-merchant to pollute the airwaves?

They should be ashamed of themselves.

A cornucopia of crazy wildlife stories for Gary to get his teeth into today.

In Bournemouth, views of the sea-front are obscured after rewilding fanatics got rid of the mowers and replaced them with goats, who can’t reach the foliage creeping over the promenade.

Meanwhile, bird enthusiasts are protesting about 2,000 pigeons being shot inside Tube and railway stations.

There’s also outrage at marksmen being hired to cull Canada geese at the St George’s Hill tennis club in Surrey. Don’t know why. Haven’t people seen the mess these birds make?

On the golf course that backs on to my house, they’ve been shooting Canada Geese for years, after they kept dumping their giant toxic whoopsies on the greens and tee boxes. I was rather hoping a stray bullet might do something about the pesky badger who tunnels his way from the golf course into our back garden every night and digs up the lawn in search of grubs.

Maybe I should keep goats to see him off. Gary, it’s over to you.