The number of vasectomies carried out by the NHS has dropped by nearly two thirds in a decade. Could it be because men are waking up to the terrible truth of the snip?

When the surgeon who was about to perform my vasectomy entered the room where I sat waiting on a bed, naked from the waist down, I started singing Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Behold the Lord High Executioner”.

He – a small, twitchy man with strands of black hair combed across a balding pate – smiled thinly, as if thinking, “Let’s see if you’re still feeling so jolly in a couple of minutes, my man.”

He immediately grew testy on seeing that my genitals were unshaven. “Surely you must have been told to make yourself ready,” he scowled.

“There was nothing in any of the information I received which gave that instruction,” I answered.

This exchange didn’t seem to improve his mood. He took up a razor.

I had never shaved my groin but I imagine the job can be done without making you feel as if your most sensitive parts are being scraped with a grinding stone. I instinctively shrank and retreated from the rough edge of his unlubricated razor. “Do try to keep still,” he said impatiently, telling the attendant nurse to hold my shoulders.