icantbelieveitsreallycancer

now I have to think of something brief and witty to say!

2011-07-27T12:51:00.000-07:00

twitter link cant believe this makes sense!

2011-07-27T12:49:00.000-07:00

https://si0.twimg.com/stickFollow @Janekelly25
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Twitter

2011-07-27T12:47:00.001-07:00

https://si0.twimg.com/sticky/default_profile_images/default_profile_1_bigger.png

I am trying to open a twitter account with link to blog - not getting very far. They seem to have named me janekelly25 no idea why!

The Lord Saatchi

2011-07-10T08:57:00.000-07:00

At the end of last month I wrote a letter to Lord Saatchi commiserating with him about the death of his wife, Josephine Hart, from the dreaded ovarian cancer. I met her a couple of times at her poetry readings, once with Bob Geldof who was very friendly and flirtatious. She sent me two of her poetry anthologies with DVDs when I started teaching in prison.
I took the opportunity to ask if he'd like to help with our charity, Ovarian Cancer Action. I was a bit worried about doing that as she'd so recently died, but I have had a letter from him thanking me for my "inspiring words," and adding,best of all,

"All shall be well..."

New Blog

2011-07-07T12:34:00.000-07:00

Dear friends I am starting a new blog - off with the old and on with the new!

It's called, Oknowibelieveitbutwhat'snext?

Do hope you will enjoy it!

A response from Colin at last

2011-06-19T12:32:00.001-07:00

On my way home from church this morning I met Colin Firth leaving his ivy-cladhouse. He was all done up in black cycling gear, including goggles and helmet, but I recognised him and of course I know where he lives.
As he cocked his famous leg over the bar, I mentioned to him that I had sent him a letter quite a long time ago, when he was in line for the Oscar, asking if he would like to contribute to our church roof fund, as all the lead has been nicked.
This missive also mentioned the church organ which is currently dying, but I didn't bring that up as well. As he was half on his bike it was best to keep it simple.
He said he hadn't seen it but he never responds to letters put through his letter-box, as he doesn't want anything coming to the house, and "tries to discourage it."
Not sure he understands the postal system and how does anyone know that he discourages it? His silence doesn't exactly betoken disapproval of letter boxes.
He has someone to deal with all his mail, and he says he will at some point get round to looking at my letter and will respond. I look forward to that!

what has happened to shop assistants?

2011-06-18T05:36:00.000-07:00

Another Groan about modern life – what has happened to shop assistants?

I set off this morning to buy a small tube of hand cream, something light to put in my luggage on my next voyage out. I also need some tinted moisturiser, as that saves putting on foundation, at least in theory. It’s the lazy woman’s maquillage.
I tried a small chemist on the Chiswick High road, one of those that stay open even though there rarely seems to be any customers. The cream was all expensive. I asked about the moisturiser and a tiny, very smiley Asian girl directed me, vaguely, towards some stuff new in, “organic” cream at £12 for a small tube.
I asked if they had any other more regular brands and she went moving about the shop listlessly before disappearing altogether. I found some tinted cream, but an expensive French variety, and decided to give up. On my way out I saw her again, looking out of the window, and told her where she could find the tinted moisturiser in case anyone asked for it again.
Traipsed on to Superdrug. As soon as I got there I asked the young Indian assistant if they had any such face cream. “We have no cream tinting,” she said emphatically, looking quite pleasantly apologetic. I looked in a different aisle and found Nivea, Daily Essentials, tinted moisturising day cream, a neat little row of the stuff.
What is going on? I had a similar situation a few months ago in the apparently up-market, “As Nature Intended,” organic food shop on the Chiswick High Road.
I asked a large Asian girl on the till, swathed in black robes, if they had any cherry juice. She’d never heard of it and seemed annoyed that I could ask for something so unlikely. Now deeply cynical about girls on tills, I found another assistant at the far end of the shop and asked again. She had heard of it but said they didn’t have any. And as I turned to go, there it was, but a cherry stones throw away, bottles of it, and perhaps the most expensive item they had on sale.
Is this some kind of girlie conspiracy to undermine the shop’s owner or manager, or perhaps the already failing British economy. Do they not want to serve foreigners, (i.e. English people) or any customers who have the temerity to bother them, or are they simply not expected to know anything?
Perhaps they got the job through family connections, or are just waiting to get married. Jobs in shops are not great, but work of any kind, for most of us, is hard to come by.
If I ever had a boring job to do, in the days when I could get a job, I always found that really throwing myself into it was the key to sticking it out. I once had a job on a till in Boots where this plan didn’t work and I nearly went mad with boredom and disgust at some of the customers. Girls in dress shops are generally happier because they are genuinely interested in clothes and keenly eye up all the stock.
But the business of how these idle girls get their jobs and keep them does puzzle me, and I know if I tried to get one myself, I’d have no luck at all.

Teethn'Smiles

2011-06-17T03:43:00.000-07:00

I have been trying to fix basic things which is increasingly difficult these days, now money seems so scarce. I have heard that many quite respectable people are getting by with out proper gas, electricity or regular hot water as if their boiler goes they’ve had it – it’s too expensive to replace them.
I had a letter saying that my Neasden excursion on May 17th had been in vain. They have decided not to give me any money; my small disability allowance has stopped. No more Montmorency cherry juice and monk fish for me.
This might easily be followed by a letter from the same people awarding me a certain amount, as that happened a lot months back when the whole rigmarole began. I have never seen evidence of any money from them on my bank statements. I don’t think I ever received any. It was a kind of virtual money that drifted in cyber space somewhere between us.
The next bit of bad luck was visiting my local vet, C.J. Hall in Acton. This was just to have old Maisie’s teeth cleaned. They asked if I wanted her to have a blood test, at a mere £60. I said no, as she looks quite healthy to me.
In the afternoon they rang to say there seemed to be some sign of thyroid trouble as she had “lost a lot of weight.” I naturally agreed to the blood test. Later I got another call to say there was no thyroid problem. She had lost weight over two years – and she is an old cat. I got a bill for £300 – and not even an extraction.
I cannot afford vets anymore. I lump them in with estate agents, loan sharks and nurses as people with a smart appearance and criminal tendencies.
Rang up the Blue Cross, I am just outside their income range, and tried the RSPCA who were not open. The Mayhew Clinic where Rolf Harris made his programmes are supposed to be more reasonable and it would be cheaper to take a cab there and back to see them than pay my local vets who obviously have an obsessional need to buy themselves yachts.
Off to the dentists in South Ealing, the nearest NHS dentist who seems competent. I had a really bad experience with one just up the road in Acton Vale. Complete check up clean and polish for just £17.00. That is a bargain these days, if only he would see cats, but for how long? He tells me the government are advising dentists to only see clients once a year. He’s worried that NHS dentists are being slowly marginalised and has considered branching out into botox.
For most of us the twice yearly appointment has been the rule of a life-time starting at about the age of three. Seeing this sacred ritual discarded, I know this country has really changed.
Back to Queen Charlotte’s to see Mr McKindo, who operated on me in May 2010, to see about a repair to a hernia made at that time.
He seems so nice and charming, just like Prof Gabra last time I met him. On the day of the diagnosis they both seemed cold and forbidding, if not exhausted and tetchy.
Mr Mckindo seemed keen to do the op, and it’s surprising that he has so many dates free to do it. If I was in agony, needed a hip replacement, or my carpal tunnel fixed no doubt there would be a long delay – that’s NHS logic.
After we’d made the appointment he looked in my notes. Seeing him lift the file gave me a queasy feeling. I didn’t want him to, as if I’d got a bad school report or a criminal record. I was suddenly afraid that he would see all that ominous stuff, and say something that would throw me off balance. Later I wondered if he had given me a prompt appointment because he felt sorry for me. Going back to hospital is difficult. It seems I will have to stay in the dreaded Victor Bonney Ward where I had such a bad time. I made a formal complaint about the nursing on that ward, which was dismissed. It will be interesting to go there again – I will be more on my metal this time and taking notes.
I have insomnia again probably because I am about to go travelling, so I have been listening to the Mausoleum Club on Radio 4 Extra. This is pronounced, “Mouse-o-leum,” but none of the presenters seem to grasp this, not even Arthur Smith, who was in one episode himself.
They are parodies of Victorian tales, written by Ian Brown and James Hendrie with a wonderful cast. The last one was a sharp send-up of Sherlock Holmes. I can’t wait for The Twist of the Knob and Trevor Island.
Marriage has many pains but celibacy has Radio 4.

The Case of the Missing Compost.

2011-06-17T02:57:00.001-07:00

29/5/11

There is a vixen living in the garden next to mine, with two cubs. I haven’t seen them but if I go out there at dusk I hear a scrabbling and banging as one of them goes over the fence, and my cat Maisie won’t go out at all.
They visit my garden at night and leave evidence of their antics in the form of horrible rubbish; plastic bags, food wrappers, bits of foil and soggy kitchen paper. I once found a bag of old make-up remover pads and dead false eye-lashes. This is strewn all over the lawn and borders. They have also dug a hole under my fence into next door’s garden. It gives an odd feeling of chaos to look at my lawn now, as if my garden has suddenly become part of the pavement at the front.
I was doing a bit of gardening before lunch, picked up some stray sticks and took them to the compost heap – this is not really what you might call authentic compost, of the sort seen on TV contained in neat wooden structures, more a load of old branches and twigs I can’t be bothered to cut up, which get stacked up on a wall behind the shed, along with grass cuttings and weeds. The thing has got very large and unwieldy in the past, and once contained a wild bees’ nest.
I reached out with the detritus and found that the compost heap had gone. Vanished. Just not there. I stared at a flatish pile of old leaves.
Some grass cutting had been shoved down onto the path along with a wet plastic bag, but my pile of organic matter was missing. The foxes have taken it all for their nest, and just left me with the spare shreds of unpleasant plastic they don’t want.
They are nothing if not green.

Since I came back from Poland Maisie has been behaving slightly oddly, by sleeping on my clothes. She always used to roost in the folded back duvet, sinking into it until she almost disappeared. Now she has been curled up on my pillow on my nightdress, and today she was on the mattress sheet on top of my t-shirt. She looks as if she’s clutching the things to her. I won’t mention that I’m going away again soon, to New York on the Queen Mary.

Polish sight seeing.

2011-06-05T03:24:00.000-07:00

Ewa’s mountain idyll and the peace of the whole village has been destroyed by the arrival of Expressway S69, a four lane motorway, stretching from Katowice to the Slovak border, where it will connect with the Slovakian motorway D3.
She and her neighbours woke up one day to find they were living alongside the S69 and D3 sections of the Trans European Transport Corridor No VI.
From early in the morning you hear the noise of construction and men in orange vests swearing and shouting. Look out of the window across what used to be gardens and acres of allotments with fruit trees and you now see a rigid barrier of concrete on squat giant legs.
This new “pan European transport corridor,” now hurtles below her garden balcony. It’s so close that you could reach out from the balcony and almost touch the concrete.
It’s being built closer to domestic dwellings than any new road would be in the UK. EU law, at least in Poland allows a distance of 40 metres but here the distance is 37 at most.
She says she wants to invite reporters from the BBC to come and sit there with her and have tea, and watch how their cups and saucers rattle to the sound of high powered drills.
“My house is like a watchtower overlooking the road,” she says. “Perhaps when the cars come I could stand on my balcony with a billboard, advertising something and get paid for it.”
That’s about the only joke we’ve found in the situation so far. The cars haven’t arrived yet but it’s already ferociously noisy and fills the air with dust. There is some vague plan to put up giant screens as noise barriers to shield the houses, and schools which are just an alarming eighteen metres away.
These will have to be painted somehow stop a massacre of birds, so the future will certainly be different in Bielsko-Biała; one of triple glazing, staying in doors instead of sitting in the garden or looking at the view, and smog masks.
In the 1970s there were about 500,000 cars on the road in Poland, now there are about 20 million. The roads are in bad shape. In Bielsko very little is down to repair the small local roads, which break up badly in the winter frosts.
The government’s response to this, using EU money, is to build motorways, and to run down the Polish railways,(PKP) which were privatised quickly just before Poland entered the EU.
Early this year the Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk announced that 4.8 billion PLN (1 billion GBP) which had been allocated for expenditure on Polish rail was being diverted to the road budget.
Like good old British Rail, has not been improved one jot by being sold off, at least not as far as the “customers,” are concerned. Poles now experience the kind of Christmas chaos which we enjoy so much in the west. Ticket prices have soared and passenger numbers fallen. Trains lines that I used regularly in the 1970s, for instance from Katowice to Oswiecim, to my surprise no longer exist.
The Polish government is now subsidising cars not trains. Currently, due to an EU directive, three major motorways spanning the entire country are being built. Many sections are under construction, due to be finished by mid-2012.
What is so alarming about all this is the lack of any consultation with the public.
A couple of years ago I wrote a letter of protest about Ewa’s plight, to the European department dealing with Polish roads. They sent back a thick document written in dense jargon, saying that full consultation had taken place. A terrible lie as neither Ewa nor her neighbours had any say in the matter. Local people suggested running the new high-way along a route proposed years ago, skirting the town, or putting some of it into a tunnel, but those ideas were dismissed without comment.
I tried to fathom out Polish local democracy a bit – who is there MP or equivalent? No one is sure. There is a list of men, chosen by different parties by proportional representation, in a multi-party system, with sixteen regional governments, who send a representative to the Sejm in Warsaw.
This is confusing to say the least and not one of the men appointed locally was interested in the residents concerns. When Ewa went to the local town hall and met a councillor he said, “Well what can I do? I am only one man.”
Available land was quickly sold by the county council and even the church, so the road quickly seemed to locals like a fait accomplis.
The key man apparently who wanted it is the mayor, Jacek Krywult, 70, a career politician who even had a good career under the communists, and has continuously been re- elected “President” of Bielsko since 2002.
Despite being “vice-president for traffic safety,” he is not worried by having two schools bang up against a major motorway, or 37 metres from the local church steps.
Where is Swampy when you really need him? Apparently there are no knotty headed tree protestors or groups of determined middle-class road protestors in Poland. According to Ewa protestors are taken away, put in hospital and given drugs.
“Like in Soviet times,” a phrase which is sometimes a dark joke between us.
One of her neighbours, called by Ewa, “the bravest,” who refused to move out when ordered, had her 19th century house knocked down anyway. She was offered help to pack if she got out on the appointed date, but she stayed defiantly inside until police arrived and turfed her out. There is still a great fear of the police in Poland, “just like in…”
The woman received compensation and built a new, smaller house nearby. No one can sell their once fine houses so there is no chance of moving away to a quiet, less polluted place.
It was disappointing to me to think than no local press reported her situation and there were certainly no TV cameras recording any discontent. When this sort of thing happens in Beijing and people are forced by their government to quit their homes, you do see reports of it in the world’s press. When it happens in Poland, the new EU, no one seems to bother.
A beautiful country town is now scarred, raddled by road builders as blind to the environment as our planners were in the 1960s.
The people I spoke of spoke of a new “Red Bourgeoisie,” former communists now living on the fat of EU money, happy with advanced capitalism.
This sometimes has its darkly comic side – in the mountain town of Zywiec an old factory with a tall chimney, has been turned into a TESCO, which has its logo vertically on the chimney stack. It looks ominously like a crematorium.
In Auschwitz itself, always a boldly unembarrassed little town, all the supermarkets apart from Carrefore are German; Lidl, Kaufland and Biedronka. There was an objection when Kaufland wanted to put up signed advertising itself with the initials: KL, once famous for Konzentrationslager.
After the wedding we had a couple of days sight seeing, visiting churches old and brand new. There was obviously a building boom going on. Detached houses are springing up everywhere, among them a few old grey concrete boxes, patterned with asbestos tiles, and flat roofs from communist times when pitched roofs were forbidden as they used too much material.
Ewa knew someone who made enough money cleaning in Dublin to return home and build a house. The Polish Zloty is low in value, so it’s possible to get rich abroad. A kind of Polish fiscal miracle.
“It is a mystery everyone talks about,” said Ewa. “There are no jobs in Poland, yet everyone is building country houses.”
It was interesting to see Bielsko town again. It was dreary and run down under the comms but now looks like a clean Alpine holiday resort, with good bars and night-clubs.
We visited Łodygowice village with its baroque wooden church, and up to Zywiec to visit the old brewery where they still produce 1,464 bottles of the amber nectar every four minutes, that is 2,108,160 bottles a day.
They now have an interactive museum, taking visitors on a time travel from the time of the Hapsburgs to the Soviets. This included a flickering black and white film made in the 1920, free Poland between the wars, with well dressed people gathering at race-tracks, travelling in sports cars and gliders, the Poland that never was.
Not being a beer drinker, the best part of Zywiec for me was sitting on the grass, eating a fresh yeast roll, in the old Habsburg park, in front of its Palace. In an act of extraordinary and unlikely kindness the Polish government have allowed Duchess Marie-Christine von Habsburg, 87, to return and live in a two room flat in her former home.
There is a short film about her life in the Zywiec museum. She is a grand old girl. Perhaps she has been allowed back because her father was tortured by the Gestapo and her mother, an Austrian, joined the Armia Krajowa, AK, the valiant Polish underground army.
We took a cable car up Zar, or “hot” mountain, and sat in the sun looking down on Tresna Dam, and Bielsko’s lush enfolding scenery. I hadn’t realised until then that Ewa now lives in a major tourist spot.
“Over there, behind that hill is Oswiecim,” (Auschwitz) said Kazik.
“I can see that you’d like to visit it,” she said.
At one time every blade of grass, every stone in there was fascinating to me, but we had decided not to go there this time. I’d come to a wedding and it wasn’t appropriate, besides she finds the tragedy of it has got worse in her mind over the years, not better.
Her grandfather moved the family from northern Poland down to Oswiecim after the first world war. He looked at the map and decided that it looked like a quiet, rural place where nothing much would ever happen. Her father was taken to the death camp to work as a slave, aged sixteen. As soon as he arrived his teeth were punched out. I know other Poles whose relations had the same treatment. It was obviously company policy. Gruesome to think of people walking about with smashed up jaws and no medical help.
There were a lot worse things going on in there of course. That was the luxury end of the itinerary. I was fascinated by it on one level, as a factory of death; such a completely in-human, un-human idea.
Before it became properly known, some Jews called it “Pitchipoi,” a distant destination. The artist Charlotte Salomon said the name, “resounded like an eternal curse.” The German painter, Felix Nussbaum painted it quite accurately, on the basis of this hearsay.
When I first went there in 1978 it seemed oddly still, like an extinct volcano. You pick over the old lava, climb up small hills of moraine, walk carefully over the cracks in the ground, not sure that it isn’t all going to ignite again at any moment. It still has a devouring presence.
Part of this feeling of torpor came from the poor quality of the museum in those day, ruled over by communists who used it for partly for propaganda purposes. On my first visit, the Jewish bunker was shut. I saw a youth who’d come all the way from LA sitting on the ground outside the locked door, really distressed. In those days there was no one to appeal to. If something was shut that was it.
After the comms went, the same people were left in charge. They opened a “Jewish reading room,” but I never saw a Jew in there. I was given a signed first edition of his book, The Pianist by Wladyslaw Szpilman. I gave it to the archive and they were very pleased to have it, but I did wonder why they didn’t just go to Warsaw and ask him for a copy themselves. They didn’t go in for collecting oral history, what was there when the Russians arrived was it.
Apparently the museum has got better now, even providing visitors with i-pod commentaries. I wonder if they all leave them in a heap when they go home.
It’s very difficult to know how exactly to view the place. I was at Machu Picchu in Peru recently. Like Auschwitz it is also a “World Heritage Site,” a place where you can pay respect to a race and their culture which was systematically exterminated. It doesn’t have that kind of impact of course, a lot of tourists find the place rather cute. That is due simply because of the passing of time.
Wondering whether to go there again was like talking about an old acquaintance, someone we didn’t know anymore.
Kazik suggested going past it briefly on our way back to the airport on my way home.
We stopped for a moment outside KL One, before driving along the wall of the old Austrian barracks. It could be any old wall, yet the other side of it forms the end of a court-yard and is painted black. Hundreds of Poles stood there naked, facing it, waiting to be shot.
Up the road, reaching Birkenau, you immediately see the broad, black camp watch-towers which look as fragile as charcoal when you get close. We parked in front of the famous entrance, like the open mouth of hell in a mediaeval painting, with the strips of metal rail feeding in.
Ewa’s younger son remained very quietly in the car, perhaps wondering what people were doing, having photos taken but not smiling into the camera, staring through barbed wire at expanses of rolling nothingness, bending their eyes on vacancy, putting their hands down flat on railway lines as if they were to tops of sacred tombs.
On the plane back from Krakow I was surprised to find that most of the passengers were young Jews. When I was last in Poland ten years ago I didn’t see any. Visitor numbers started increasing after the release of the film Schindler’s List.
spoke to a couple of the young women. They seemed angry and agitated by what they’d seen.
“It will definitely be my last visit,” said one, sounding disgusted with the world. I wondered where all that rage will be directed, perhaps towards support for the state of Israel, which means that Hitler’s work of destruction will go on.

Polish Wedding.

2011-05-30T04:30:00.000-07:00

Ewa appeared downstairs in metallic splendour; long copper coloured dress, silver bolero and old looking hooped earrings containing residual deer tusks.
“I was wearing them at one of your parties in the 1970s,” she said.
“You said, “Oh, you are too elegant.””
Oh dear – what an insecure twit I was. I remember those student parties in my flat near Katowice in Silesia. I was a so called teaching assistant at the University of Sosnowiec, although I had no one to assist. I was on my own fronting large classes mainly of bored looking teenage girls with inexplicable names like Małgorzata and Bożena. A rattled Fulbright scholar from the US called them, “The whispering maidens of Katowice.”
Ewa was one of my students who didn’t whisper or pass bits of paper to her neighbour. She worked determinedly and was definitely the most elegant, possibly the best looking of them all. A real Polish princess.
We first met when she put up her hand in class and asked me if I would like to go home with her for the weekend to visit her family in Oswiecim, better known to the world as Auschwitz.
“The town is very interesting,” she said. “We have a wonderful ice-rink.”
We’ve been friends since then, down all the years, and I was invited to Bielsko-Biała for her son Adam’s wedding on May 21st.
I remember when he was born, just after Martial Law had been declared. There was a food shortage and everyone was in a panic about finding milk for him.
A Polish wedding is possibly more significant than its English equivalent, especially if the family is strongly Catholic.
This time, unlike the 1970s I complimented her on her outfit. She didn’t comment on my black and white M & S dress and bright red fascinator, she was too stressed to notice. Her husband Kazik sat quietly sewing a button onto Adam’s suit.
We set off in two cars, along the pot-holed roads to visit the new in-laws, for a special Polish parental blessing on the young couple, which sounded rather strange to me.
The small house might have been English, part of a pleasant looking estate, but there was a large black crucifix at the bottom of the stairs, and a table set out like an altar in the living room, with a silver crucifix and beside it a bowl of water and a small brush called an aspergillum, used for sprinkling in the Catholic church. On the floor was a white towel.
The mother looked rather perplexed at seeing me, as if this intrusion might be the last straw on a very stressful day. She shooed me away from the towel as I struggled to take photos with a strange camera.
The bride came down stairs and no one made a big fuss at seeing her in her wedding dress, except me! In Polish tradition this is the moment when the groom first sees the bride. They both had to kneel on the white square. The four parents made spontaneous comments on their union before kissing them, making the sign of the cross on their foreheads and sprinkling them with holy water which had been blessed by a priest at Easter.
Seeing Kazik cup his son’s face in his hands and kiss him briefly was very moving. I wondered if I would get through this without shedding tears. Around me everyone else seemed light hearted.
The nuptial mass took place in the church of St. Barbara in Mikuszowice, a smart looking country village. The tiny church, was built in 1690 from nailess planks of black larch wood, sweeping down to the ground in a broad stiff skirt. Above it has an onionish dome and a slender tower. http://www.panoramy-wirtualne.pl/panorama/kosciol-sw-barbary-w-mikuszowicach-bielsko-biala-spacer-wirtualny/33/5
http://parafia.twojestrony.pl/0,0,galerie,lista,galeria.html

I first saw these churches when I went to work in Poland in 1978 and found them disturbing, too like illustrations from fairy-tales. I associated them with village culture and persecution of the Jews.
Milling about outside in the sunshine, among the guests there were a lot of chic clothes on view, but I quickly realised that I was the only woman in a fascinator, or hat of any kind.
“For Polish women the most important thing is going to the hairdresser on the day,” I was told.
Inside St. Barbara’s is a Baroque jewel, with ornately painted walls, showing scenes from her martyrdom. There were also carvings of her, and St. Michael the Archangel slaying the dragon, and over the altar a giant poster of the Blessed John Paul II’s beaming face.
When the comms were in power, the grim image of Maximillian Kolbe the martyr priest who died in Auschwitz was everywhere. He now seems to have been replaced somewhat by the sunnier, more triumphant figure of the late Pope.
The bride and groom go up the isle together, no one is “given away.” That custom is purely Anglo-Saxon apparently, but catching on in Poland, thanks to American rom-coms on Polish TV and the recent royal wedding.
There were no wedding service sheets, but I could follow the Mass easily as its rhythm is the same as the service we have at St. Michael’s in Chiswick. I didn’t lose my place at all.
At the “Pokoju” or Peace, I felt moved, and at the end when the choir, including Adam’s new father in law, struck up with an English anthem: “Great is the Lord. In his power we trust, ” sung in a rather “Swingly” manner with lots of “pah, pah, pahs,”
Afterwards the guests lined up to give the bride and groom presents of money and fresh flowers all beautifully wrapped. Ewa told me that flowers as gifts are getting rarer, and there is a new custom of asking guests for lottery tickets in the hope of a big win. Others ask for tiny keep sakes, “Pamiątka,” which can also be risky as you may end up with a room full of pottery elephants.
I lined up with my envelope containing £20 and told the bride she looked, “as good as Pippa Middleton,” forgetting that I’d been warned that “pipa,” pronounced, “Pippa” is a very rude word in Polish. Hearing it cause much hilarity in Polish homes during the royal nuptials.
“You must say Philippa at all times,” warned Ewa.
The bride laughed and I got the impression they thought I was a bit eccentric anyway, with this red feathery thing on my head.
We made our way in convoy into higher mountains, to the small hotel, the Stara Szmergielnia, the equivalent of “the old whet-stone.” A beautiful place with a wide court-yard leading down to stables and the Białka river.
We were going to be there until the next day. The party might last that long. “However late it ends,” Ewa told me, “the parents must stay till the very end.”
A strange convention indeed. No sloping off to bed like the Queen. I was glad I had a room to retreat to even though it was ominously number 101.
A fat chef appeared with a very large loaf, with a heart shape cut out and filled with salt. He gave the bride and groom a glass of water and one of vodka. They had to pick a glass each and the one who got the vodka would be “the ruler,” of their house.
Food began appearing as soon as we sat down.
It came stacked up on the plates, Kotlets, traditional beef roulade, and a modern version with chicken and fruit, piled up like pleated material. Very tasty but I couldn’t recognise much of it, and to Ewa’s annoyance there were no menus.
Then endless salads; raw celeriac with walnuts and orange, herring in cream and with apple, cooked vegetables and traditional chicken broth.
There was supposed to be a Greek salad but to Ewa’s disgust no one could find it, but it was difficult to spot as the tables became crammed with food and the lights dimmed as the disco started.
The bride and groom kicked off the dancing with an ambitious tango. I suspected that the tentacles of Strictly Come Dancing reached even into deepest Poland. Then the DJ launched the evening with the hits of Boney M.
I sat there in my fascinator, clearly not fascinating anyone much, but the man next to me and his wife spoke some English and he seemed very charming and amused by me as we excavated the food and drink.
He wanted “Kluski śląskie,” glutinous boiled dumplings. They were there among all the plates but he asked the waitress for an extra portion. I wondered if he might like to have them in a kind of croque en bouche, piled up with gravy poured down over them, but I couldn’t put that into Polish.
At first there was a toast, then one glass of wine and some orange squash available, later Ewa managed to procure some real fruit juice, and a small but ominous bottle of vodka. People had to decided early between wine and vodka, mixing the two would be lethal, but the wine was kept back for awhile. Despite this, the dance floor was full of sexy couples and then I was dragged up and flung about and clutched closely by a sweating, barrel chested man, which was quite enjoyable.
We sat down for awhile for some gypsy music and singing by a local “mountain man,” and I realised that my fascinator had been noticed. A fat young man who looked like a football hooligan asked to be photographed with me wearing it, then he put it on himself, then on his wife.
After a few old records the music seemed to be mainly covers of old songs. I asked for some ABBA and the DJ reluctantly agreed. For a few moments I was again the Dancing Queen, only seventeen, prancing about alone in the strobe lights. I don’t get to do that very often these days.
At 10 pm more food arrived, this time large fried pierogi, or ravioli, with cheese and meat. I was visited by a young girl from Alabama. She said she’d deliberately changed her accent at college as other Americans thought it was “too cute,” the frequent reaction we English get.
She was living with a Polish boy in Krakow, studying East European culture and Polish language. Apparently her mother is very understanding, but her father finds it inexplicable that she should swap the US for Poland.
Over the din of Polish pop music which neither of us knew, she laid out the whole basic structure of the language to me, a bit like doing a diagram of the National Grid or inland waterways. She was really clarifying it to herself, but it was useful for me to hear.
“Honestly, you know I speak it like a seven year old,” she said. “All the nouns and pronouns decline and the verbs conjugate in three tenses so I often get lost.”
But unlike me she had cracked the code. I told her that in a few months it would be gushing out of her and she’d be surprised to hear herself.
I wished that I’d worked at it when I was living there, but then all the students wanted to speak English to me, while teachers from the Jagiellonian university said they didn’t want to hear foreigners speaking poor Polish. I couldn’t have focused enough anyway.
Strangely she said she couldn’t follow the wedding service at all. After ten minutes she shut off because of all the “formal, old fashioned Polish.” Well, she was by tradition a southern Baptist, so perhaps she would have found the Eucharist hard to follow even in English.
As the hours ticked by in what was part party and part endurance test, people came up to chat and intimacy developed quickly.
Ewa told me she had seen a piece by Dame Diana Rigg on line, about me. In 2003 she sued me for libel, got about £40,000 I think, in an out of court settlement and my career at the paper went into a nose-dive. It was her word against mine and I didn’t have a tape-recorder, just my trusty note-pad.
“That woman wrecked your career,” said Ewa bitterly, “and your health.”
Ewa really does not like what she sees as bad people at all and seethes if they are seen to prosper, a hangover from the old communist days when flagrant injustice was the norm. For a moment I imagined a Polish posse descending on the liver-spotted old cow. But it’s old history now and despite being a tabloid journalist, I still have my integrity. Some months after it all happened I heard La Rigg on Front Row on Radio 4 contentedly describing herself as, “A monster.”
The DJ generously offered us a rendering of, “Viva Espagna!” and the floor filled up again. I was pulled up to dance by a man ho constantly twizzled me about and kept pirouetting me in and out under his arm as if we were jiving. He wouldn’t let me alone and wanted me to join in congas and groups of arm wavers in the centre of the room. I got away from him and had a moment of pure joy under the strobes, dancing to, “Staying Alive.” That never had more resonance for me. I didn’t bother with it at all when it came out.
“Should I stay or should I go?” by the Clash brought back memories of working in Wormwood Scrubs. We had a visit from what remains of that group and some of the men loved that song. Particularly a Dutchman I was fond of.
Then we had Polish disco music and for a moment the floor seemed to be taken by Polish Elvis impersonators.
I returned to my table which was gradually stacking up with food, feeling a bit maudlin about all that had happened since I was last in Poland ten years ago. Thinking about all the new people I’d met over the last year, some of them at Maggie’s Cancer Support Centre, so many of them slowly dying, to be swept away soon like leaves. That connected with thoughts about Poland and the last war, the great horror, which is never far from mind; so many good people just like these frisking about so sexily, all those pointless deaths. I had a sense of everyone being intensely valuable which I never used to have.
The couple reappeared to cut the cake, thin slices as the whole bottom tier was mysteriously missing. “It’s like communist times,” I said to Ewa who looked apoplectic.
Other cakes arrived, sturdy wedges of poppy-seed cake, apple cake which I love, and piles of petit four, but some mad fool had flavoured almost everything, apart from the apple, with coconut.
When I first went to Poland as a picky girl, I didn’t like the flavour of coconut, dill and caraway, which the Victorians used for small cakes. My mother was forced to eat them as a child, in an age where children had to take whatever they were offered.
I quickly realised I was going to have to put up with these three flavours as they were in almost everything, with caraway often put into bread. Over the years I have got to like potatoes and fish with dill.
At 1pm the rather surly waitress brought us a kind of very fatty soup, “bogracz” a kind of goulash, which is supposed to be supportive to vodka drinkers. The wine had appeared and more vodka, and people had made their choice of poison hours before.
The bride decided to throw her bouquet at last. A large girl in a very short, tight pink dress was determined to get it, there was a scrum, a real pile up and in the struggle the flowers were shredded. The girl in pink emerged triumphant but got very weak applause after such a desperate fight.
“I’ve never seen such a strong fight between maidens before,” said Ewa, still cross about the blips in the catering.
I could sympathise with the fat girl in pink, as I realised that this was the first wedding I’d ever enjoyed. I have not been invited to many, which was a mercy as I used to behave so badly at them, wanting so much to have one of my own. Now all those bitter, anxious feelings had gone. I was happy for other people being happy, a tottering step in the right direction I suppose.
I stayed up for some very good ice-cream, but at 2am slipped away before the beetroot soup, to room 101. Other people had gone too, but the young and the surprisingly old, and the parents were still hard at it and stayed till 5am.
In the morning I pottered about before anyone else came down. Breakfast was fixed for 11am. Round the side of the hotel I met the fat chef, still in his whites and hat, having a quiet smoke.
He said he’d been working for seventeen hours non stop. His pay was not as good as it would be if he moved to London, and was Gordon Ramsey really as crazy as he seemed on TV?
Ewa told me that one of the mountain women had asked for my fascinator. She had told her it was improper to ask for such a thing. I said she could have it, as long as it didn’t become an object of pagan worship. But then I hesitated. I am going on the Queen Mary to New York soon and rather fancied wearing it to go on board.
The bride and groom went off on their honeymoon, walking in the Beskidy mountains. They were staying in a luxury hotel at the foot of Pilsko mountain. When I saw the bride with her enormous ruck-sack as long as her long, graceful body, I thought they were heading for the summit at 5108ft. I asked what was in it.
“I am a woman. I need so many things,” she said in that winsome womanly way that some Polish women still have.
I was up there myself once in deep snow. We met some Czechs on their side of the invisible border, and toasted each other in vodka, but after initial greetings sat in silence, in a kind of acknowledgement of mutual political oppression and frustration.
Ewa’s home and the other mother in law’s soon filled up with the couple’s wedding flowers. It was sad to see them sitting there in their wonderful arrangements, lining every window ledge and table, a beautiful burden.
In the house in Bielsko, I had my usual bed on the top floor under the eaves.
It’s a tall country house, with a wood interior, which her husband built by hand with his friends. When I first saw it in the early 1990s I thought of it as a kind of tower he had designed to imprison her. She has never let down her tawny hair and attempted escape but things have changed drastically around her.

One Big Thing

2011-05-30T04:28:00.000-07:00

Monday 30th May 2011

Today is the feast of St Joan of Arc.

All this worrying about will it happen or won’t is all rubbish of course, if we all have eternity to deal with.

In church yesterday, young Fr Stephen gave us a print out of some words from St. Basil about the Holy Spirit. It ends with a list, which he says we might like to consider over the next nine days before Ascension Day. It gives what they call the “fruits of the spirit,” and he says we should think which ones we already have and which we’d like to acquire:
Love
Joy
Peace
Patience
Kindness
Goodness
Faithfulness
Gentleness
Self-control

A bit daunting really. I think I have Kindness, now and then, and honesty, which isn’t mentioned, but little or none of the others!

History Boys

2011-05-27T12:05:00.000-07:00

15/5/11

Before Easter I was chatting to the editor of the quarterly magazine which now very kindly gives me work, and he mentioned interviewing the UK’s ten top historians, Schama, Fergusson, etc. and finding out who they dine with, go shooting with at weekends, advice given to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown etc.

It sounded like a great idea and I wished him well. Then he said that I was doing it.

I set about it immediately, before the shock had set in – real hard work for a change, all those phone numbers to find, most of them abroad as that last generation of grammar school boys provided a round the world history service.

The whole country was about to pack up for Easter followed by the Royal Wedding but I beavered away feeling the way I imagine Kenneth Branagh behaved when he was trying to rustle up a cast for his Hamlet: “Who is it? Oh – Darling we’ve got Jack Lemmon! Oh Derek you sweetheart! Darling, we’ve got Jacobi! And so on collecting them all up; Julie, Katy and that old fellow who used to be in sitcoms as Polonius.

I got most of my history stars before the hiatus of the wedding and the bank hols.

“Your magazine is exactly our target audience here at the Royal Palaces,” said Lucy Worsley winsomely, but they were a tricky bunch. I had to establish a time and call them. One young buck who'd once been on TV spouting about castles was out when I called and when I spoke to him a day later he gave no apology or explanation. Another provided a time to call him at home in New England but when I rang no one answered. When I tried again the next day his wife said vaguely that she thought he was at a party and he had not been able to speak to me the night before because he was in the basement doing the laundry and couldn’t hear the phone.

David Cadwardine got back to me after a party. Alcohol can be the interviewer’s best friend, but not in that case. He was so maudlin and self-deprecating, saying he had no influence over anyone, that he really had nothing much to say. Lord Hennessey of the mysterious, erotic sounding Nympsfield, was also unsure that anyone listened to him.

No word from the Scots lothario Niall Ferguson, but then he never used to speak to me even when I was working for his wife.

There was soon only one person left – Simon Schama that cerebral, writhing, fevered exponent of world history, so passionate and mighty that he can even get away with using long words and winding sentences on TV.

Before Easter hit, I left messages with his publisher, or tried to. I got through to the voice mails of girls with names like Suzanna, Savannah and India, who’d never heard of him. When I was put through to the correct double-barrelled name she had already slipped away for the break.

After the holiday with my deadline only a day away, I got a date and time fixed to call the great man but he would only do it if I read his views on education on line, and a salient chapter in his new book, Scribble, Scribble, Scribble. The publisher didn’t know which chapter that was.

I rushed off to Waterstone’s and bought the book, only out in hardback, got back and started trying to read as much of it as possible before he called the next day at 3pm our time.

I sat at my desk, reading possibly relevant chapters, not sure what he would ask me, making notes, going through my questions, waiting until the appointed moment, but he was not in.

The next day no reason was given for this silence, perhaps he was doing his laundry or out at a party. The publisher made another date for me. She thawed out a little as if we were both now up against it. I waited at the appointed time, sitting there like a love-lorn fool, but heard my phone ringing off the hook as they say in rom-coms.

On Friday 13^th I went off out for the day to collect some of my paintings from my friend Charles in East Finchley, which is a lovely looking place if you live in Acton.

The date lived up to its reputation as when I got home I’d got a parking ticket, having forgotten to display my new and costly parking permit. There was also a message waiting from the publisher with the double-barrel name, saying Schama would talk to me at 4pm.

It was 5.30pm and she left no number for herself or him. I scrambled to find her in my note-book again and she gave me a number for Schama in New York. I rang but it didn’t work. I tried it again, mixed the code around a bit, tried 118, but no use. Just caught the publisher before she went off and she promised to get me another number. She also suggested I should apologise to him for not being in when I was supposed to be.

“Yes, apologise Jane, apologise, do it!” said my editor, sounding more like an editor than he normally does. He's usually very pleasant.

I had a flash of perception about the publishing world, where if you are in that extremely rare position of making money with your books you cannot be in the wrong, a bit like an old Hollywood star or even royalty.

As I waited again, I wondered how you talk to the most interesting man on earth? At last I heard that silky, careful, almost whispered voice. I’d been to the Jan Gossaert exhibition at the National Gallery, and I hoped he’d be interested in that. He was.

There was an exquisite little sculpture in the show called the Spinario, of a boy taking a thorn out of his foot. This slightly erotic image was immensely popular in the early modern period, the Pope and later Charles I commissioned them. I'd never seen it before and mentioned it to him. There was a moment of silence – had I by chance found the one thing in the world unknown to the maestro?

After this tiny lull the conversation cracked on well, I even got a possible diary story. I also mentioned the arguments I had heard against history as a subject. The line is that it’s all propaganda written by the victors in battle, and there are no real facts. Also that the facts we once used are redundant as they only apply to an extinct patriarchy. I was surprised when he said he hadn’t heard those views very much.

“That argument has been kept from me,” he said, as if it was of no consequence.

I got an impression about his world too, that it’s a comfortable place where left wing views do not form the main opinion. Lucky he – when I was in university and recently in FE and working in prison I was surrounded by teachers who hated history as a subject and were suspicious of knowledge itself.

The following week I had lunch with some of my former Fleet Street colleagues to try to catch up on the latest round of gossip i.e. sackings and whose got work and who hasn’t.

Of course one of them knows someone who slept with Schama when they were young. Apparently he was really interesting in that department too.

collywobbles

2011-05-26T13:20:00.000-07:00

26/5/11

Collywobbles a bit today; just had a lovely trip to Poland to see such good friends, enjoyable day out today to London Zoo to the opening of the new Penguin beach enclosure, but there was slight fear there; was it because of the magpie on the path, a slight stomach ache which could be something I ate, or a young person's death mentioned in the paper?
Got home and lay in bed for awhile thinking how "it" could just happen at any time.

Neasden

2011-05-19T03:21:00.000-07:00

Tuesday 17^th May.

I’ve never been clear about what I’m getting. Way back when this thing began I got a lot of letters from Acton JobCentre Plus, or were they? There was an address in Glasgow. Some how I got onto the disability benefits list, I think, and was told I was entitled to £40 a month or so. I didn’t bother with that, then there were more letters, some saying I was not entitled to anything, as if I was arguing, which I wasn’t.

My doctor took charge of it all and got me to sign a letter with him. Since then I have been receiving a small amount of monthly money. I put it towards the high cost of Matcha Green Tea and the magical Montmorency cherry juice.

Then I got a letter saying I had to be assessed to make sure I am not defrauding the taxpayer by dossing around when I could be out there partaking in one of the millions of exciting jobs available.

This troubled me a bit. I lost my job at the Daily Mail in September 2005, and spent the next five years sitting at my computer filling in forms on line for jobs and getting no reply. I didn’t get enough freelance work to live on either, and eventually I started going for the “small” jobs; shop work, stacking shelves, a local café, book shop, Waterstones, museum guide, the Acton Care-Centre, doctor’s receptionist. I didn’t get a thing.

It became clear that there were no jobs for white middle class, middle aged ladies like me. The woman who interviewed me at the care home was embarrassed. She said she mainly employed Africans who sent money home to their families. She wanted strapping young things who could work a twelve hour shift for shit wages.

At forty eight I was an embarrassing bit of scrap on the heap, apparently un-usable by this society. Forty eight sounds old, I know, but I wasn’t. I was still ready to test my fate, take a chance, but I didn’t get one.

The trauma of that with its wrenching shift of identity and life-style was almost as bad as the diagnosis of cancer – I would rank them almost side by side. Perhaps that is why my mind gets so cloudy when the matter of “Jobseekers” and benefits comes up.

“You should get this money,” said my Doctor. “You have ovarian cancer.” I didn’t want to hear that, but I decided to go through with it.

This assessment seemed even more unlikely because it involved a trip to Neasden of all places, with an order to be there at 9am or there would be a danger of losing benefits. As if this north London suburb is known to be inaccessible and largely unvisited by outsiders, they provided a map and even a timed journey plan from my flat.

I got up at 6am as I had no way of knowing how long the journey to Neasden might take. I got there at 7.30am and followed the map along a dual carriage way, under a dirty bridge to a large flat building called something “house,” as much like a house as an air-craft hangar.

I had decided to put on a summer dress, bought on Saturday from Dorothy Perkins in the Westfield Centre, along with a white cotton bolero. Lord I was freezing. I hadn’t worn a dress for ages and I badly misjudged the Spring weather. Despite costing £40 it’s made of mighty thin cotton, almost like tracing paper, and it kept blowing up around my neck.

Some Somali men on the desk of the office next door to the medical centre let me sit in and wait. The medical centre still hadn’t opened at 8.45am. I stood on the step in the wind, joined by a middle aged woman with a pony-tail, and a walking stick.

“Be careful,” she said, “they are watching us. There is one of them in that four-wheel drive over there. They watch to see if you are really disabled.”

I flexed my hand with carpel-tunnel syndrome a bit to try to look a bit less of a ligger, whilst screwing my fly-away skirt down between my perishing knees.

She said she was by profession “a dog psychologist.” She hadn’t had much luck with her clients.

“I was in the park with my Shepherd,” she went on. “Another dog barged up to us and completely severed my leg.”

I smiled politely as if perfectly convinced. I wondered what kind of dog it could have been, probably not one of the myriad Yorkshire terriers or pugs in smart coats that you see in Acton Park. And why couldn’t she carry on with that work - surely all she needed to do was sit opposite or behind the disturbed dog as it lay on the couch.

“I now wear a brace,” she said. How could you put a brace on a leg that was no longer there?

“My physiotherapist says I won’t be well again for seven years.”

The letter was very keen on us being there by 9am but they only opened the door one minute before the hour.

A young Somali man with a shiny forehead and tiny features unlocked it as I pressed the bell. He looked annoyed and began to question me about why I had done that as he was unlocking. He seemed like an offended policeman who might at any moment turn proper nasty. The dog lady and I hopped into the lift with remarkable alacrity for two such disabled people.

“Well, you are here nice and early,” said the Chinese girl on the second floor desk, as if we were not only disabled but only five years old.

There were just the two of us being interviewed and I was relieved to be called very quickly.

The woman interviewing was a nurse of the old type; English, well educated and pleasant. Unlike the other staff I’d met she was impeccably professional. As far as I could tell she had no attitude towards me at all. She just wrote it all down and some one else made the decision.

She tapped away, and I noticed she had no wrist supports on the desk or key board at all. As I listed my rather vague symptoms, I wondered how long her wrists would keep going like that.

I asked her if she knew how much I was getting, she didn’t but thought it might be about £64 a week. I was very surprised. I’d never noticed that on my bank statement. I’d feel rich if I had that.

We did some exercises - swing the arms, open and shut hands, pronate and supinate the forearms. Lie down and sit up. Touch the toes. I was very good at them, except when she told me to put my chin on my chest and look at the ceiling. She tapped me for reflexes. It was no more humiliating that meeting people who didn’t know me or can’t remember me when I had a job, Egyptian cotton sheets and good clothing.

On the way out, heading to the loo, I saw the Somali who’d let us in, sitting facing the ladies lavatory door. As I went in he gave me an unpleasant, knowing look as if I’d got scammer written all over me. Perhaps the dog lady was right and we were being scrutinised. He and the girl on the desk regarded us as if they had private knowledge about us and it wasn’t anything to be proud of.

I wondered whether to ask them how they got their jobs – and if they could possibly get one for me ?

Honeymoon

2011-05-05T02:59:00.000-07:00

4/5/11

I suppose I am having a kind of honeymoon with myself – all this lovely weather, and the lovely name NED playing in my head - “no evidence of disease.” I am on a spree.

Yesterday I went to a service at St Martin’s in Ealing at 8am. There is a desire to give praise and thanks, and the memory of all the people I’ve met who are still suffering.

The church was locked and I began to wonder if it had been cancelled or Fr. Bill had overslept. At the vicarage there was no sign of life.

He appeared at one minute to, holding a heavy bunch of keys, which always seem symbolic of something; St. Peter, one of my former cat sitters who used to visit twenty cats a day, old fashioned gaolers.

The Lady Chapel, although being a low church they don’t call it that, was flooded with golden light. I was asked to read the Gospel which surprised me, as at my other church this is the preserve of the priest. Fr Bill gave me a short homily about what he calls, “democracy.”

I haven’t read anything out loud since I was about thirteen. In my early days at school I was regularly called on to read and relished it, then my confidence evaporated and I started to develop phobias, about all sorts of things, and that was one of them.

There were only four of us there but still the words started swimming before my eyes. I managed it OK though and it was a good chance to try it again.

Spent the day struggling with a piece I am writing about the UK’s ten most influential historians. I have six so far, David Starkey and Lucy Worsley gave me some brilliant quotes, the others are in the US and more difficult to reach.

In the evening I walked through Acton Park to the Rocket pub for a life-drawing class. I used to go to this class two winters ago now and was very friendly with some of the group including an Australian doctor who was involved, sadly, in vivisection.

He was giving me a lift home one night, after I’d had the diagnosis of cancer. He said, “It’s only a Stage 1, you’ll be OK.” I told him it was stage 4. He said, “Oh,” sounding really shocked, taken aback. I remember his bulging, glaucous eyes in the car mirror, their look of fear, as if I was as good as dead. I haven’t seen or heard anything of him since that night.

The class is now in a different pub with different people, apart from one elderly lady. She was surprised at how much I’d changed and wondered if I’d had my hair done like this deliberately. A lot of older people seem to like this bubble cut, it must remind them of something from long ago.

It was a good feeling to get to the class again, like a renewed strength. But I realise that I am not ambitious anymore, for my art, writing or anything, all that has gone.

The model was an exquisite Chinese girl, with perfect proportions, not an ounce of fat under her skin which was smooth as marble.

An elderly man in the group, who must once have been handsome, chatted her up relentlessly during the break telling her all about his former career with an oil company. He’d ordered a beef burger and chips but hardly had time from looking at her to eat it. I removed nearly all the chips. Being invisible can have its advantages.

Today, struggling on with the history men, and girls. trying to pin down Simon Schama. Before Easter I approached Columbia University, and publishers in the UK. They didn’t return my calls and today neither India nor Sophie, the plummy voiced gels in their publicity offices, had ever heard of him. I had to spell out his name v-e-r-y carefully.

While I was waiting for someone, anyone to call back, made some Yorkshire parkin for the first time. It seems to be a butch northern kind of gingerbread, for people who disapprove of the pleasure of cake.

Royal Wedding day.

2011-05-02T02:22:00.000-07:00

Friday 29^th April. Royal Wedding Day.

I don’t know how the bride was doing but I was getting frazzled trying to get people to come round and watch the Royal Wedding with me.

My friend June in Guildford said she was scared of transport problems in London. “I’m not interested in these English things,” said Kayoko, my Japanese friend.

Another Japanese friend said she couldn’t come because she is addicted to a Korean soap opera.

“I can’t ask the children to travel all that way by car just to watch TV,” said another and my friend Pam had a cold.

I felt gloomy thinking of watching it on my own, then I began to picture them all arriving just as the bride got to the abbey, needing help to park their cars, demanding tea while she was taking her vows. I regretted ever suggesting it. It also dawned on me that perhaps I shouldn’t have invited anyone as my TV screen is only 13 inches wide.

My mother, aged 88, far away in her Staffordshire village said she preferred to watch it alone, then both her neighbours were having afternoon parties and her favourite old people’s home in the village, there are now five of them, had invited her as well.

I suggested she went to all of them, imagining her rolling around the village full of champagne.

“Don’t be silly. I couldn’t possibly do that,” she said to me, but then I heard her talking on her mobile to a friend, saying she was going to try to get round all of them.

The morning of the wedding Kayoko rang up and said, “What time are you expecting us?” I pointed out that she wasn’t coming. “Of course I am,” she said, “you are mixing me up with someone else.”

Five guests turned up, four women and one man, all good and early as I was finishing off a plate of cucumber sandwiches. As one helpful friend managed to open the salt cellar and pour salt over everything, I considered the party was underway. Everyone brought champagne and strawberries.

The BBC commentators were rather boring and lacked historical knowledge, they don’t provide context these days as they don’t know it. I recognised the 1930s scroll tiara, and Kayoko turned out to have detailed knowledge of the British monarchy.

“I have studied it,” she said, managing to be both slightly sinister and impressive as usual.

There was a bit of murmuring about the size of my TV screen, comments that it was left over from the Coronation. I wondered if the ladies didn’t spend most of their time glued to the plasma, but we could all clearly see the beauty of the bride’s dress, with its modest grace and clean lines; she was only slightly outclassed by the abbey itself which was the splendid star of the show.

The service was beautiful, and we all agreed, so very English. No multi-cultural, multi-faith junk, at last we were allowed something of our very own, quite a surprise. It was also so simple, one reading by the bride’s very brave brother, no soprano flown in, as Charles would have done, no homily from Stephen Fry although we did keep getting the grotesque spectacle of Elton John.

Among the 1, 900 guests there was certainly a panoply of powerful, complicated hats. Princess Beatrice looked like that little alien who appears on TV trying to introduce us to going digital. Tara Palmer Tomkinson wore something like a giant Quality Street choc, which pointed to her new nose. It seemed to have been made rather hastily, rather large and broad, making her look as if she should be pulling pints somewhere.

Quite unexpectedly it was a perfect Christian marriage service and, delicious irony, no bling. The Middleton family were perfectly elegant and as calmly focussed and unflustered as if it had been just a small country wedding with a local photographer.

How could the mother with two dazzling daughters on show conceal her pride so well? Some women would have burst with it. I take my fascinator off to them.

My mind did slip back once or twice to what I was doing at the other royal wedding, thirty years ago. I had recently arrived in London and was living in a tiny room in a council flat on the Wandsworth Road with a mattress on the floor. Councils hadn’t got round to double glazing in those days and the traffic roared past my window night and day. The mattress had fleas which would bite the back of my neck whenever I tried to sleep but I was glad to be in London. My only certainty in life was that I wanted to be there but I felt appalled by what I saw every day on the streets of Lambeth, the filthy plastic bags hanging in the trees, broken potholed roads and the constant mugging and fear of street violence.

I felt I hadn’t yet found the London that I wanted but I knew it was out there somewhere. By the time of the Charles and Di wedding I was sharing my room with beautiful Bruce, a graceful American I’d met on a trip to Iceland. It was one of those relationships where you know immediately that you must have sex, and you don’t care how or where, up against a wall or under a hedge would do. We managed it in snow under the northern lights, not bad, but as soon as he arrived at Heathrow even across the concourse I could see he was a stranger. I was working as a cleaner in a local pub, the South Pole, but he lay on my mattress all day every day in a fog of marijuana. I wanted to help him but I couldn’t. He’d rouse himself at night and we’d make love, but in the day time we hated each other. He wasn’t the person I’d seen in my mirage in Iceland. Eventually I threw his banjo over the balcony and he followed.

With great determination and drive I set myself up in London all those years ago, but I still haven’t lived in the right place or found the right person.

During the service Kate kept trying to smile at William. At first she couldn’t quite get her face to relax enough, but she was palpably supporting him. In a slight re-run of the Queen Mother George VI situation, Kate, the loved and cherished child of stable parents, doesn’t look neurotic at all. She can provide a damaged prince with just what he needs. Occasionally the Windsors get lucky and find an emotional rescue.

The next day I looked at photos of Charles and Diana on the balcony. There is this child, weak, emotional and needy, and next to him Diana, lunging towards him, also desperate for an overwhelming, unconditional love. He can hardly bear to kiss her. His lips are sealed, his shoulders turned away from her, almost as if he has no idea who she is. He looks as connected as a gay man faced with a busty, blousy, amorous woman. If only Diana had ignored the fact that her face was on all the tea towels, and cancelled the whole show, as Kate would certainly have done if she’d felt like it.

Sandwiches, chocolate rolls, jam tarts, strawberries and cream, broken glasses, squashed sandwiches, crisps on the carpet, my little party went well and everyone agreed it had been a good one – June rang up and said she would have liked to join us but the size of my screen had put her off.

I have my next party, for my birthday, now looming up. I want this one to be small, so that I can really cook something, instead of providing a buffet c/o Waitrose. I have already invited too many people and I bet they will all turn up, oh dear.

Easter Break a year on

2011-04-29T00:43:00.000-07:00

27/4/11

At home my mother is very amused to see me looking like Leo Sayer, not that she would know who he was, she’s probably thinking Shirley Temple. She doesn’t of course say it looks nice, but seems fascinated by it and takes lots of photos to show her friends. I am going to tell people I’ve got cancer of the hair.

This time last year we also had radiant weather but I was creeping and crawling around the back ways of the village, almost out of my mind with shock and disbelief.

That was the start of it – a vague diagnosis of cancer, it was “undifferentiated,” which was bad news in its self, they didn’t know what it was but there were “lesions,” and one doctor said that I would have to have chemotherapy whatever it was.

I was also scratching around for work and not getting any. Since then I’ve had pieces in the Telegraph and the Times. My theme seems to be cancer, and the pity of it.

I have also been writing travel pieces for the glossy Private Banking Magazine, all because of the cancer. What a dull, shabby life I’d be having without it.

The anguish of last Spring is almost like a distant story now as I stand in the sunshine in Codsall village, at an open air Easter service, boiling with irritation.

Someone has decided to change the words of, “There Is A Green Hill Far Away.” The word “without,” as in city wall, which puzzled school children for generations, along with “Harold be thy name,” as been replaced by the sternly clear, “outside.”

The translation of the Gospel has been quite a strain for whoever set about hacking at it. They have come up with the idea that when he was mocked Jesus wore “a purple cape,” he was taken to a place called, “the hill of the skull,” and when he was crucified someone put up a “poster,” with the with words “King of the Jews.”

“The place of the skull,” used to be so evocative and sinister. Who are these people who keep changing our liturgy? Perhaps English is their second language. They seem to qualify for the job by having thick cloth ears.

I feel no respect for the vicar, who sounds like a dimmer version of William Hague, or his good lady curate, that they can stand happily listening to such butchery.

On Sunday morning at the 8am service, we are supposed to have the prayer book. It’s actually a pile of leaflets, but I found an old book at the back by the font, with the nice old type face.

“Mike,” a different vicar, very whiskery, introduces the service, just so that we all know where we are, and gives a little homily, based on the Easter gospel; stone rolled away, knots undone, empty tomb, angels present, women unable to find the body.

“Perhaps we should reflect on how we would react in similar circumstances,” he advises. I hope we’d all keep calm and carry on.

He then goes through the service changing every “man,” to “person,” and “indifferently,” becomes “impartially.”

I don’t think he really likes the old service at all, obviously doesn’t see any aesthetic point in it. I suspect the thinks that people go to it because it’s very quiet, a kind of clapping avoidance syndrome. He probably doesn’t realise that people like me turn up to hear phrases like, “indifferently administer justice to the punishment of wickedness and vice,” for the thrill of hearing words that sound like the ruffling of old pages. Well you won’t get any of that poetry stuff in the Midlands it seems.

I was pleased that we used Psalm 118, which has the verse: I shall not die, but live

The Lord has punished me sorely,

But he did not hand me over to death.

The whole psalm is about rejection and gives one a boost of hope.

Later I discovered that this psalm is being used at the royal wedding. It’s about death, abandonment and reprieve. I wonder if they have really read it? Perhaps that is how William the bereaved felt when Katy junked him then changed her mind.

I like my home village but my tastes are different, don’t fit in, and this makes me grumpy. Hearing a new tea shop has opened in Bilbrook the next village, walk over there eagerly. I like to know every cake and sweet shop within a hundred miles.

It’s a gloomy little place with old flap-jacks and submarine rolls with pink icing in the window. They are also offering a children’s party menu: Chicken nuggets, sausages and Dairylea slices. I wonder how that would go down in Chiswick? It certainly wouldn’t go down the throats of infant Chiswickians.

I do all my old walks in glorious sunshine, clinging the remaining pretty parts of the village, wallowing in patches of beauty. It’s a joy that you can still look up and see the ancient tower of St. Nicholas’ church from where ever you stand, except where its obscured by trees in full green leaf. I don’t like what goes on inside but the outside is still breathtakingly reassuring.

Results

2011-04-20T05:59:00.000-07:00

A long wait amid the high backed lilac coloured chairs to see the doctor and hear my fate. Interested to note that the whole chemo clinic has now moved. There is a new place for it upstairs – hope I never see it.

Professor Gabra is very charming and almost casually drops the news that I am fine, better than that almost. What do you say? I thought I would skip out of there with joy if I got good news, but when it comes it’s difficult to fully realise.

I also know that I am trapped in some strange kind of relativity; the longer I go on without a recurrence the better are my chances, but the longer I go on the more a recurrence is likely, at least within the next five years.

He asks if there are any “issues” he needs to know. I mentioned the strange inner rumblings and whinings I get. At Christmas I thought these noises and aches and pains in my diaphragm meant the cancer was back. It’s not, so I wonder what they are?

He actually has a name for them, a great long one that I can’t remember. They are caused by the drugs given to stop rejection of the chemo drugs which cause scarring over the peritoneum, if that is the right word - the inner lining of your inside. He says they take years to heal.

I don’t mind, I quite like the sounds which are rather like the noise of overhead cables, wiring and metal springs, or mysterious activity in a haunted house.

I said thank you to Prof. Gabra and his team, for their skill at saving my life. He seemed genuinely pleased to hear that. I said thank you to Mr Gabra and his team, for their skill at saving my life. He seemed genuinely pleased to hear that. Obviously I hadn’t made my gratitude clear enough before, but what happened to me after the operation, the terrible nursing on the Victor Bonney ward and the lack of care when I got home had rather overshadowed the good work of the surgeons.

“We try to provide a first class service,” he said, “but the way things are going we won’t be able to do that much longer. The NHS is heading for a bottom of the line service. The government wants all the money to go to the “community,” and GPs, we are expected to get by on very little.” He sounded genuinely despairing.

I was due to go up to a private view of an exhibition in Highgate. I have two paintings in the show, but after all that all I wanted to do was go home and sit quietly over a Pimm’s and borage in the garden.

Second check-up looms

2011-04-20T05:41:00.000-07:00

18^th April 2011.

Spent a week writing my Peru piece, crammed it all into 2,000 words and young Alec the editor of Private Banking Magazine seems pleased with it. I actually sent over 2,001 words and wonder which precious gem he will remove.

The paradise of Peru is fading as the next three monthly check-up looms.

Visit my GP for a blood pressure test. It’s up and so is my weight. I have put on eight pounds since chemo, and before that I was already ten pounds overweight. Help!

It seems very hard to lose weight now. I never thought that would happen to me.

This time last year I was over a stone lighter, had wavy brown hair and thought I would probably never get the chance to travel again. Where is that person now? Gone missing.

I visited a councillor at Maggie’s to help me face up to possibly getting bad results tomorrow, and if not tomorrow some time soon.

I said I felt embarrassed at not having anyone to go with me for the test, or more importantly to meet me afterwards if the news is bad. I have not even tried to arrange anything for this eventuality. We explored that a bit and he told me I was projecting into the future, worrying about being isolated now and at a later date.

He recommended that I try to lessen my feelings of isolation and talked about joining “The University of the Third Age,” which he says is excellent in Oxford. It sounded attractive.

“Make an effort,” he said.

Went to a Holy Week mass at 8pm and felt better. Asked someone in the congregation to help me tomorrow if necessary and she was happily quite willing.

Acton U3A sounded a bit sleepy on line, but Richmond U3A seemed to have a lot of exciting courses, including “Computer Art,” and history courses on Hitler and Stalin.

Rang the computer number. A quavering voice answered and sounded quite shocked that I wanted to come along.

“I am 90,” he said. “I only have two students and they are older than me.”

He said all their “machines” were very old, “almost finished.” “We use the Commodore Programme,” he said. Not sure what that is. He mentioned Alan Sugar and I remembered my hated old Amstrad. I wondered if they used Windows at all?

“We are moving in that direction,” said the quavering voice. I could have been talking to Babbage.

Phoned the lady about Hitler. If she was anything like the last person she probably went out with him or his brother.

I asked her about the age of people in the U3A. “Haven’t you looked it up?” she snapped. I had but it didn’t say anywhere on line just how old you have to be.

“Retired,” she said. I think she meant the old days, when people retired at 65.

She has dropped Hitler and Stalin.

“I am doing interesting people next term,” she said, “so I can get out of bed in the morning and feel cheerful.”

I will ring a few other numbers, make an effort. But I can’t see it somehow.

Paid a visit to my friend Elaine, who looks after Maisie when I am away. She has a menagerie in her flat, rabbits, birds, rodents, guinea-pigs. I saw a post-card in Cusco showing a deep fried guinea-pig and thought of sending it to her, but then decided on someone else with a rather blacker sense of humour.

She spent all winter looking after a stray cat, Sox, trying to give him shelter and food in the garden, encouraging him to come in but he was terrible nervous. After months he moved in with her, but then he started misbehaving towards the other animals. She sent me anxious texts: He has noticed the hamster/ He is too interested in the budgies.

Then worse: He’s got to go/ I will have to find him a new home.

I urged her to give him another chance. He was on the brink of being out in the snow again.

When I went round last night the first thing I saw was this great looking tabby cat sitting bolt upright looking very pleased as he was groomed all down one side by a small black and white rabbit. Apparently the rabbit is mad about him. Elaine has photos of them in bed together. So Sox won’t be going anywhere soon, I am glad to say.

The Search for Hiram Bingham. A few travel notes to peruse.

2011-04-11T09:37:00.000-07:00

Sat 2nd April, 2010. London- Madrid to Lima. 06:20 am until 17:35 their time.

15 hours, 30 mins. British Airways then Iberia.

On the long trip to Lima, sat next to a tiny woman called Manuela Florez. She spoke only Quechua the old Inca language, Spanish and a bit of Italian. I only had a smattering of Italian but managed to understand that she had lived in Sicily for years with an Italian husband who died of, "krebs," she used the German word for cancer. I didn’t mention my situation or why my hair looks so weird. She made a sign with her hands to show deep sleep and looked very sad as she said this.

I got the feeling she was rather lonely, a very motherly type who would love to look after a man.

She told me that a perfect diet consists of “cheecha” or corn beer, chicharrones or pork scratchings, cuy or guinea pig and coca tea. Sounds OK to me, except I won’t eat cavie. I must let my friend Conner who runs the anti-cancer cookery school in Toulouse know about it.

Manuela was terrible patient as I huffed and puffed, writhed about, couldn’t sleep then fell asleep unexpectedly. Being so uncomfortable, with aching joints reminded me of chemotherapy all over again and I also started getting hot flushes.

We put up the arms on our seats to get about two inches more space, and walked about together down the dark plane towards the increasingly wet loos. Despite my restlessness she must have liked me a bit as she invited me to stay at her house in Arequpa near Lima, but I had to say that I was working, going to Cusco and Machu Picchu the Inca citadel, writing about the discovery of Machu Picchu in July 1911 by Hiram Bingham.

I met a lot of young girls on the journey, quite a range of them. One had a distinct under-bite and rather a silly, eager face. She seemed really good hearted but didn’t talk to her parents and looked as if she was out on her own. She wore a long dress, flip-flops, a stud in her nose and tattoos. She was reading The Celestine Prophecy and urged me to do so. She also had another fat book about someone who had been an armed robber in Latin America and fetched up in India. That seemed to be about all her hand luggage.

All the girls said they had only decided to travel to Latin American a few days ago and only packed the night before. Even in my wildest youth I was never that spontaneous or confident.

There were a few real toff girls who seem to be heading for Cusco the way they once flocked to Kathmandu. None of them seemed to be affected by the flight and emerged in Lima looking as fresh faced and jolly as when we got on.

Lima. Sunday 3rd April.

Great sleep. It’s almost worth travelling 8,000 miles in an airless container just for that.

I breakfasted on roast pork ribs, roast sweet potatoes, papaya, real corn flakes and quinoa, followed by rolls and coca leaf marmalade, which was a bit too sweet for me.

S America is a good place for meat eaters, not in the sense of big US steaks but fat bits of pig, medium sized rodents and alpaca, which I hear, "melts in the mouth."

Not eating cuy will be my one successful Lenten vow this year I think! I told the Maitre’d, "In England cuy are our friends." He looked sympathetic.

Hoped to have a swim. My hotel, Casa Andina Miraflores, boasted an “impressive third floor swimming pool with a waterfall,” and panoramic views. This turned out to be a patch of water the size of a garden pond surrounded by high frosted glass. Who really wants to look at the streets of Lima anyway? I know it is now rated for its cuisine and nightlife but I don’t like the look of it at all. It seems to consist of a small modern area with high buildings and a lot of glass and beyond that rings of squalid shanty towns.

“It has beautiful parks,” my guide told me as we drove in from the airport. True, but no one can walk in them without armed escort, or so it feels. My instincts are on over-drive perhaps.

Look at myself in the large hotel bathroom mirror. What do I look like? Nothing much. My new curly hair is so quaint! It makes me look like one of those girls who joined the Christian Union and the hockey club at university. I feel it gives strangers the wrong impression, that I am about to play the role of a gentile lady traveller.

Sitting in the lobby an English couple came over and chatting to me, at first I had no idea who they were because I had sat next to them hours ago, flying from London to Spain and had only seen their faces in profile.

13:50 Lan flight Lima up to Cusco

A friendly, chatty young woman checked my bag in, a change after the stony faces at Madrid airport where they didn’t seem to speak any English. She reappeared as I sat waiting for the flight and I felt a bit alarmed when she wanted to see my boarding card. She told me to be sure to stand on the right and get on the plane at the first call. There were only about 20 of us waiting so I didn’t understand the reason for this. As people drifted past heading for Mexico, Quito and exotic places, she called out to them asking if they wanted to go to Cusco. She reminded me of some FE teachers I’d met in London, desperately trying to get their number up to keep their classes going.

Flying into Cusco over the Andean mountain lakes must be one of the most spectacular sights in the world. As the small plane turned and tipped towards the side of a hill it was heart stopping. The “international” airport is small and where as you normally get out in a foreign country and taste the different air or temperature, here the first thing that hits is the pressure on your chest, as if you’ve put on a pair of tight corsets to leave the plane.

As we drove into town there was a football match on the radio, an Inca team, I was told, against some Indians from the Central Ashaninka jungle. They were cannibals, fond of raw flesh at the time of the Conquistador. The match might have been quite a spectacle, but the screaming commentator sounded just like the usual ones. It could have been Arsenal playing.

My itinerary for the next week is very complicated, it worries me, all those flight, bus and train connections. One new sheet of instructions given to me in Lima says; "You will be alone" in bold, well I know that chum. It also says at the bottom, "Travelling alone is not advisable."

Young Alec, the editor of Private Banking, which sent me here, has been out of touch for over two weeks. I asked him about expenses and he fell silent. That is usual for editors, but I thought he might have contacted me before I took off. I decided not to call him so that he has no idea whether I have gone away or not. I could still be in Acton for all he knows. Of course he might not still be an editor for all I know, might be signing on down at the Job Seekers place in Shepherds Bush.

As everything is planned and paid for I might as well plough on.

Seeing my room in my hotel, Inkaterra La Casona, on plaza Nazarenas in Cusco, I felt very happy. I spent a long time last year saying to myself, "Why me, why did I have to get cancer?" Now I was saying, "Why me? How did I get this lucky?"

The hotel was built on the sight of an Inca palace but was they claimed by a Conquistador. It remains in the old Spanish style, dark and cool around a small court yard. My room was simple but elegant, leading into a marble bathroom.

I celebrated with a Pisco sour, Peru’s grape brandy, and a large glass of red wine with dinner. Woke in the night with pounding headache breathing like a landed fish. My face was bright red and I had a pain across my forehead. The 24 hour butler service brought a large green canister of oxygen into the bedroom and applied the mask. I had two face-fulls before things settled down. I lay there feeling helpless and vulnerable, wondering if I could do the trip after all. When I was in Cusco ten years ago I didn’t have any problem. A lot has happened since then and of course alcohol and altitudes of 12,000 ft just don't mix.

6/4/11

Hiram Bingham train (Orient Express) up to Machu Picchu.

The usual Orient Express finery; crisp cream napery, flowers on the tables, brass and copper fittings, and Tiffany lamps. That’s appropriate as Hiram Bingham, the American who discovered Machu P exactly 100 years ago, was married to the Tiffany heiress before he dumped her for a younger model.

The train is full of Americans. I am placed at a table opposite two large families of them. One boy is crouching, with his trainers on the finely upholstered seats. Feel annoyed. In my role as quaint, eccentric travelling spinster, ask him gently not to put his feet on the seats. His mother looks astonished. Not long after she suddenly flings herself under the table, head down.

Her husband explains in a burbling, whiney voice, "We've had terrible bouts of altitude sickness." A bit odd as we are now in the Sacred Valley, down at 8,000 ft. Decide she was a silly woman and I feel glad to see her bourn off to spend the whole journey lying down and closeted away. He starts complaining that the trip from Cusco to the railway station by mini-bus was “tough, really tough, we nearly didn’t survive.” Then he starts asking one of the stewards to provide different food for his kids. Move my seat away from them.

Have a look at the bar, next to an end carriage which is open and used as a viewing platform. A group of Peruvians serenade loudly as we take pictures. As I go and look at the tracks realise that I have seen them before in a dream, years ago. This makes me feel very unsettled. Chat to a couple of American lady travellers from San Francisco in the lounge, very nice people, hope to see them again on the trip, then return to my table.

There is a glamorous woman now seated opposite with her old mother. They are originally from Belize. She is dressed in tight grey cotton ensemble with paste jewels on the shoulders; she also has large ornate shades and elegant Fendi bag.

She tells me her husband runs a successful business in Miami but she travels with her mother all the time.

"It is so wonderful to travel," she goes on, place dropping all the time. Later I think she was saying, "What is really the purpose of it all?" and her compulsive travel was a diversion from some kind of sorrow.

5/4/11 Inkaterra Machu Picchu Pueblo Hotel.

I didn’t like this hotel much when I first arrived, after the grand comfort of La Casona it seemed a bit more Spartan. No chocs on the pillow or nice slippers. Then I realised it is a completely different kind of hotel. It consists of pueblos on an estate set in 2,000 acres of cloud forest. There is an “eco center,” offering walks into the jungle to look at orchids, Peru has ten percent of the world’s orchids and also abundant fushia. There is also a tour to see some bears, rescued from local people who took them in as cubs.

6/4/11

I enjoyed meeting three spectacle bears; Yogi, Pepe, Coco. I gave Yogi a banana. He looked amazed, took it in his mouth, going cross eyed to see what it was, didn't touch it with his paws, bit into it, then dropped it. They peel all their fruit so he probably didn't like the bitter skin.

He'd never had banana and I don't think the ranger with me was expecting me to do it, I had saved it from breakfast. She said they would go back later and find out if the bear had eaten it or not, it was of interest. Up there they live on avocado, mango and bromeliads. They make a high sweet cry too, no growling.

Today I saw a bear’s genitals for the first time. Pepe, aged 20, sniffed the air, smelled females in the surrounding jungle and showed me what he’d got. The best offer I’ve had for some time.

They looked like a bright red pencil box, very rectangular and sharp at the corners, then the end turned into a funnel shape. The whole thing flopped back into his dense fur and hung there listlessly, a dark sack with a tiny red tip.

His keepers say he is too old to have a partner which seems a bit unfair. The truth is they haven’t rescued any females. The one they had made off and now lives happily in the forest nearby, appearing occasionally.

Like many middle aged mammals Pepe suffers from overweight. He was on eight avocados a day, but is now down to three, perhaps this unusual version of joining AA was the reason he seemed so depressed and listless.

In another cage I met Coco, only two and a half years old. He lived with a local family for eighteen months, until they had a baby and decided he had to go. In London he’d probably have got a job as a nanny.

I think I have just had a perfect day: 8.30am visited the bear sanctuary, then breakfast overlooking the roaring Urubamba River.

12 noon a two hour massage using hot stones and lemon scented oil, followed by 20 minutes inside a "sweat lodge," then a cold plunge in a pond, followed by two warm baths in hot pools.

I felt very contented, resting my head on the side of one pool watching humming birds drinking from sugar feeders put up for them in the gardens.

Lunch on Andean salad and cheese. Potter into Agua Callientes, the local town over the railway tracks, where the blue Peruvian trains come in, look around the market, then return to sit on my patio. Sip coca tea looking up at Machu Picchu mountain and below it, all round me, a bank of hydrangea, wild strelitzia, ferns and orchids.

Later get a text from young Alec, at last! It says simply, "Good work, Jane." I could be in Morrison’s doing my weekly shop for all he knows, He takes it on trust that I will do the job, perhaps it’s down to the famous Daily Mail training which was something like an army training.

7/4/11

Hiram Bingham train back to Cusco at 5pm and tomorrow the long slog back to the UK. So many notes for my magazine article, and a piece for the Telegraph about the Spa at the Pueblo hotel. Do hope I can do them justice.

Coming back from the rail station by mini-bus back up to Cusco last night, bumping along the pot holed road in the dark, I realised that while I’ve been away I’ve had no sleep problems and no short term memory problems either. I was plagued by both before I left London. I think they were the symptoms of isolation and stress. My mind now seems as good as when I plodded the Inca trail fifteen years ago.

Also realise one can live happily without TV, radio or internet.

8/4/11 Lima to Madrid. Iberia Airlines.

The food on the return flight is much worse than coming out for some reason and the stewardesses are not nice. They remind me of the nurses I met when I was in hospital at this time last year; coldly hostile, unsmiling, if you are rash enough to ask them for anything you get a kind of death stare.

In the night I went to look for a glass of water and ventured behind the curtain into the galley. One of them was sitting there her legs stretched out, feet up on the work surface. She was very grumpy and when I said “excuse me,” and tried to get past her legs she said, “Oh don’t bother,” in a mock English accent. The only English I heard spoken on board. At the far distant end of the economy section, near the loo, two others were sitting inside and wouldn’t let me past so I had to push past the front row of the economy section over people’s legs and bags. Hospital patients, passengers; a damn nuisance.

There is also the concomitant neglect; our empty food boxes not collected for over an hour so no one can get out. In the end I gathered them up for myself and the silent unfriendly man sitting next to me and took them to the gallery myself. I could have done the whole plane before we saw the stewardesses again.

The curtain dividing us from business class remains firmly shut, but the curtain dividing us from the galley is always open, so we are flooded with light all night and out little TV screen fades into nothing.

When I arrived in Madrid I realised I had a bottle of water which had come with me all the way from Cusco. The Spanish security men tut tutted at me, made me have a few swigs of it to prove it wasn’t some noxious substance, then confiscated it.

I said, “why not tell them off about it in Lima?” they shook their heads as is that would never do.

There is certainly a huge difference between economy and business class, perhaps it was always so, but I feel that differences between the rich and the not so well-off are getting more obvious and annoying.

In Lima they gave me no boarding card for Madrid to London, so I had to join a long queue at an Iberia desk to get one. While we were standing there an English business class passenger, “prioritee” just walked to the head of the line. He had the good grace to look embarrassed.

The new terminal in Madrid, “S4” is a horrible place to wait. It has not been designed for travellers, only itinerant consumers. There are no seats unless you sit in a café. You have to pay to sit, unless of course you can use the business class lounge and its private spa. I remember with longing some showers at the air-port in Singapore.

There is nothing to look at, the shops are crummy and an air of anger and confusion as very few people can follow the strange signs. Again there is no English, the idea that it’s become a lingua Franca doesn’t apply here.

As I sat in Starbucks, wondering if I could survive on the wooden chair for the next three hours I saw a Latin American woman with a strange bottom like two very large balloons. She’d obviously had implants. It was a parody of the human form. I wonder if that will catch on, a baboon bottom to go with a trout pout? It was a good job old Pepe couldn’t see her. Elderly couples seated nearby averted their eyes.

For a time I sat with an elderly man who gave me his card. It said: “E Anton Loubser, Honorary Consul General of the Republic of San Marino. Ambassador of the Republic of South Africa (retired)

He was grimly facing a ten hour wait with no where comfortable to sit. He talked a bit about his life in the South African diplomatic service. He gave me a picture of how a civil servant behaves under an increasingly despotic regime.

“For a civil servant loyalty is the watchword,” he said.

He had met Nelson Mandela several times since his release, and was full of sentimental admiration for him. “He loves children,” he told me.

He had wanted a kind of federal system in the country so that all ethnic groups could “develop” separately. Now he was sad to find himself part of a state mainly ruled by one tribe, the Hausa, and had feelings of terrible loss.

“We gave them a marvellous country with a fine economy,” he said. “Despite sanctions we once had a great infrastructure and the finest medical service in the world.”

He also talked about his time in France during the Algerian crisis. He greatly admired de Gaulle. “But the French can be very hard,” he said. A lot of wealthy Algerians had wanted to emigrate to South Africa but he said, “we had no place there for them.”

He also remembered Emperor Bokasa of the Central African Republic very well.

“It used to amuse me to see him coming in with his fly whisk,” he said. “He liked us very much, was always very friendly to me, but perhaps he did lack judgement.”

Diplomatic speak for the man was a homicidal maniac and possibly a cannibal.

Finally got to go to my boarding gate feeling exhausted as if I’d read a whole Graham Green novel in one go.

On board it felt suddenly safe, like being in England, not just because it was British Airways but because I found myself seated among a party of boys from Harrow and Eton returning from a school trip to Salamanca. They hadn’t been learning any history sadly, the battle was not mentioned, it was all about “Spanish life and culture.”

They were of course terribly charming and polite. They chatted about where they’d been but didn’t ask me where I’d come from. As I left the plane and headed for the customs gate I was ahead of the rest with one of the boys aged about fifteen beside me. We chatted as we slowly filed along. He said he was very tired after the trip from Spain. I said I had just flown from Lima thinking it might impress him a bit.

“Oh Lima,” he said. “I’ve been there a couple of times, great place.”

I expect he’d sampled the famous night life. As we parted at the baggage carousel he insisted on shaking my hand.

“Well, it has been really lovely to meet you,” he said. “Good luck getting home!” I won’t see manners as polished as that again in awhile.

When I got home I noticed a walking stick in my hallway that I’d been given when I walked the Inka trail ten years ago.

I’d set off well across the thousands of miles of granite pavements, but then one of my knees had “gone,” and I’d had to stagger along with a knee brace, pain-killers and that stick.

It’s very stout, topped with a grotesquely carved Indian face, with a gaping mouth full of large, horrible looking donkey’s teeth. It’s topped by a sharp pointed animal horn.

I remember bringing it back with me on the aeroplane. What would be the chance of that now?

Just before we got to the Sun Gate, the triumphant end of the trail, we stopped for a drink at a hostel, the last one on the trail. Our leader had gone ahead and must have been chatting to people, because when I arrived, lagging behind, I was suddenly pushed violently and jostled as I tried to get to the bar.
I went outside and sat by myself in the sun but a daft looking young man with a new age hair cut came towards me and said, “You are from the Daily Mail. The people in there hate you and they are going to come out here and beat you up.”

I stood up, feeling very still and calm, stick in my hands, pointed horn at the ready and said, “Ok, come on then.” I was going to use the horn to crack his head open like an egg, I really was.

“I think you are a nincompoop,” I said, and he backed off grinning rather sheepishly.

I am still surprised at what altitude can do to you, in my case bring on a bout of psychosis, and just how much the Daily Mail is hated, even in the remotest corners of the globe.

Lord Acton never lived here

2011-03-29T10:53:00.000-07:00

29^th March 2012

Perhaps the place is called after him, but I am pretty sure that Lord Acton never lived here. I am really tired of living in Acton. When I moved here I was working full time and travelling by taxi or my company car so I didn’t have to look at it. Now I am marooned here. I have heard people praise it but I suspect that they live in grand houses and travel everywhere by private car, and do their shopping in far away places.

I would like to live somewhere easier, less corroding to the mind. “It’s just like Peckham,” said a friend recently. That emotive name, which acts like a code word, no more needs to be said.

I feel bad about the place at the moment as I am rather stressed. My tenant is moving out, another is moving in, it’s the big change over. The flat has to have a whole new bathroom, and two new patches of damp have been discovered. I am well into the red now, spending money I just don’t have.

My very good, efficient letting agent suggested I needed a new sofa, so I swapped with one down in the flat where I live. There was also the issue of the curtains. Curtains!! Oh dreadful word. I did a lot of research; Argos, John Lewis, a special mill out of town, and considering the size of the window with its 90ft drop it was going to be horribly expensive.

Then I remembered seeing a small curtain shop on Acton High Street. I went up there and they had one pair of curtains in my size, just the right colour – a snip at only £120. I thought I had found a bargain and it was a bit of a boost.

Not much English was spoken, it was all conducted in Arabic, but the man behind the counter seemed friendly enough. I paid up front, £47 for the track, £80 to put them up and I felt grateful.

We arranged a time for Habib to come and put them up. Unfortunately he didn’t turn up and his mobile was off all day. “He’s tired,” the man in the shop told me. Another arrangement was made and I rushed back early from my painting group on Saturday. I had to be there to meet him at the flat at 6pm. He arrived at seven. I thought he would be a little old man with a beard, but he was about 35 very robust and bad tempered. “This country is finished,” he told me, as soon as he’d got through the door. He said he’d be back in Lebanon if he could, “but there is always a war.”

Strange that he thought I would want to hear his rancorous remarks about my country, and that he might not even suspect that I have a trace of patriotism. He reminded me of someone who had been so badly abused that he couldn’t imagine what good relationships are like – not that I have that good a friendship with England at the moment. With no possible reply to make I left him to it.

Three hours later he had put up the track and was about to get the curtains up as well when he realised he had no curtain hooks. End of play for the evening. I still had his ladder – my one bargaining tool if I could take it hostage.

On Sunday I rang the shop. They blamed me for not having any hooks of my own, and asked, “Can’t you put them up yourself?” No I couldn’t. The voice on the phone said he might come himself but would need someone to help him (I was supposed to be able to do it on my own).

Last night two men arrived with hooks to hang the curtains. They looked lovely – but the pulley system didn’t work and they wouldn’t draw. Mr Habib had put up the wrong track. At 10pm Mr Habib returned, agreed that the track was wrong and took away his ladder. He told me to go to the shop the following day and collect a new track. In the morning I wondered if the shop would know anything about this, and rang one of the other men. He said not to go to the shop, he would sort it out.

And so it goeth on – curtains are up but won’t budge and the tenant comes in tomorrow. It surprises me that the curtain men are not interested in doing good business. When I went into the shop and saw their prices I said I would like more curtains from them for downstairs, but it didn’t make any difference. But at least they were more friendly than the small curtain shop near my road. It used to be quiet OK but the last time I went in it was staffed by two elderly Muslim men with beards. They made it clear they could not help me at all and I was out side on the pavement in about two minutes.

Today I had to finish off trying to get the flat sorted out, cleaned, polished and net curtains sewn for the new arrivals. At this make do and mend stage of my life Sally Bowles has turned into fraught Frau Schroeder.

I went up to Acton looking for a lavatory brush, you have to say toilet brush as no one now uses the other word. All the ones on show in the numerous Asian pavement shops were pitifully weak and fragile looking. In Pound Stretcher I saw four laid out on a shelf with sturdy ceramic bases. The problem was the bases were empty.

“We ain’t got none,” an assistant said. I led her to the toilet holders on the shelf.

“The brushes have all been stolen,” she said. “Our customers are always doing it.”

I wonder what the people of Acton do with all those purloined loo brushes? Clean their teeth, brush their hair?

When I got back with appropriately crappy new brush and groceries I couldn’t park anywhere near my flat. I saw a driver outside my flat get out and ring the bell of the flat next door to mine. He could be living there for all I know, but was holding a card and looked like a visitor. I asked him if he was staying long as I would like to move my car a bit nearer. “Not leaving I am going here,” he told me with an unpleasant grin.

After I’d unpacked my car and walked up the road with my stuff, I went out to see if there was a space nearer my home. He was sitting in his car, a long shining silver thing with tinted windows making him a silhouette. I went to my car and waited as he looked as if he was leaving.

I sat watching the builders who are working on my late friend Hilda’s old house. She was born in 1912. She used to forget her age and I would say, “Remember the Titanic,” which always delighted her. The house has been boarded up for years now. It was bought by an Indian woman who rumour has it, has been having trouble with her builders. They seem to have made very little progress. I watched them gathered round a skip full of soil, swigging from cans, railing and jeering to each other.

Eventually I gave up and went back to my flat which is out of sight of the road. Just as I turned my key I heard his engine and away he went. Some how I just knew he was going to do that.

I am too dispirited to go on living here but I can’t afford to go anywhere better in London. I want to live in Bedford Park, in one of the roads leading to the church which belong to that other world of prosperous London – but I am at a stitch and mend time of life and the only way I could do that would be to do a “Miss Smith,” she is the local bird lady who once lived on a good street inside a very bad car.

Spring arrives with a dull thud

2011-03-23T11:30:00.000-07:00

21/3/12

First day of Spring, at last more day than night. This brightness and vivacity, with daffodils bursting out all over seems to offer some kind of challenge which I don’t think I can meet, which makes me sad. But it is easier setting out for an early swim now the weather is milder.

Did remember to take my swimming things this time, but found that my swim suit was on inside out and after a very good swim, realised I had forgotten all my underclothes.

9am. Set off to hand in a painting to the BP Portrait Award up at Arnold Circus. No, no one does know where it is. It’s an obscure mark on the map, somewhere between Old Street and Liverpool Street. I can never find the right exit at Old Street so decided to try Liverpool Street instead. Had to ask people to point me in the right direction, but still ended up going the wrong way.

Got there feeling too hot, bought some paint and got back to Trafalgar Square by 11.30am. I had to meet some people from the church at lunch time for a tour of the Coliseum, one of our Lenten outings.

Drifted or was it glided around the National Portrait Gallery for an hour feeling like a ghost; listening in to tourists and their guides. An American woman pointed out how much a portrait of Mary Tudor resembles Kate Middleton, which was impressive of her. We all gazed at the Duke of Buckingham’s ruby lips and long silver legs in awe. Their elderly guide said that he probably wasn’t gay, even though King James called him his wife, and didn’t get a wife or children until after Buckingham was dead, murdered by a male admirer. What did one have to do to be gay in those days?

In the Regency rooms I listened to a guide talking to two smiling American ladies. They seemed to think that “Regent” was some kind of surname, after it had all be explained asking if George III was called “Regent,” too. They were interested in Wellington but vague about Napoleon, which was a surprise as I thought he was somehow international. The young guide, who looked like a student was patient and full of information.

I couldn’t hang around too long listening in so pottered on feeling increasingly gloomy, through the glum faced Georgians. I knew I was sad because Spring is a marker of change and I’m still alone in the world and feel the shame of it.

The tour of the theatre was very informative but I couldn’t concentrate and felt listless. I enjoyed standing on the main stage under the blue and white lights fed through a stencil, preparing for that night’s performance of Swan Lake. Going behind a flat, I found the little boat, complete with Perspex feathers by which Odette sails away at the end with her prince in pale blue tights.

It was interesting to visit the orchestra pit too, as I have never been in one before. So cramped and uncomfortable it reminded me of being below decks on an old boat.

When I got home at 3pm I had to face the fact that I am now leading a useless empty life, not even an enjoyable Regency style, useless and empty life. The cancer shoved out such ideas, but now they are coming back. I really need a job.

22/3/11

Another good swim followed by a trip to the doctor to get some Asprin which I take every day as some trial said it was good against cancer. She says she has never heard of such a thing but agreed to give it to me. Tell her I am losing my memory, no underwear again. This could be due to menopause, chemotherapy, stress or Alzheimer’s, or all of those things at once.

She says it is nothing to do with the menopause and I “must have been reading things in magazines.” She asked me to name the Prime Minister and for a moment I thought she was joking, then realised it had almost deserted my brain along with my pants and bra. Managed to summon it up in time, and got the other questions right, even counting backwards.

I was glad she asked me the dates of the Second World War, made it more interesting, but I wondered if they reserve that question for everyone, even people like me who came along some time after it. Maybe she’d ask my mother about the one before it, and anyone over 95 about the Franco-Prussian fiasco.

I am glad she didn’t ask me questions about the Treaty of Westphalia, or the Boer War because as an example of how odd my brain is, at different times, I once knew a great deal about both of them, answered detailed exam questions on them, but by about the following day couldn’t remember anything much about them at all.

She said there are no preparations available which can do anything about memory loss and my condition was most likely caused by stress. I ought to stop worrying and learn to “live in the present.” She is right of course.

I was walking out of the door when she realised she had forgotten to give me my Asprin prescription.

No cheque yet from Colin Firth. Perhaps my letter has slipped his mind. He has probably been carrying it around LA in his pocket for weeks, meaning to reply.

Shriving.

2011-03-13T13:35:00.000-07:00

9^th March. Ash Wednesday.

My brain still seems to be affected by the chemo; chunks of memory gone and frequent confusion. Yesterday on my way to Luton to interview little Tommy Knocker of the EDL, I thought I was at St Pancras when I’d only got as far as Paddington. It’s the second time recently that I’ve been bewildered on that station. The last time I went looking for all the shops in the new international part.

Today I set out for the Ash Wednesday service at St Michael’s in Turnham Green an hour early. When I arrived and found an empty church I was perplexed. A lady giving out hymn books to no one said “not to worry,” she had done the same thing herself.

I had to kill a bit of time. I have started using charity shops mainly because I am going on the Queen Mary to New York in June and have to sit down to six formal dinners needing evening frocks.

In the Oxfam shop in Chiswick I found a bawling baby and her mother dashing about in a frenzy as she had just had her wallet stolen. She had used the purse in the previous shop and it contained quite a lot of money and all her cards. No one seemed to be trying to help her in any way and she’d forgotten her mobile.

“It was my fault I was too careless,” she wailed, white in the face. I thought I would try to help by calming the baby. It was screaming horribly. I have no experience with them at all and when they cry it sounds to me as if they are in real agony or completely broken hearted. Stooping over her pram, or what every you call them thes days, I could see the roof of her mouth like an open pearly shell, and right down her pink throat. I tried stroking her stomach as if she was a cat and talking to her soothingly. It worked. I got her almost hypnotised. She shut up and gave me a smile. Her mother thanked me before she dashed away home to ring her bank.

When she’d gone the American who runs the shop returned. He asked the Japanese girl assistant if all was well. She said it was, then she hesitatingly said, “something went missing.” He thought she meant something she owned, but after a lot of humming and hawing she said, “A customer lost something.”

I piped up, “her purse was stolen.” “Maybe,” said the girl reluctantly.

I felt really annoyed with her, that she couldn’t just admit what had happened.

I got to church bridling and wishing I could like foreigners more, or at least not be so perturbed by them.

The vicar began his address with quite a good joke then drew our attention to the fact that Ash Wednesday is about dust and ashes, beginning Lent which is about dying and death.

I felt a bit scared, not sure how I was going to cope with this. I avoid thinking about death – thinking about it now is not the same as it once was, when death was a depressing but remote prospect, the way it was this time last year.

I didn’t go to ashing services then or give much thought to the mind and personality of God, or my relationship with him, but I did have a tumour growing in my groin.

“A very respectable lump,” said one doctor when I first had a scan last March. That afternoon I went to the cinema and sitting in the dark convinced myself that the thing was shrinking. It was the start of living in jeopardy and of my magical thinking, reaching out to the supernatural for help.

After his amusing words the vicar brought us sharp by unexpectedly making a personal confession of his sins. He spoke gravely and quietly. It was very moving and showed what trust he must have in the people gathered there. He made us think about Lent as a time for serious reflection, study, and conversion of the heart.

I had made the usual Lent promises, giving up things that I really like; alcohol, chocolate and toast. That all seemed far too trivial, although abjuring drink will be much tougher this year as having a glass of red wine with my dinner often calms me down when I am in on my own and fearful. The Bible might give the promise of eternal salvation, reading Acts might be nourishing to the soul but liquor is quicker. I suppose I can try Eccles cakes instead, usually a good antidote to depression.

I left the church feeling that I had to make a real change in my own life and perhaps cancer can make me a better person than I really am.

There was a meeting at Maggie’s at Charing Cross about how to publicise their third birthday in London. The London centre is the busiest in Britain. They were planning to do something the day before the Royal Wedding but I didn’t like that idea – cancer and royal nuptials don’t mix, certainly not in the press that I know.

Around the big kitchen table the women were mostly foreign, from Asia and Latin America, and in the middle was a box of Maltesers. I hadn’t seen any for years. I used to love eating them in the theatre. I tried to distract myself by reading a paper until one of the English speakers suggested that they are not chocolates at all, but bits of malt that have been accidentally dropped into a vat of chocolate.

Once you’ve slipped your hand in the box it’s almost impossible not to take more. While I was crunching and sucking relishing the way they slowly implode into a tiny crystal of sweetness, a woman asked me what the headline on a newspaper meant. “What is this, “dab hand?”” she asked. Then she asked me to translate more. She seemed interested in news from Italy but said she was Bulgarian.

We chatted about refugees pouring onto the island of Lampedusa from Libya and the Maghreb. “They will never stop it. You will never stop it here,” she said, “because the English are too scared. If anyone says the word “racist” to you English you are so scared you run out the door.”

She spoke with a cold but teasing malevolence. There I was half an hour after Mass eating chocs and wanting to throttle a foreigner.

When I got home Maisie licked the remaining mark of ash off my forehead with a deft swipe of her tongue.

From the bus queue

2011-03-13T13:33:00.000-07:00

Sat 5^th March

One of the most bummish things about being poor is having to travel by bus. I once lived in taxis, taking several a day, even using them to travel outside London. On one noble occasion on a trip to Petworth, I kept the taxi and the driver with it and went to an hotel over night. It cost £300, cheap at the price. The paper paid of course although they did complain about him to the taxi company.

Those days are gone. I am now travelling with life’s other failures. I doubt if you would ever see a cabinet minister on a bus. You rarely see a white middle class man, although round here you rarely see a white man.

The 207 from Southall to Shepherds Bush is packed with urban peasants from Eastern Europe, Polish and Russian girls in bright make up, with tight pony-tails, sprayed on jeans and killer heels, Somalis and British West Indians, some of whom are now veiled in complete niqab along with the residents from Asia. Occasionally there is a white woman other than me, usually older, or extremely obese bulging out of thin vests, wings of fat sticking out under the shoulder blades.

We are packed in like cattle, or at least like cattle where there is no animal welfare legislation. The crowding is not helped by women putting their babies, small children and bags of shopping on to the seats next to them. I still live in an age where children smartly dressed in uniform stood up for adults so I am reduced to scowling; one of those women who sits on buses disapproving.

I do not enjoy these trips, in fact I hate them but they are often interesting. On the way from Maggie’s Centre at Charing Cross to the bus stop in Hammersmith last week I walked behind two Muslim boys who were plotting to blow up the House of Commons. I listened attentively.

“You could just throw a grenade into the chamber,” said one. “Or just roll it in.” They talked a bit about this. One glanced at me and quickened their step, and I quickened mine.

“Do you know where the place is?” said the other. He said he didn’t. “But I could find it,” he said unconvincingly and I felt slightly relieved, pretty certain that he was never going to buy a map.

Yesterday on the late bus I listened to a mixed race lad who has converted to Islam giving advice to another young man who was hidden behind a long curling black beard. He sounded nice, an easy charm, obviously generous hearted as he eagerly advised the other how to progress as an English Muslim.

“You must try to get into a Saudi University,” he said. “As you are a re-vert (Muslims believe that everyone was somehow originally a Muslim) they will let you in easily.”

How odd to prepare for a life in London by going off to Saudi, but what do they know of England, that only England know? More than boys who spend their time in Riyadh reading the Koran I should think.

Many people I travel with live in London, one of the greatest cities on earth but instead of enjoying it, have chosen to live in psychic exile. They have fanatic hearts. I used to be like that myself when I was growing up with a confused identity and no self worth. I also wanted to die for a glorious cause. It was geography, lack of direct contact with IRA people and having so many more practical ambitions that saved me.

This journey into and out of fanaticism is on my mind as I am about to interview young Tommy Robinson, street fighting leader of the English Defence League, for the Salisbury Review. Also because of reading “Alone in Berlin,” by Han Fallada.

There is a lot of talk about a chapter that was repressed, kept back by the East German authorities. They hated any shades of grey, ironic as it was such a grey place. When I used to visit the DDR I was surprised to find a whole half nation which had expunged itself of any guilt about the war.

I visited Buchenwald and saw the chapel like place they’d put up to Ernst Thalmann and his wife who were sadly murdered in the camp near the end of the war. He was leader of the Communist Party of Germany, the courageous KPD which was eviscerated by Hitler. As a student I was infatuated with them, and saw Bader Meinhoff as their worthy decedents.

Later I discovered Thalmann had voted with the Nazis in the Reichstag, giving them block votes, rather than side with any democratic parties of the centre-left. Another fanatic heart.

I used to go shopping on a dreary street in Katowice, Poland called after Klary Zetkin, a member of the KPD. She said, “Thälmann is caught in uncritical self-deception and self-infatuation which borders on megalomania." We’ve all been there. The trick is to grow out of it without blowing up public buildings or killing anyone.

*One advantage of poverty pointed out by Stuart Elliott, my anatomy teacher at Central St. Martin’s. He says that if he was rich, he would spend too much time developing his bad ideas. (He pointed to certain well know artists as examples of this.)

Spring still far behind

2011-03-03T03:00:00.000-08:00

3^rd March 2010.

It was great to see my piece in the Daily Telegraph. Father Bill has put the photo of me onto his fridge. But I shouldn’t have read it again. They put extra statistics into side-bars and it has disturbed my peace of mind.

Last night I felt a frisson of fear return like a cold draft. I kept busy, painting and listening to the radio and cheered myself up, but when I went to sleep I had an unpleasant dream.

I seemed to be living in a very small place, so small I had to lie on a shelf. My fellow tenant had brought with him his pet crocodile, a very large aggressive looking animal. I was terrified of it, it was going to destroy me and where was the cat? He was grumpy about taking it away. I tried to ring the landlord to complain but could never get through. None of the numbers worked.

Then I was trapped in a tall building trying to find an exit. I met Torin Douglas from the BBC who advised me to get out through the basement but when I got down there and looked out there was a raging river outside.

Woke up to a report on the Today programme about hundreds of thousands of refugees trying to escape over the border from Libya – all running from the ferocious Gaddafi crocodile.

Another bitterly cold day. Even the swimming pool water seemed warm compared to the outside air. The birds on my lawn seem famished. I try to put out food for the small ones, particularly the robins but as soon as I go out there with my bag of seed I am swamped by pigeons with the size and determination of oviraptors.

My friend’s tortoise has come out of her sleep but now has to be kept going with a special heat lamp. The tortoises I knew as a child must have been much tougher, some of them made it through the great snows of 1962-3 in just a cardboard box beside a coal fire inside a kind of wooden tent laden with drying vests and pants.

No word from Colin Firth yet – he must be back from Hollywood by now!

Lucky Day

2011-02-28T07:10:00.000-08:00

Monday 28^th Feb.

Wake up to the news that Colin Firth will be bringing the little gold man back to Chiswick – this could be a very lucky day for our church roof and the organ.

I have a piece in the Daily Telegraph about the problems of living with after effects of a cancer diagnosis, and the “false hopelessness” meted out by some doctors.

My picture in the paper is quite good for once. "Kim O'Therapy" looks both gamine and sagacious sitting in the garden in a lgreen velvet coat. I bought that about twenty years ago when I had a large disposable income, and I have never worn it as it always seems to be too cold. I chose the colour to show my support for Sinn Fein – that all does seem a long time ago.

The editor of Private Banking Magazine wants me to go to Matchu Pitchu in Peru as soon as possible, not walking this time, but going by train and bus to the site, and to sail to New York on the Queen Mary in June.

I will have to go on these jaunts dressed entirely from charity shops. Most women I know sport wonderful designer clothes from them and provide lists of the best ones to visit. I have ignored them so far out of laziness but I now have no choice. I am tired of this no money lark, can’t get used to it. I don’t think I am exactly alone in this, in fact I sense a rapidly spreading malaise.

Oscar Night

2011-02-28T07:05:00.001-08:00

Sunday 27^th Feb.

Tonight is Oscar night. Like everyone I am hoping that Colin Firth will bring home the little gold man, and I have my own extra agenda. On the 28^th of January, when excitement about the film was gathering pace and everyone seemed strangely cheered up by it, I wrote to him wishing him luck and asking if he would be so kind as to give generously to the St. Michael’s church organ fund – it could be the “Colin Firth Organ,” I suggested what a fine plaque that would be, etc. I also mentioned that we had just had the lead stripped off the church roof too. There is a security system set up but what it needs is someone to sit up there with a pick-axe waiting for the thieves to appear.

I pushed this missive through his black letter box as he lives just up the road from the church. His white gate and front fence have holes and gaps painted over against prying eyes, but the letter box works perfectly normally as far as I can tell.

No word back since then, but he has been very busy. I just hope my chemo drenched synapses didn’t lead me to write Colin Farrell instead of Colin Firth.

Some of my friends have been a bit sceptical about this letter, but in 1983, when I belonged to St Giles Church in Camberwell, we had an appeal for a new heating system. The Church of England itself never seems to give any money to its churches.

I wrote to various local celebrities including Terry Jones, of Monty Python fame. He sent me a cheque for £100 by return.

The vicar of that church was brilliant intellectually, a former maths don at Oxford, but very peevish and suspicious of young women. I took the cheque into the vestry just before the Mass when they were all vesting up. It is a time of reverence and they peered at me uneasily, as if I might start bowling sacred objects about.

The clergy and congregation were used to windows being smashed and large scale theft. Even the bishop’s chair and the heavy eagle shaped lectern got lifted, but a lot of people in Camberwell were also dangerously mad.

The area was dominated by the great Maudsley Mental hospital, bin of bins, and Mrs Thatcher had just introduced her, “care in the community,” policy, emptying inmates of institutions onto the streets, despite the fact that there were no “communities” to receive them.

Shortly after a baby in some local flats had been killed by a mental patient who had been released eight days before, and the day before I entered the vestry a young woman at Saturday morning Mass smashed up the Confessional box with a hammer. I had watched with interest as the young curate grappled her to the floor.

I handed the vicar the cheque in silence and watched as he read it. His irritated expression merged into surprised comprehension but he quickly shooed me out and never said thank you. I had such low self-esteem at the time that I failed to call him a bastard, or throw things about. One of only two vesting-up anecdotes I have.

Odd- bods out and about

2011-02-28T06:52:00.000-08:00

Wednesday 23^rd Feb.

Managed to get to the St Martin’s church coffee morning at the Greek Taverna near Ealing. This is Father Bill’s “new sort of church,” an off-shoot of what he calls his “Vicarage tea party movement.”

He arrived late as his motorbike had broken down. Under his leathers he was clad in h is usual pink corduroys, Icelandic sweater and hand-knitted socks. The clothes of many middle-class, middle-aged arts graduates on their day off. He told me he wasn’t reading my blog anymore as he is never in it. The vaunting pride of some vicars!

He seemed a bit depressed, or perhaps just stressed. “I used to be a Parish priest spreading the word of God,” he said, “but now I am just an administrator and handyman. I spend my time clearing drains.”

Bill says this group has replaced “the old women’s group,” which long ago replaced the, “young wives group,” as there is no such thing these days, at least they are not at home with time on their hands.

There were plenty of old women still around, including one lady in her 90s who has the same name as my mother, and like her was in the ATS in Scotland during the war. She used to drive “top brass” around in staff cars and eventually married a handsome Pole.

She has been driving for 75 years, and she says has only been stopped once, “for no reason.” She sometimes offers me a lift, but I am ashamed to say I always turn it down.

She has been doing a computer course but has given it up, as it gave her “a bad back.” I asked if she was going on holiday this year. She said she usually visits a daughter in the USA but won’t be going there anymore as, “there is no oxygen in America these days, none at all.”

She had been in touch with a local councillors called Faisal Islam. “He really liked hearing about my war time experiences,” she said. But now she is worried that he is Colonel Gaddafi’s son. We reassured her, but who knows these days, when London is replete with riff raff from all over the planet. I didn’t say this to Fr. Bill who reads the Guardian and has a signed photo of Yassir Arafat in his study.

On Friday I was sent by the Daily Telegraph to interview a young boy who has had his Disability Living Allowance withdrawn. A very topical issue as the government is about to shape-shift all our welfare laws.

He was football mad as a boy but diagnosed with bone cancer just before his sixteenth birthday and they amputated his leg a year later. He was clear for two years but now, aged twenty the cancer has returned, in one of his lungs.

After agreeing to do this story I was apprehensive. I wondered if I might throw a wobbly, how apt that horrible expression has become, especially if he was in an oncology unit surrounded by other young people. I just can’t cope with too much grief at the moment. As it turned out he had a room to himself in an adult wing so it wasn’t too sad.

I don’t know yet if my feature will do him any good, but he certainly has had a good effect on me. His courage sewed a tiny seed of acceptance in me that wasn’t there before. Today, Sunday, I tried hard to hold onto this feeling and some joy in the good life that I have.

After Mass I went to meet Eve, my friend I have recently got to know again after twenty years separation. We had lunch and I find that I can remember so many things she said when we knew each other in the 1970s when we were both teaching in Poland, even people she knew and I never met. I can remember photos of her friends at UEA, names of her school teachers and tutors. I must have had an incredibly receptive brain back then – but I think it’s because until I met her I’d never met anyone so well educated or of that background before.

Her family lived in Paris where her father worked for UNESCO. She said she just wanted to live there and have “nice breakfasts with her friends.” I felt so vulgar in comparison as I wanted to move to London somehow, and have a good career, to be what I became, one of Thatcher’s children.

We pottered around the National Portrait Gallery ending up in my favourite room which is based around paintings from 1918 to the late 30s. She liked a portrait of EM Forster by Dora Carrington. I like the loosely worked portrait of Churchill by Sickert. He captures Churchill’s childish envy of the better painter.

Eve’s father was at Oxford in the 1950s where he knew a few famous people and became friends with Richard Hoggart. Her daughter has recently graduated from there. She says it’s not so much an intellectual community now as a commercial enterprise, and they keep writing asking her for money.

Despite the cold and drizzle it was a good Sunday. I like showing people round. “You seem to know London well,” she said. “But then it’s your home.” I suppose it is, although I never think of it like that. Perhaps because it’s my home I keep thinking of how best to leave it.

Turning Woolly

2011-02-21T02:59:00.000-08:00

Sunday 20/2/11

I am turning woolly. My hair is coming back in soft, bushy little curls, a cross between Col. Gaddafi and an OAP. It is also slate grey rather than the red-brown it used to be.

After church, in the vestry this morning, an old lady with a tight little grey perm came over and said, “My Dear, your hair is looking lovely.” In other words, it’s just like hers.

Some people say it looks gamine and cute, quite trendy. I call this new person in the mirror, “Kim O’Therapy.” She has an Irish pixie look about her.

At church we are gearing up for Lent. In his sermon our gorgeous young curate suggested that the people of Chiswick might like to forego their foie gras, pate d’canard and fine wines for awhile. He said one friend was even going to reduce his time on Facebook to a mere one hour a day.

We are going on lots of lovely Lenten outings as part of our aim of “making Lent meaningful,” and “delighting in God,” none of your old misery and privation. Trips will include a guided tour behind the scenes at the English National Opera, and afternoon tea at Chiswick House and Gardens. We will at all times be keeping our minds on higher things and the transitoriness of this mortal life of course.

I started last week feeling as if my head was full of wet soggy wool. I dreamed that my watch had turned digital and I saw strange numbers on its face. My mother in her usual matter-of-fact way said it meant I was due for a recurrence of the illness and could expect to be recalled to the hospital shortly. I was then looking at exhibits in a museum and saw my own decapitated head, painted in bright colours, perhaps because of the self-portraits I’ve been working on.

I woke with my nightdress soaking in sweat and immediately thought the cancer was coming back. I went off to my “stress management course” at Maggie’s but felt too stressed to go in. Instead I sat with a mug of coffee in a quiet alcove with a self-help book and wept. I couldn’t face the possibility of breaking down in front of the group, or even seeing them face to face. Our nice teacher came out and was very understanding. She told me to go home and listen to the class relaxation CD.

I went off on a bleak day into Kensington to visit the Cass art shop and bought some canvasses at half price.

I went home and started a portrait of Otto Hampel, who is the basis for the novel, Alone in Berlin, by Hans Falluda. At the moment I am blissfully absorbed in reading it. It’s as vivid as watching a film.

Otto and his wife Elise put post cards all over Berlin decrying the Nazis. There are mug-shots of them at the back of the book and you can see clearly in the picture that Otto is not afraid. Some how he faces death head on with a defiant smile.

Making this portrait and cutting it into post-card shapes really helps me to feel stronger and I hope he knows somehow that his example is valued, even if his little cards with their spiky writing did no good at the time.

I perked up later in the week, thanks to painting, rapid swimming, tumble-turns and summersaults under water. I wish I could do these on land. How wonderful the next time I go to the clinic, to do a back summersault in at the door. I also used the sun-lamp at the my health club. Nothing like a burst of sunshine in a long, cold winter like this.

Today, before church I had a mobile chat with my mother. She said she'd met an old man in Codsall where she lives, he was only 80, "just a boy," she said. They had reminisced about the village.

He asked her if she remembered the time years ago when a bear got off the train at Codsall Station? She didn't. Apparently it left the train and ambled into the local woods. Later it climbed a tree and sadly was shot. I was disgusted by the ending to the story.

“It’s no good worrying about it now!” She said with her usual common sense. But I thought of the bear, for what ever reason making its journey to Codsall via Wolverhampton, little knowing what a fateful day it would be.

A Club No One Wants To Join

2011-02-10T00:01:00.000-08:00

7/2/2011

Attend a book launch in Chiswick. This one was in a sofa shop but it was a bit like the old days when I had a note on my desk saying, “Gone To Launch.”

A few of us were talking about the wonders of Venice. Someone said, “I know Venice very well but of course I have never stayed in the wonderful places Jane has.”

The editor who sent me to Venice in November, said, “Oh you know Jane, she just saunters in and asks for the best room.”

Strolling into grand places and expecting to be treated like a princess was part of being a journalist on the Daily Mail of course, travelling the world at someone else’s expense and pretty glorious it was. Later I reflected how badly my attitude to hotels had compared to my attitude towards men. Even when I was successful, a member of Groucho’s, world travelling and well off, I always took the worst on offer, the most battered, flea bitten and down trodden. I expected to be short changed and I always was.

I remember all this with detachment as if it was someone else’s life a long time ago. I am now living in the present tense and all that I know for sure is that I am a new member of the cancer society, the club no one in the world wants to join. Perhaps it only seems like this because I am taking two courses at Maggie’s, Stress Management, and Nutrition, but most of the people I meet are sufferers, I seem to be surrounded by cancer, and the news papers are full of it.

At Maggie’s on Monday we talked about the pulses, plants and juices which might keep us alive – foods which do not suddenly increase insulin. Cancer loves sugar, so they say. The aim is to only eat and drink things that are low on the glycemic or GI index.

On Tuesday we had our class teaching us to relax deeply. In the room with cushions, hand stitched rugs, carefully selected paintings behind glass, and bowls of smooth egg shaped stones, we all settled down for some deep breathing. It seemed almost incredible to me that people cared that much about us, to want us to be more comfortable as we wait like condemned prisoners. Maggie’s is an extraordinary example of sheer human kindness.

The group is no longer intimidating to me. We have all become familiar very quickly. Sometimes I look around at the comfortable sofas and divide the women on them into threes thinking, “which one next?” But mostly it feels like attending a very good coffee morning, or rather green tea morning.

As we chatted in the break, I glanced up and saw a beautiful young girl sitting by a window crying then smiling and waving her arms around in self-deprecating gestures as if she could charm or dramatise the reality of the thing away.

Our jolly group leader decided to help us to sleep better. She told us to use our beds for nothing except sleep or sex, banning even reading or listening to the radio.

“I will allow that rare thing, a breakfast in bed,” she said.

I said it would have to be the cat bringing it to me.

“I don’t know what it would be like if a cat brought it to you,” she said quite seriously.

Bizarre conversations are frequent in this club. Later Conner, who runs the anti-cancer cookery school in Toulouse, told me that her lovely old cat had brought in a mouse for her, then eaten it himself. I wondered where a mouse would be on the Glycemic Index ? She said that with the “bones and the hide” it would be quite low.

The idea of a “mouse hide” was amusing.

My feature about Conner’s school, and her book, Zest For Life, appeared in the Daily Telegraph. It was spread out on the big table at Maggie’s. People were interested to see it, but sadly my line about some of the profits from Conner’s book going straight to Maggie’s had been subbed out. So a major plug for Maggie’s was missing.

I was relieved to see the piece, which was written in November. “Making cancer pay for itself,” as old Miles Kington used to say.

Just before I left Maggie’s I got a text from my friend who had very bad results when we had our three month check up on the 25^th. Her emergency scan was OK, the problem is just the level of cancer showing in her blood. This was a great relief. As a religious person, albeit a member of the Church of England, I regard it gift from God.

At 5pm I set out for my anatomy class in north London feeling like a different person from the slightly spaced out one who was there last week. A few days ago it felt as if my friend and I were physically grappling with death, now he has laid off, at least for awhile.

The horrid dark, dirty building at the Back Hill site still bothered me and unlike the other students I had to sit down while the teacher was talking. My energy disappeared as I got there, perhaps because of the stairs, or meeting another group of people I don’t know, all younger than me.

Stan the fractured skeleton on his broken stand fell over at one point. I asked our teacher, the painter Stuart Elliot, if he couldn’t ask the principal of the prestigious Central St. Martin’s School, to buy him a new one, perhaps one with detachable muscles too, the sort you see in medical shops.

“You won’t get anything like that in an Art college!” He said.

I have already gained some knowledge of muscle groups, and an idea for a painting from this class but more importantly the chance to complain to my doctor about the pain around my “xiphoid process.” I can also now whinge that “my vastus muscle is too vast.” But nothing yet beats NF Simpson’s line, “Doctor, the small of my back is too big.”

Result.

2011-01-31T09:54:00.000-08:00

25/1/11

The whole day seemed to be about cancer. This was because it started early with a relaxation class at Maggie’s. Last week they lifted a weight from my shoulders, I feel better, but I still needed to come to the class before going to Hammersmith to get my results.

The group wasn’t so intimidating this time. Some people never speak, some go on too much. When our leader asked for any other comments near the end, I said there is a problem about expectations. I have felt let down by a couple of friends and that plays on my mind. At night I get some bitter thoughts. This unleashed a gallon of tears from the others – most people seem to have these bitter blooms growing under their beds.

The young girl with brain cancer suddenly wept as she mentioned her brother, whom she feels has rejected her because, she says, “He can’t cope with it.”

I felt my emotions well up seeing her face as she said this. I managed to control myself but I am facing up to this tearfulness. I no longer want to cheat myself out of my own emotions. I spent years pretending not to feel things. Now I am surrounded by unremitting emotion and I am trying to allow myself to respond.

An elderly Irish lady told us that her two daughters no longer visit her, and her husband has left.

“I have my little dog,” she said, “and I take it for walks, but it’s not the same. Once I had everything, now I have nothing.”

My problems were nothing compared to these.

I’d brought some food with me and shared it out at lunch time. Quite a lot of people sat down at the big table and we all got rather jolly for a change.

In the afternoon I left for the hospital. My appointment was 2.45pm but I waited till nearly six. While I was sitting there I saw my cancer support nurse. What seems years ago now I complained about the treatment I’d received from nurses on the Victor Bonney Ward in Queen Charlotte’s. In their reply they dismissed my complaints and said they had discussed the matter with my Macmillan nurse. Now I had my chance to ask her. She could not remember having had any contact with them. Pretty much as I expected.

We sat there with our radical haircuts, strangely fashionable since that film, An Education, starring Carey Mulligan. I got chatting to a very brave, pleasant Guardian reading lady from Norfolk, but as the hours went on I realised I was getting a bit tired of people and I still had an evening class to go.

At last it was my turn. I had asked to see a woman as I am scared of the male consultants with their bravado. To me they seem like male TV chefs, what they do is not just about the end product, it’s also about them.

This doctor was young, attractive and cool but friendly. She asked me how I’d been. I told her I’d been stressed because of some of the things said to me previously by a doctor. Her smile tightened. She didn’t want to hear about any of that, and I felt a fool for saying it.

I told her about a few aches and pains, the same ones I had during chemo. I managed to mention aches around my, “xiphoid process,” which widened her eyes for a moment. I am taking an anatomy class and it has its uses outside drawing.

My results were all that I could hope - the CA125 which indicates the cancer was down to 5, it was 7 in November. Normal is 0 to 30.
She didn’t seem particularly happy, as one of the prophets of gloom she said they wouldn’t be able to fix my hernia yet, “Until we are sure the cancer has really gone.” An admission at last that it really might go!

A friend of mine was going to sit in with me, but I felt OK to be there by myself. She was getting her results later. When I met her in the clinic she was on her second round of chemo, after a remission of two years. She has two young children.

When I went back into the waiting room I saw her marching out towards the door. I waited awhile then thinking she must have gone home without saying goodbye, I decided to leave too.

As I left I saw her coming back up the long dark tunnel that connects one part of the hospital to another. I started to tell her about my results, not noticing anything different about her – the distraught expression, the staring eyes. Then I registered them. “Is everything OK?” I said.

“Nope,” she said. “It isn’t.” She broke down for a moment and I gripped hold of the shoulders of her sheepskin jacket. It was a moment of black despair.

“Jane, how can I face a third round of chemo?” she asked. “This whole thing is just a bloody nightmare,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Her husband collected her and I set out for Central St. Martin’s college of art, at their Back Hill site, up near Farringdon, where I have my anatomy class.

It’s a horrible building on a dark Victorian street. Filthy, cold, with no café and no lift but the teacher is gently charming, and I was glad to be there. As I stood at the easel trying to draw from Stan, our genial looking skeleton with a broken leg, scenes from the day returned with all those voices babbling away in my head.

Remembering my friend and that terrible moment I sometimes felt teary, my view of Stan on his Stand blurring. I’d had a reprieve. Others had not been so lucky. I had escaped, but for how long? If I’d had bad news what would I be doing, who would I be with?

Now I am busy again, the fear has lifted, and I wander about like it’s the morning after a bombing raid. I almost miss it, wondering where its gone. There is a an empty space full of small twinges and anticipation suddenly turning into dread then dying away quickly into nothing again.

Week of weeks.

2011-01-31T09:35:00.000-08:00

23/1/11

Finally arrived; my week of weeks, the first staging post on my journey into illness or recovery. Which will it be? On the 25^th I will know.

Set out my shiny new artist's diary for the weeks ahead; playful weekends, films, meetings, enjoyable trips, but more chemotherapy might cut into that plan and wreck it.

I feel much better since I went to Maggie’s last week, what ever they did it worked. On my mobile my mother’s asked, “Well, what did they do?” She was really curious. It is no great mystery. They just provided some breathing exercises, a group of people, and then an intelligent, experienced listener.

Now that I'm calmer, the old question arises – just what am I going to do with the rest of my life? A friend asked me this last night and it was painful. I didn’t have an answer. Shall I be bold and make plans, or just tread water for the next ten years?

My life has changed so suddenly. Once I was scrabbling around for work, looking for a man, wondering how to advance myself as a painter, now all that has been wiped out and I mainly think about food, like the survivor from a death camp or an open boat. But this is what you are supposed to do as a cancer survivor, they even have a name for it – “mindful eating.”

I now lead a life of quinoa and green tea, in which every mouthful is considered. Today at a nutrition class we were advised to chew each mouthful thirty five times. I remember my grandparents insisted on twenty. Mindfulness and emotionalism, that’s new too. Almost anything can turn my eyes into pools of water, from babies being baptised to vague memories of dogs being sent into space.

There is the blood test tomorrow, then the dreaded result the day after. In my head I hear the doctors deliver the bad news in their detached, even voices. As if I am taking part in a film, I survey their faces as they say, “I am sorry. It has come back. There is something there.” They tell me that the quisling body which I now fear has let me down again.

I used to have the blood tests in a very blasé mood, with no idea that the blood, showing the CA125 was the key indicator of ovarian cancer returning. I didn’t enjoy them as my veins hurt and my main interest centred on the phlebotomist whom I thought was an insolent little tick.

Now I realise that despite his glib manner, every day he was sees women holding out their arms to him shaking with despair. Like them, the whole focus of my life is now on this blood test.

Keeping The Lid On

2011-01-19T04:20:00.001-08:00

18/1/11

The next check up is looming if not glowering on the 25^th. Decided to visit Maggie’s again, for a relaxation and “stress management” class and then a one to one with their clinical psychologist.

Once inside its bright walls I was glad to be there, although part of me resented it as once you enter those red doors you are part of the “cancer community,” and there is no two ways about it.

There were eight people in the relaxation class, one of them a sad looking Swedish man aged about sixty in an elegant cable knit sweater and pale trousers. Our teacher was very jolly, like a big, friendly Labrador. As she began, I saw the half circle of people and felt a rising panic. Two bloody hours of this, I thought, and no escape.

She went on about the “many challenges” presented by cancer, the dangers of one’s “inner commentary,” especially if it sounds just like your mother’s voice, and the “thought components of stress.”

I suddenly felt stressed just being in there. We went round the room one by one, introducing ourselves and telling a bit of history. I heard their stories with increasing dread, they were all so calm, so brave. I suddenly wanted to run out and checked the distance past the sofa to the door, then I cracked and wept openly, swept by painful humiliation. I was last to speak and just said that I was moved by what they had to say.

The young woman next to me, so pretty and slim had brain cancer, another woman had two small children and a husband who resents her, the woman next to her was coping with her own disease, which has come back after four years, whilst trying to get her ancient mother into a home. An elderly French woman talked about her husband’s sympathy towards her and how he wants to do everything and she doesn’t want to be seen as helpless.

“If it doesn’t destroy you it makes you stronger,” said the woman with the mother.

Nietzsche didn’t know it, but chronic disease does both.

One of the other women is a patient of the doctor who scared me so much, when he said glibly, “Of course the chemo is unlikely to work.”

“He is OK,” she said. “Just don’t see him if he has students with him as he shows off.” So that was it.

The meeting went on with breathing exercises and having got my fear of the group out of the way, I began to feel very much better, cheerful and quite optimistic.

Our leader does not believe that stress is related to cancer, and made the important, very liberating point, that if you feel stressed and anxious it will not bring the cancer cells back. You are free to feel bad. She seemed to know all the ways in which cancer survivors beat themselves.

In the break we chatted and I noticed that almost everyone started their conversation by saying, “Well, you do look well,” as if that is the only positive thing we can say at first.

At lunch time there were the usual wan ladies at the table I remembered from last time; like a photo of survivors from the Titanic, sitting on the deck of the rescue vessel with blank eyes and dejected faces.

They were joined by various odd bods, including one dishevelled elderly man in heavy glasses who likes to chat ladies up. The elderly woman next to me said she had been offered a therapist but didn’t want to go “because of the stigma.” She began to ramble about her decorating, the need to replace her white curtains with lilac, asking if I thought that would be suitable? The newspaper in front of me got more and more inviting as she rambled on, but I managed to stay focussed on her. She said she’d recently learned to use a computer, although she is 75, and is using it for her art work, but then I couldn’t make out what sort of work it was. Eventually I started reading but she carried on talking.

On the other side was a thin elderly old gal with a shrivelled face and a bolt in her neck, making truly terrible noises, a kind of incessant barking, growling, choking and whining as if she was being strangled. Everyone ignored it. I glanced at her occasionally and asked her if I could get her anything. She shook her head holding a coffee cup up before her mouth as if she was trying to hide. I saw tiny scared eyes looking back. She had borrowed a leaflet about lung cancer, perhaps a little too late.

After lunch I saw the counsellor. He didn’t exactly impose his authority and came late which irritated me and because of the earlier class I was in a very lively, happy mood, not at all the way I was when I made the appointment. I wondered if I would have anything to say, but then he said something bereavement and loss, and I felt like screaming, and dived for the tissues again.

We covered a wide range of emotions and ideas, including God, whether he can interfere in nature, and relationships. I told him things about the past, disappointment and how I thought I had avoided close relationships in order to avoid loss and bereavement, and now it had caught up with me all the same.

“You seem sure that you are going to have bad news,” he said at one point.

“That is what the doctors have told me,” I said. “They want you to get better but tell you it’s unlikely.”

As a therapist he knows all about the power of suggestion. He said that the original Maggie created her centres to be somewhere positive and full of hope, well away from the doctors and their mechanistic routine. Helping people, as she said, “not to lose the joy of living in the fear of dying.”

On the way home on the bus I felt extremely calm, and composed, as if I’d had a complete catharsis. It was more relaxing than two hours in a floatation tank, plus CD and all for free. Maggie’s is a truly wonderful charity.

**************

At 10.30pm I picked up Nebulous, on BBC 7.

This is an hilarious parody of a Sci-fi series, starring Mark Gatiss as the stuffy English Professor Nebulous, the late Graham Crowden as something or other, and David Tennant as the evil Scottish Doctor B. That name was some kind of joke but I missed it as the puns and word play goes so fast it’s quite hard to follow.

This episode was all about health, or lack of it. Half the world’s population suddenly phoned in sick and seemed to have all the world’s worst, most disgusting diseases, real and imagined. “I wish I knew what to do about this to-do,” said Nebulous.

He eventually went down with “Tuesday disease,” when you can’t remember the correct day of the week.

“My brains are frying in the juices of their own fear,” he quipped. Many of us know how that feels. The best cure is Maggie’s, but didn’t appear to have one yet in outer space.

“You have been let down by your health. Health, the great destroyer,” said a horrible screaming robot. Well it seemed funny at the time.

Other People's Lives

2011-01-12T05:44:00.000-08:00

I 10/1/11

I now visit a small health food shop in Turnham Green Terrace. It’s staffed by two lively youths who are very friendly and helpful.

Part with £20 for one small bottle of walnut oil and some Montmorency cherry juice. It’s like a new levy I have to pay; a hope of staying alive tax.

As I come out here the melodious fluting voice of a Chiswick lady saying, “I have heard that if you drink this green tea, it halves your chance of getting cancer.”

Remembered how scared I used to be of getting cancer. At the same time I was afraid of growing old. News of deaths of elderly people and old actors filled me with gloom. There is a saying that before the age of 40 you never think about death, after it, you think of nothing else. I used to identify with that.

Now I listen to reports of people’s deaths to ask anxiously what they died of? The actress Susannah York perished from cancer today, depressing, ominous, but she did reach 72. I now have no fear of growing old – it’s a cherished hope.

Picking Up Threads

2011-01-12T05:36:00.000-08:00

6^th Jan 2010

Return to the V & A to draw and see an exhibition, the first time I’d done this since everything crashed in May.

Sitting in the café sketching, feel quite easy about it all, even though I now look and feel so different from when I was there before. At that time I was swimming every day, intending to get fit and hoping to go to Heatherley’s Art School in September. I had a plan for my life but at the same time felt rather empty and aimless a lot of the time. Now I am full of energy and fear, mainly directed at staying alive.

Finally got to the Diaghilev exhibition, which closes on Sunday. I visited his grave recently on San Michele, Venice, and was touched to see small pink ballet shoes strewn onto his tomb.

I admire him, not just for finding his genius and using it so effectively, but because he had such a good attitude towards money; spending up to the hilt, living from cheque to cheque, eating in the best places, daring anyone to notice his threadbare socks and frayed collar.

I thought the exhibition would be quiet at this time of year but the whole world, that is a world familiar to me, of cultivated middle aged ladies, seems to have arrived by the coach load. Perhaps we were all too busy before as Christmas now takes up most of December, everyone is trying to catch it.

The show is huge, we had a ticket timed for 3pm but didn’t come out till the gallery closed at 5.30pm. when we fell into the book shop where reproductions of the costumes were being sold for spectacular prices.

A panoply of vibrant costume, photos, film, old documents, short TV documentaries and spectacular backdrops. Some spectacular Tzarist jewellery and his death mask, which looks surprisingly small and youthful.

The most famous exhibit is the backdrop for Picasso’s Blue Train. It’s huge but no one says how they managed get it to that size. One man took 24 hours to enlarge the blue train from a small painting but it didn’t say how he did it. I find it hard to square something up accurately at A4 size, so this intrigued me.

One of the most interesting things was seeing very old film of dancers from the Ballet Russes. There they are – almost in the flesh and it’s often a surprising amount of flesh too. Karsavina, short, stocky with a large head was seen dancing very convincingly. Someone of her body shape wouldn’t get near a ballet class never mind a company these days.

Compared to the beginning of the 20^th century, classical dancers now seem absolutely standardised with a virtue put on starvation and androgyny. Some of the sensuality and individual character has been drained out of famished female ballet dancers.

10/1/20

Started swimming again at my nearby health club which I left last May. The last time I was in those waters I had shoulder length hair bound up in a cap, was a stone lighter and I had a lump in my groin.

I had a slight reluctance to go there again, no enthusiasm about jumping in, not just because the weather is so cold and miserable but because of that memory. Realise that I still haven’t got over the shock of the lump.

Happy Holidays

2011-01-04T02:39:00.000-08:00

28/12/10

My anxiety seemed to get worse by the day. Watching repeats of the Two Ronnies, Morcambe and Wise and Dad’s Army, all I could really think about was the next blood test on January 25^th. Felt I couldn’t wait that long, so without telling my mother, I went off to see if I could get an appointment with the village doctor, but he was off until January 4^th. I walked about the village seeing the whole ghastly thing unfolding again.

30/12/10

Use hair shampoo for the first time since August. It’s coming back slowly, pepper and salt now. I think I’ll keep it like that, won’t bother with any more hair colour, a small sacrifice, a mark of change.

31/12/10

On one of my walks around the village, stopped at the lower church yard across the road from the church, expanding into the fields around. It’s much bigger than when I used to go in there at night to snog boys and drink cider. Looked for the graves of two locals I knew well who died in the last two years, Dorothy who always went to the same hotel in Weston Super Mare for her holidays, and Iris who was an expert with horses, dogs and poultry. Neither of them had any flowers on their plots at all. Stood there rather aimlessly, saying hello.

Someone had inscribed on a tomb stone: “Without you there is no perfect day.” A bit defeatist I thought. My sympathy is now squarely with the dead – at least you unhappy mourner, are still alive and kicking.

On the way back visited an elderly woman I know from the church. She had quarrelled with her son over Christmas because her loo broke down and he tried to fix it, but made it worse.

“I told him to leave it alone” she said, “but he would have ago. I was not there to stop him as I was out with the rabbit.”

I picture her and the rabbit making the slow bus ride from Codsall into Wolverhampton for the sales and coming back like my mother and me, complaining that there was really “nothing in the shops this year.”

Bed at 11pm. I have had quite enough of 2010 and don’t have the energy to even wave it goodbye.

2/1/11

I didn’t mention my anxieties to my mother until I was leaving when I said, “of course it could be anything, indigestion, wind, or muscular.”

“Well, you always do use your muscles a lot,” she said disapprovingly her chin going into her neck, as if that was some particular foible of mine, always out lifting weights or getting involved with construction work.

Back to London. Being a Sunday the roads were quiet but I got back in exactly the same time as usual. No matter what speed I do it always seems to take three hours. Must be something to do with relativity.

Spent another three hours exactly unpacking the car and sorting out presents, sales shopping and all the left over food my mother had unloaded onto me.

Found an Xmas card from another Linda, my third, but I only know two Lindas. Also a card with a double signature saying, “I bet this is a surprise for you!” It might be if I could read who they are. Another friend had sent me an e mail thanking me for the presents I sent to her children. She said my presents were, “Always thoughtful,” and Timothy Elephant has been a prized toy ever since they got it. Unfortunately he didn’t come from me. The last time I gave them a present in person the little boy went off screaming. I wonder if they think some other friend is really bad at sending appropriate gifts?

3/1/10

Maisie is in a big sulk. She did this the last time we came home from Codsall. My mother says she likes the stairs. I think she likes everything in my mother’s house, particularly the arm chairs, the large warm rooms and the 1970s gas fires. She sat with her nose in one until it was turned on, then lay spread out on the rug, looking like a really happy cat should. She took a great interest in my mother's large, flat screen TV but ignores my small portable set. I haven’t got any squirty cream either.

Don't Care Was Made To Care

2011-01-04T02:26:00.000-08:00

The upside of cancer has been all the wonderful people I’ve met, and some of my attitudes have changed for the better. Even though I felt my energy drain away over Xmas lunch I stayed with it and concentrated so hard on our guest that I missed the Queen’s Speech for the first time.

I feel strangely fascinated by people, even my mother’s old friends, and want to hear what they have to say, whereas I used to drift off like a teenager, often removing myself bodily to my bedroom when they arrived. Now I want to stay put and enjoy them, perhaps because I might be gone soon and never see them again.

But from Christmas lunch onwards I felt increasingly anxious, especially in the evenings.

My mother would start watching TV at about 6pm with the obligatory hunt for the news which she felt had been so recklessly moved about in the schedules, and from then on I would feel my insides start to slowly clench, my stomach knotting as the hours ticked by.

I could feel there was something wrong, I had a pain in my diaphragm, a slight burning feeling, was it the bloating I wondered that is a sign of ovarian cancer, there was a strange vibration too, a bit like a stomach rumble but fainter, like a mild charge of electricity, sometimes it went down to my toes, what was that? I became convinced that the tumour or tumours had returned, but where they in the diaphragm, the stomach, the liver, and where are those organs exactly? There was no medical book in the house so I sat there full of unhappy fantasies like an old hypochondriac.

Life demands courage from us and it’s like a pressing debt, somehow it has to be found. Over the festive season I came across a few epithets to hold on to:

Critic Sarah Dunant on BBC4 looking at a painting of the Holy Family by Fra Lippo Lippi:

“It’s a difficult painting, but it says that if you can stay with the dark, you can see the Holy Spirit.”

On Radio 4 they had a programme about the poem, At the Gate of the Year

I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year
'Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.'

And he replied,
'Go into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way!'

So I went forth and finding the Hand of God
Trod gladly into the night
He led me towards the hills
And the breaking of day in the lone east.

So heart be still!
What need our human life to know
If God hath comprehension?

In all the dizzy strife of things
Both high and low,
God hideth his intention."

It was written by Minnie Louise Harkins 1875-1957, a social scientist from Bristol.

The first verse was quoted by King George V1 in his Christmas Day broadcast in 1939 hitting exactly the right note with the public who were deeply apprehensive about the coming war. My mother remembers at that time having, “a feeling of dread.”

The poem had been given to the King by his wife Queen Elizabeth, and the first five lines were recited 63 years later at her funeral.

I saw a quote somewhere from the Dutch Christian, Corrie Ten Boom: “Never hesitate to trust an unknown future to a known God.”

And on a lighter note, I heard Islam defined by VS Naipaul as, "Sanctified rage."

The Big Day

2011-01-04T01:56:00.000-08:00

25/12/10

A lacklustre Midnight Mass with electric lights turned full on all the time as if health and safety people had been round before the service to ban candles, darkness and any hint of drama. No atmosphere at all – just a lot of people in anoraks packed into pews enjoying a bit of something different after the pubs closed.

I longed for liturgy, candle light, glorious vestments, incense and proper ritual.

It’s the big day and my mother, aged eighty eight, does everything, just as she always has; dips the silver, climbs a ladder to find special crockery, cooks a giant meal with sprouts, carrots, broccoli, parsnips and roast potatoes, pork and turkey. Produces crackers, and special napkins, even squirty cream for Maisie the cat.

I manage to chop the vegetables and do the washing up, but apart from that her kitchen is a hostile foreign land to me.

We only have one guest to help us through the pile of food. Two other people didn’t make it because of the weather. He is an old friend of mine who has advanced prostrate cancer. He was given eighteen months to live about nineteen months ago. Before lunch we had a light hearted and typical cancer survivors conversation on the merits of Omega 3, goji berries and Manuka honey. When we start eating, wearing our paper hats, I couldn’t help wondering which of us will be sitting down to Christmas lunch next year? Even Maisie is old.

Taking up my thought he challenges me by saying he will have a bet with me to see which of us is alive next year, him or me. He seems to find this great fun but I found the whole meal a strain and when he left I felt drained and vaguely out of control, like slowly starting to skid on ice. I wondered if I would be able to keep the lid on my anguish.

Later I slipped next door to thank one of our neighbours for her Xmas present. She was so kind and sweet to me that I dissolved into tears.

Got there anyway

2011-01-04T01:48:00.000-08:00

27/12/10

Despite all the dire weather forecasting and the snow and ice and poor visibility, my new car got me home to Codsall in the west Midlands in exactly the same time as usual.

As my mother bought me the car I felt I should take her out in it – as much as possible. The fact that there was hardly anywhere to go that would look enhanced in the dingy, damp weather which followed the snow was dispiriting, but we made the best of it with little sorties to local villages and garden centres. We were often almost the only people there.

The highlight was our trip to Brewood Hall, in the next village to Codsall.

The house has been there since 1660 but some how we had never really noticed it before. My friend Chris who recently got in touch with me again after thirty five years, has connections with the woman who now owns it, and he invited us over.

The Chatelaine is Jan C Ford, a most extraordinary woman, with a slight Hinge & Bracket look about her but a very kindly, enthusiastic face.

She is a professional engineer with her own company and she showed us round very graciously, followed by her old dog who has cancer in one of his rear paws and can’t put it down.

It was mighty cold, I was wearing a felt fedora given me as a Xmas present and my head with its lack of hair was quickly freezing. My mother said she was thankful for her long boots. It’s almost impossible to heat such a large old place. The radiators are not up to modern needs but as it’s listed she can’t alter it much. “I have almost given up on it at times,” she admitted.

She showed us original oak panelling and staircase and rooms containing treasures picked up on her trips to the Far East, particularly Burma. She has shipped back effigies of the terracotta army and a marble Buddha which is in the garden inside a specially built little house.

Most interesting to me was her railway room with the artefacts of the age of steam. She is mad about trains and although she doesn’t drive a car, she spends her free time driving steam trains. She has even piloted, if that’s the word, the Flying Scotsman. “For a long time my main interest was railway signalling,” she said. What a woman, why can’t more of us be like that?

She showed us her offices, the only warm bit of the building, big enough to be a normal house, containing the old bread oven. The walls were lined with ledgers with titles such as, “Transport Movements in Sedgely 1962-69.” A worthy topic for Mastermind, or a PhD.

The kitchen has the original fireplace with its stone surround, one side smoothly indented where people used to sharpen their knives.

She cut a large plate of corned beef sandwiches for us and entertained us on her harmonium, singing a spirited rendition of, “How you gonna keep them down on the farm, now that they’ve seen Paris?” She also showed us a film of herself on a steamer going up the Irrawaddy. She has started work building a school in Burma. http://janfordsworld.blogspot.com

An afternoon with her took my mind off all my own problems, a real tonic as they used to say.

Hysteria!

2010-12-21T04:12:00.000-08:00

21/12/10

Woke up to the radio telling me about temperatures plummeting in Belfast. I also heard this last night, several times. I am due to drive north soon – and find myself in the grip of national hysteria.

There has been nothing like this frantic confusion and teeth gnashing since the death of Diana and news of the last serial killer – the new agent of terror and despair is the weather!

I couldn’t watch the news last night as I knew what it would be; people trapped in their cars over night or surviving in hastily built igloos with their dogs, lorries jack-knifed, a humanitarian catastrophe at Heathrow airport, forlorn people trying to get onto a Eurostar train, and reporters in thick jackets standing outside, telling us, “It’s terribly cold here!” Also more references to the plummeting temperatures in Belfast.

Oh Dear. Just like last year when I was worried sick before I set out.

I got home safely then as there was a whole area of the west Midlands that was completely untroubled by snow – and I do hope to get home again this week, in my new VW Fox, on its first big outing, without needing a shovel or space blanket.

Into the carpal tunnel

2010-12-21T03:58:00.000-08:00

17/12/10

Sent off to a GP in Southall, west of Ealing, to start having my carpal tunnel problem sorted out. They give a steroid injection in one hand to begin with, see if that works, then a few weeks later do the other hand.

My hands got worse after the chemo, due to neuropathy which makes them numb and tingling, even more numb and tingling than they were. At the moment they are really bad, plaguing me night and day. While I was in France Conner gave me some splints to wear at night, which help a bit. Lord knows what people did in the old days, before steroids etc.

I had to go on an overland train to Southall. As I got there it went suddenly dark, then heavy snow began to fall. I was really early as I thought I’d have a look at the place and have lunch in a local café before seeing the doctor, but now I had to plod through the snow which was turning into a blizzard, blowing into my face.

I found my way by asking locals, most of them didn’t speak enough English to help me, or didn’t know it. I was so relieved when a young Sikh lad gave me directions. I had to walk down a road with Victorian terraces on either side, it might have been a typical London street except that at the end, bang up against the houses was a vast mosque topped by a golden dome. I was astonished at the size of it and how close it was to the houses – it was a flagrant declaration that everyone in the houses was Muslim, marking the deliberate and proud creation of a ghetto.

I found the surgery near by. It was quiet, no one in but one young man. We sat and listened to a TV broadcasting one of those NHS films - it described the help available if you find you have a weak bladder, the actress Pam Ferris appeared telling us coyly that at some time she, “had been a carer,” but not when or for whom, there was advice about what used to be called VD and an advert for Bryn Terfel’s new Christmas recording – which could also have served as a warning against cheese.

The young man got up and spoke to the receptionist, but as he had no passport, ID, NHS number or evidence of a permanent address he went empty away.

I decided to venture out and have a look around. In the next street another very large mosque with a minaret scratching at the snowy sky. Couldn’t find anywhere to eat, apparently the main high street is full of places, but this must have been a bit out of the way. I eventually landed in a fish and chip shop. I never expected to eat this dish again, after spending time with Conner and deciding to eat healthily, but it is amazing how appetising it is, when you see it on the plate before you. In this case on the paper. Although there were tables at the back of the shop in the gloom there were no plates and no drinks available. I asked for a fork and the man behind the counter didn’t know the word, another man who looked Turkish had to translate.

I was the only woman in there, I didn’t see many women around at all, and I was the only white English person. I had a feeling of gentle, friendly people living in a very small, enclosed world and rarely leaving it. They were in a suburb of London but it could have been anywhere, a construct of south east Asia transported as if by magic carpet and randomly set down in wealthy northern Europe.

At 3pm I returned to Dr Sandhu for my injection. He kept a mask on all the time but I think there was a big beard behind it. He was a most interesting and friendly man. He told me he had worked with Sir Harold Gillies, the father of British rheumatology after the war, and had been a specialist in bones and joints ever since. He obviously had a deep enthusiasm for his work, which is always reassuring.

“A beautiful hand,” he said, turning mine over in his, “no sign of rheumatoid arthritis.” Well that’s one good bit of news.

He put the syringe into my wrist, it stung a bit, it went in further then hit the nerve – I shouted out loud. But then I felt very grateful. There is a speck of light at the end of the carpal tunnel and over the next few days I hope to get the proper use of my hand back.

Gadding About

2010-12-14T12:19:00.000-08:00

9/12/12

So many people to meet, everything slightly off the hoof, as if we are all dashing off somewhere else or have just been somewhere at short notice – the effervescent effect of the onrush of Christmas, still tantalisingly out of sight, weeks to go but you can just about smell it coming.

I stepped into the National Gallery and not having anything particular in mind to see drifted about a bit, then settled in front of a Leonardo, The Madonna of the Rocks. Quite a few tourists peering at it – it is strange the difference in their looking and mine, as the painting is here in London I feel a kind of familiarity and ownership about it.

When I went back onto Trafalgar Square, after about eight minutes, there were lots of students with placards gathered outside. They had arrived surprisingly fast.

Crossed the square to get to a Costa Coffee place to meet my new friend Ann, whom I met waiting for blood tests in Garry Weston. She is a lecturer, an expert on rural radicalism in the late 18^th century, and as I mentioned earlier she is losing some of her sight and uses a white stick.

Sat waiting, watching the students get into a tighter bunch and the ominous sight of the police in their yellow waterproofs, blocking off one exit from the square. They looked as if they were spoiling for a fight, pre-empting it by their numbers and rigid formation.

People sitting nearer the window could see them cutting off the top of Whitehall.

“Oh dear no, not again!” said the waitress, a young Spanish girl. “The last time, all the tables and chairs outside got thrown into the air, it was a terrible fight.” She sounded like a nursery school teacher talking about a rather unruly class.

“The Police came in and closed us down and then no one could get out of the square,” she added.

I wished that Ann would hurry up so we could have our coffee and sandwich before we were all turfed out into a massive police “kettle.”

A foreign tourist started eye balling me as I was sitting there with two seats while he was standing holding a plate of food, but at last Ann arrived. At the sight of her white stick he backed off giving me a reproachful look.

It is a relief to talk to Ann as we have a shared a life-threatening situation. This gives a kind of closeness I have never experienced before. I told her I’d read there were three stages with cancer; disbelief, bargaining and acceptance. We agreed that we are both still at the bargaining stage, at least I am, bargaining with God, and we are both trying to improve our diets, which is a kind of attempted deal with nature.

After lunch we crossed Trafalgar Square, which looked strangely wet, as if the police had already been busy with water-cannon, to the Sir Thomas Lawrence exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. It would have been a whacking £12 each but she paid a reduced fee and I got in free as a “carer,” thanks to the white stick. I am still pretty bald and I couldn’t help thinking that we must look like a couple of old crocks. We have also both got incisional hernias or is it herniae, from our operations.

She has two one on each side. We both feel disgusted by them and want them fixed. She has had a few conversations with doctors about it and hopes to get it sorted out sometime in the New Year. We have had to wait till the effects of the chemo had finished. I haven’t been to my doctor about it at all yet, as I don’t feel like going near a hospital unless I absolutely have to. We both agreed that if we could afford it, we would go private to get small things fixed. It would be nice to just walk into a clinic and get my carpal tunnel syndrome sorted for instance, not because the medical treatment would be better, but just to avoid the visit to planet NHS with all its hassle and confusion.

We forgot all this inside the exhibition, sharing a commentary with two leads fixed to one i-pod, rather shackled together. Ann had to peer at the works through a magnifying glass with a lamp attached. One of the attendants sprang forwards, worried about the light, but when she saw the trusty white stick she backed off.

It was really good going round with someone who knows a lot about Regency celebrities and is passionately interested in the paintings. She was fascinated by things I wouldn’t have noticed, such as the portrait of the chaps who started Barings Bank, in 1762.

They were hated by her hero, William Cobbett, the writer who called London, “The great wen.” He was against them because they made money from enclosing land which had once been open for common grazing. He was possibly also upset that they funded the Louisiana Purchase for Napoleon, even though Britain was at war with him at the time! Bankers, I ask you.

I was interested in the difference between the paintings – a portrait of Sophia, King George IV’s unmarried sister, looked like a real, living, breathing human being, so modern in its loose handling and humanity, while right next to it was a glossy image, already in a style that became popular with the Victorians, as unreal as an air-brushed photo of Sarah Fergusson in Hello! Magazine.

We were in there for hours and had to be revived with tea. When Ann got home she found a letter waiting, with the dreaded NHS logo on the envelope. It demanded crossly to know why she hadn’t turned up two days previously for her hernia operation, which had been arranged for her.

No such arrangements had ever been made – she could only think that they had mixed her up with some other lucky person.

Winter Wonderland

2010-12-13T09:55:00.000-08:00

11/12/10

Mik’s rap describes the mood and the mindset – I am going in for constant checking. When I feel tired I seem to find more lumps and suspicious bumps that have gone by the following day. But at the moment I am healthy, as far as I know. Not sure how I do know. One of the symptoms of ovarian cancer is “bloating,” and I now eat so many sprouts and pans of curly kale that I am bloated a lot of the time. Just wind I say to myself reassuringly. I have an “incisional” hernia too, created by the surgeon’s knife, and that causes some strange aches and pains too.

My eyebrows are back, in fact they came back suddenly in Venice as if two insects had blown in across the Lagoon and stuck to my face. They are thicker than they used to be, perfect dark bows. My hair is also coming back, “gamine” people say, and more pepper and salt before.

This is by far the best time of year for me, cold, which in London is easier to manage than hot, you have an excuse to eat mince pies and cream, and there is nothing immediately ahead but parties, lunches, mulled wine and fairy lights.

There have only been two downers so far this month. A letter marked NHS, which fills me with more foreboding than a bank statement. It was long and detailed and referred to my complaint about the district nurses who didn’t call at the beginning of October. I was waiting, they didn’t turn up and I got no help from what the letter calls their “referral service,” i.e. their call centre, called Harmony – or rather I now see from the letter, “Harmoni,” which is even dafter.

The letter does show that they have made a thorough investigation into what happened. Only one person denies anything, but then apologises. This is certainly much better than the response I received to my complaint about my treatment on the Victor Bonney Ward at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital back in May. I am still smarting from that letter, which implied that I had made everything up because nothing had been written down in their book at the time. They also dismissed my comments because I had not brought them up with my cancer support nurse, although I had no idea I was supposed to do that. They spoke to her after my complaint apparently, but she has never mentioned any of it to me, which is a bit embarrassing.

My other recent problem was Tescos. Set off there with a pile of their hard earned coupons, only to find that the best one could only be used on line. Last time I tried that their whole system had gone into meltdown, they couldn’t even send me my new password. I also noticed it is for £7.50 and there is a £5.00 delivery fee. Even with my bad maths I could see there was not much point in that one.

Today I found that the shop near me doesn’t have many of the items listed on the coupons. I was told to go to a bigger store. Two of the other coupons wouldn’t go through, one because it was just out of date, the other because he hadn’t rung the item up properly. I then made the mistake of asking for a wine box, which he couldn’t open. While all that was going on I was aware of an angry looking young man with metal in his face, who looked like a bouncer but who seemed to be in charge, staring at me in annoyance as an irate queue forming behind me. It’s that unpleasant feeling when you know someone thinks you’re a trouble maker.

I did come back with a crate of mulled wine. Had trouble finding it though and for some reason they sent a young Muslim lad to help me locate it. He had no idea what it was and told me rather accusingly that he wouldn’t know where it was because he doesn’t drink. I expect he will be in charge of their wines and spirits the next time I go in.

Two small blips because I am living in a winter wonder land. Last week I was in south west France, visiting Conner Middelmann-Whitney, who runs an anti-cancer cookery course in Toulouse.

As I am slightly unbalanced at the moment, or I was at the time, I didn’t think how long I was going to impose on her when I made the arrangements, but I arrived on Wednesday and didn’t leave her home till the Saturday, and she took me to visit a spa, for the Daily Telegraph’s Spa Spy section on their Wellbeing Page.

She said it wasn’t a long trip, but it seemed quite far to me, through the snow up into the Pyrenees. She didn’t complain and was such a lovely hostess.

It was a fascinating trip for me – I got the chance to live in the French countryside for a few days, in a beautiful house decorated for Christmas, with a real family. She has three children, the oldest is 13, and they are all tri-lingual.

I read to them in the evening from Dr Seuss. I love that Green Eggs and Ham thing, with the lovely little rodent skipping about, and I was able to lie on a sofa, wrapped in a blanket watching the children sitting at a table quietly doing their homework by lamp light. It reminded me of a scene from an Ibsen play, where people sit at a table, getting on with something, before something else happens.

During one meal, the oldest boy, who was very good looking and intelligent, asked me, “What was Prussia?” I love it when children say things like that. It’s so fresh and makes you think carefully about what you actually know. I remember a little boy in a restaurant saying to his father out of the blue, “Daddy, where is Poland?”

There was also an ancient ginger cat called Paddy. I was a bit worried when I saw his bed in the garage as it was below freezing, but when I first met the children, I realised that Paddy was with them, completely wrapped in a shawl.

He wasn’t very well, and after I left they took him to the vet. He was found to have hepatitis and an old bullet lodged near his spine. Cat’s all have their own stories.

The first evening I was there we went out in the dark to a local farm house, to collect a large bag of organic chickens, actually they were hens, something we don’t eat in England now. It was rather unsettling to see their heads and bluish-pink wattles inside the bag. They have the same expression dead as when they’re alive.

One day we went into the local village where they have a market. Conner knows all the suppliers. The cheese seller had twelve kinds of Roquefort, and next to him a man was selling acorn fed ham from the Basque country. Not so delightful perhaps that they also farm donkeys in the area, for sausage meat.

One evening we collected two of the children from the home of some neighbours. She is Swiss he is German. Their house was large and open plan, overlooking a valley. It reminded me of a house I visited in the 1960s, when everyone was excited about seeing The Sound of Music.

They had a bushy Christmas tree going up to the ceiling and a large wooden crib on display for the children. A party was about to begin, a “Raclette evening,” not sure what that is, a cross between roulette and a wine and cheese party perhaps, but you wouldn’t have known it was a party at all, as the guests sat very quietly speaking in low voices. Apparently that is the Swiss way.

I was interested to hear that the Swiss lady had had cancer, while she was expecting their first child. Her chemo had been delayed until she gave birth – how ghastly is that? He works for the local aerospace industry where they make the Airbus. The French government are cutting back on the project and sacking many of their foreign workers, mainly British, German and Swiss and sending them home. They are not allowed to do this under EU law, but get away with it somehow. The couple might lose their grand house if his job goes. Almost every one I meet seems to be struggling in some way. I wonder if people always went through such traumas in middle age?

I loved Conner’s cookery class, with its interesting collection of ladies from all over the developed world. The spa, at Ax les Thermes, was rather strange, but fun. Not often you get the chance to run about in the snow in your swim suit, or jump out of the snow into a really warm thermal bath.

It was pleasing to see the local men in their tiny Speedos. Apparently they have to wear these by law, probably brought in at the request of Mme Sarkozi.They are not allowed to wear baggy boxer shorts in swimming pools, as they are deemed street clothes.

Ax became a well known spa at the time of the Crusades, and French doctors still send their patients there for three week stints, free of charge. I was surprised when a German friend of mine was packed off to the Saxon forest for a few weeks R & R after she broke her nose. Now where exactly is the NHS equivalent?

Since I’ve been back I’ve been buying some of the healthy foods that Conner recommended, including walnut oil and a delicious cherry concentrate which you add to juice. Despite that, I’ve somehow got a cold – and a large lunch party looming up!

Zest for Life The Mediterranean Anti-Cancer Diet

By Conner Middelmann-Whitney published by Matador £12.95

(25percent of all royalties go to Maggie’s Cancer Support Centres)

Nutrelan Cookery School: Four hour’s tuition for 45 €, including lunch with wine, recipes to take away and on-line support.

E – mail conner@nutrelan.com Phone (33 5) 06 76 96 99 00

www.nutrelan.com

Mik Artistik

2010-12-11T09:22:00.000-08:00

9^th December 2010

In bed on Thursday night, I heard The Bespoken Word on Radio 4, recorded at the Cheltenham Literary Festival.

Being Radio 4 they had selected a bunch of rap poets. I wasn’t too keen on this and wondered whether to switch it off, but among the yowling, growling voices, I heard someone called Mik Artistik.

Apparently he makes a living by touring the north of England drawing portraits on brown paper bags. As I listened he performed a rappish poem called Cancer. Defiant and perceptive, it acutely told the tale of someone living with the disease.

The next morning I e- mailed him and he sent me a copy of the poem.

I spoke to him later on the phone and apparently he doesn’t have cancer, has never had it. It was purely a work of the imagination.

Hello Jane,

Thank you for your email. It gave me a jolt and made me thank God

I can run about painting and doing poetry and music.

I am happy that the cancer poem has given you a buzz and some cheer

and I hope you continue to paint and create Stuckist stuff.

It's a touchy subject for lots of people, I think.

I am in rude health and had some misgivings about doing it initially because

Ben and Johnny who are in my band, Mik Artistik's Ego Trip, both lost their parents

to cancer. However we had a few chats about it and boom it's out there now.

Here it is...

Woke up this mornin ..Cancer ,

had a cuppa tea .. .. Cancer,

went for a wee............. Cancer

Cancer's killin me.

Went to the pictures ...Cancer

had a cuppa coffee .. Cancer,

had a fuckin toffee.. Cancer

Cancer's all I see.

There's nothin that I want for Christmas,

There's nowhere that I want to be,

I sometimes feel like killin meself,

..but Cancer's killin me.

I've lost four stone... Cancer,

I can fit in me jeans ..Cancer

I look like a dream..Cancer

Cancer's killin me.

I wish it were flu but it's ..Cancer.

What can I do I've got.. Cancer.

I wish it were you that had Cancer,

instead of ..Cancer killin me

It's also on our album "BLASTER" with a Latin backing, available on cdbaby.com

Merry Christmas lass,

Mik

Winter arrives

2010-11-30T02:03:00.000-08:00

Tuesday 30^th November 2010

The first snow has arrived, not crisp and even as in the north, but wet and half hearted. When I got up and looked out my back garden was covered in fox prints right up to the back door – so deep the animal must have been in it up to its groins if they have them.

A more unfortunate sign of winter – the return of Nigella Lawson, the Alma Mahler of TV cookery shows, with one of her so called cookery programmes and also some of the male equivalents – these programmes are mainly about what to do with turkey leftovers, several obviously filmed in the summer and tossed into the winter schedule, very odd considering how far we’ve still go to go until the big day.

I am off to Toulouse tomorrow for the D Telegraph. Feed a robin in the garden, he's not going to get anything while I'm away which is a bit bothering.

I worry about some of the local cats too - I have noticed a beautiful grey tabby roaming near the former council flats and in Bedford Park. He has no collar and is un-neutered. I mentioned him to Doreen at church who knows everything that goes on in the area. She said, "Oh that's Mr Tom. He's just moved in with two nurses. They are very nice people."

Canny cat. I was glad to hear that! There is a whole quiet sub-culture of middle aged and elderly women keeping their eye on the local cats which is very reassuring.

Travel Plans

2010-11-28T11:07:00.000-08:00

28/11/10

Walking along the road to church, through Bedford Park, wondered if I could estimate how near or far I am from death by looking at the position of other people on the pavement. Quite a distance behind, I saw a figure walking slowly, but pushing a bike. A young man came out of one of the big houses with a fretful child in a pushchair and got between us. When I looked back a few moments later the figure with the bike had gone.

Beautiful Advent Sunday service. The vicar and forty members of the congregation have just returned from the Holy Land. I didn’t know that there is an Anglican cathedral, St George’s, in Jerusalem, which has a partly Arab speaking congregation.

I would love to see it and resolved that I must go on their next visit in 2012.

After the service I told one of the church wardens that I would like to visit Jerusalem and he said he would make sure that I get there. I told him how much one of the doctors had worried me.

“Tell him to fuck off out of your head,” he said.

My friend in Poland’s son is getting married in May next year, and I aim to be there too.

Away Days

2010-11-26T09:14:00.000-08:00

Most of the time feel fragile with fear waiting for the cancer tsunami to roar back and engulf me.

The chance to visit Venice for a few days, to write a feature for Private Banking Magazine, was a welcome diversion, and a bit of a challenge as anxiety is so draining and makes one want to hide away.

What can one say about Venice? That was a challenge too. I decided to pitch the piece squarely towards bankers and their wives and mistresses i.e. not much about art or churches.

Last time I was there, in 2005, I didn’t like it much, it rained all the time and I was perplexed by the place. The streets really were full of water and I couldn’t understand why people didn’t fall in all the time. I’m surprised that I didn’t as I was in a kind of daze I get when I am disorientated. I remember reading that old Woodrow Wyatt fell into the Grand Canal. He was smoking a cigar and came straight back up to the surface with the cigar still clamped between his teeth. Don’t know if it was still lit.

I must have gone in September, because it was cold and wet but still blanketed by tourists. At least 7,000 a day in St Mark’s Square. The lines of US college students talking about calzone and the price of “Bud,” defeated me. I didn’t get to see St Mark’s Basilica or the Doge’s Palace or very much at all. It was not a successful travel piece.

When I first arrived, I wrote in my diary about my enchantment and my disappointment :

“One moment I was in a graffiti smeared multi-storey car-park, the next I was in a boat on the Grand Canal in the dark, gliding out of the 21^st century into the 16^th. The only light came from lanterns over narrow doorways. In the dark I saw shadowy figures standing on a small Baroque bridges looking down at us and vanishing, then I was hauled onto a creaking jetty and led through an unlit marble entrance hall, ankle deep in canal water.

“When I saw the carved wooden angels guarding the entrance to my apartment in Palazzo Mocenigo, I became a “Venice Idiot,” this was it – the ultimate place of enchantment.

“This was once the home of the powerful Mocenigo family, where they entertained royalty and political allies in the 1570’s.

Once up a marble stairway and inside, I had a thousand square feet of mosaic marble under my feet, silk brocade walls, six delicately painted wardrobes and Murano glass chandeliers overhead. This was the Venice of my dreams. I spent my first night in a bedroom once used by Lord Byron.

“The morning after, as so often happens, wasn’t so good. Who was this next to me in the morning light? It was the Piazza San Marco, epicentre of European culture, described by Henry James as “the drawing room of Europe,” where Sand, Stendhal, Balzac, Wagner, Mann, Byron, Rilke, Hemmingway and sundry Italian film stars enjoyed bumping into each other in the Florian and Quadri.

“Even in the 1960’s the comedian Kenneth Williams was delighted to spot Dirk Bogarde there, and to get an autograph from Eve Arden.

Today you make your way to the Florian through a slew of litter. Inside a scowling waiter will try to sell you “toasts” while Japanese tourists in identical sun visors troop past the window. The square is more like a fast-food joint than a salon, even though the product being gobbled is culture not calzone.”

This time I did some research before I went, reading Jan Morris’ Venice, looking at the Blue Guide, visiting the Canaletto exhibition at the National Gallery and attending a lecture at the Courtauld about Ruskin in Venice.

This made me feel prepared to take on La Serenissima, and also made me feel like a normal person – the person I was when I first went there, before I was so unexpectedly sentenced to death.

I had an itinerary laid out for me by Bellini Travel, a small bespoke company, and it involved a lot of shoe leather. I was determined to do it all, and see the Basilica and the Doge’s Palace this time. In November the ghastly crowds subside slightly so I wouldn’t have to queue for so long. I bought vouchers on line before I went, without realising that all the major churches charge separately.

I worked hard and at least understood where I was going. Bravely I thought I’d have dinner in Harry’s Bar, near St Mark’s, as most of the readers would have heard of it; once frequented by Hemmingway, Gina Lollabridgida, etc.

You have to push through tired Americans propping up the bar, and until recently the most jaded among them was the barman, Claudio Ponzio. He’d been there for thirty five years, making 700 Bellini a week in the summer. This time I heard that he was recently shipped off to Abu Dhabi where they’ve opened a new Harry’s, and perhaps saved his sanity.

I ordered a frozen Martini, which Truman Capote named a “silver bullet.” I followed with a small plate of baby artichokes, a John Dory which was rubbery and a lemon meringue pie, just like mother used to make, very badly, with no trace of lemon and it wouldn’t have passed the Greg Wallace test on Masterchef. With a glass of wine the bill came to 170 E.

After the alcohol hit me I felt very relaxed and wrote in my note book: “Stop fighting death because you can’t win.”

Full of confidence I rolled back up the tiny streets to the Gritti Palace where I was staying.

The next morning all that confidence had melted away. I found I had also written on a post card showing Harry’s Bar as a dot on a map of the lagoon: “Don’t fight it, no point anyway. Just lay down your arms and enjoy what ever is left. It won’t be too bad.”

At breakfast I had one of the most wonderful views in the world; a weak sun resting on the shoulder of Santa Maria Del Salute, but I looked at the post card and it seemed to have been written by a stranger.

There had been heavy rain early on, the lobby of the Gritti was flooded and the concierge sighed as he helped with rolling up the rugs. I made my way to St Mark’s Basilica, trying to walk on the raised portable tables they put up. I found myself in the middle of the square with some other tourists, stranded, with the walkways all round the edge. We had to wade through water to climb up onto them.

The Basilica was shut because of flooding. Owing to a brief reading of Miss Garnet’s Angel by Salley Vickers, I knew there was a north door I could go through somewhere round the back. I found it, and the walkways led me right into the chapel reserved for private prayer. I looked at the small icon of the Virgin over the altar and wept, then felt embarrassed. Fortunately there was no one in there except plumbers and workmen and no one took any notice of me. I crept out feeling empty and uncertain, no spiritual reassurance received.

I got on a vaporetto to Murano to see the Seguso glass factory. I checked my lipstick in my handbag mirror, and in the sharp light of the lagoon noticed that my eyebrows had returned, and unfortunately some hair on my upper lip, which didn’t used to be there. I hadn’t brought any tweezers along as I haven’t used them for so long.

After Murano, rushing to get back to St Mark’s where a visit to the private palazzo Loredan had been arranged, I made a quick detour to the cemetery island and the graves of Diagalev, Stravinsky and Ezra Pound. It’s a graceful, tranquil spot and it was touching to see the little pink ballet shoes put on Diagalev’s tomb. Stravinsky had the usual roses and Pound a rather suburban shrub, not right for him at all, shards of Murano glass, broken bottles or smashed up flowers would be more appropriate.

On my last morning I had a few hours free before the 12 noon check out, when I had planned to see the Basilica properly, and the Doge’s residence. I didn’t realise how tired I was, or perhaps it was the fault of the dark shutters, but I went to bed at 10pm, felt very restless, woke up at 11. It seemed strange that only an hour had gone by as I felt I had been in bed for hours. I thought I would never get back to sleep and decided to dress quickly and go down to the lobby to use their computer, to kill the dreaded hours of night. When I got there I noticed it was day light outside – I felt a sense of panic as I asked the date. It was the 18^th. I had slept from 10pm till 11 am the next day.

I was all of a do-dah then, rushing to get a late breakfast, stuffing in bread rolls and prunes under the two flying cupids in a golden stucco frame, painted by Tiepolo in 1740. I still haven’t seen the Basilica or the Doge’s esteemed home. Wonder if I ever will!

In Marco Polo airport felt an odd pricking sensation, realised later that it must be the pubes coming back.

An Angel in the Living Room

2010-11-14T05:18:00.000-08:00

11/11/10

How’s this for a bad start to a day; 9am decided to order some wine from Tesco on line, using my vouchers. Last month they went out of date before I got round to using them. Got to the “check-out” thinking, this is easy, then it wanted me to register or start a new account. As I once had an on line account with them years ago, it wouldn’t accept a new account and need my old password. I couldn’t remember which cat’s name I was using at the time, so I had to apply for another. An hour later it hadn’t come. Tried to get through to one of their numerous electronic numbers. Permanently engaged. Speak to a Scots lassie on another extension who says she’ll send me a new password, and also advises me not to try extension three for on line shopping as no one can use their vouchers on line and everyone is ringing up to complain. No new password arrives. It would have been simpler to have used a phone in the first place. Write a letter of complaint wondering, uneasily, if I am the only person left who still does this?

Unexpectedly the doctor I spoke to last week then rang to tell me I hadn't had a blood test and needed to come back for one. They are like vampires those doctors. I had one when I went in on the wrong day, the week before. She obviously didn't know that and I forgot to tell her.

Then I made the mistake of talking to her about our last chat, which had become so muddled in my head. She chose her words carefully but it was all dire and tipped me back into the terror which had been ebbing away.

“No one knows how you will respond to the chemo as it’s so early in your treatment,” she says. “Early?” Of course it’s the start, not the end.

Some people are still alive after being diagnosed in 2003, but she says, that is after “a couple more rounds of chemo.” Only a minority have long remissions.

Heard the eleventh hour being declared on the radio, national silence falling like a stone, while sitting at the computer I felt as if my own life had been snatched away by a silent, sneaking disease, as effectively as by sniper or shell fire.

I’d got a great day planned; pay over the money for the new car, two exhibitions at the RA, meet friends later and go to the Private View of the Discerning Eye exhibition, where my painting, Chemo I is on show.

Thanks to Tesco and the conversation with the doctor tears had run into my make-up. I decided to try out the wig, as I am going to Venice on Monday and think it might make me feel more confident with style conscious Italians.

As I set out I cautiously observed people’s looks. They didn’t seem to notice the wig and I didn’t get the same sidelong glances I get when I go out with just the turban. The shaggy thing hangs down into my eyes, covering up my lack on eyebrows.

In the bank I became boiling hot, and felt the remains of the makeup sliding off my forehead and nose. The girl behind the counter looked at me scornfully, what fright must she have seen before her? Her voice was very curt and unfriendly. In my hurry to get out I forgot to get my Euros for the trip to Italy.

As soon as I got to the RA I slid into the ladies loo and removed the wig. The turban felt much more normal.

Back in the Treasures of Budapest exhibition carried on where I left off before. I was stuck by a painting of Christ healing a man, by Tiepolo. It was so wonderfully humane with modern looking figures. I spoke to it, in my head, urgently, admitting for the first time how much I want to live, how much I don’t want to go back to that clinic. After the intensity of this I felt slightly better, as if I had managed to release my subconscious in some way.

In the afternoon as I was drawing St Roch, focussing on his sore leg with its wonderful sharply sculpted knee, my friend Helena appeared behind me. Then my friend Ann from the clinic also arrived. We had an enjoyable time in the Friends’ Room, with tea and shortbread, then set off in the rain and dark to the Discerning Eye at the Mall Gallery, Ann feeling her way with her white stick, whilst I limped along on throbbing nuropathetic feet, what a couple of old crocks we now are!

Quite a good show, lots of wine but no food. Prince Charles had two paintings in, the usual tightly constrained water-colours. One had some very tall, pointy poplar Cyprus trees, which made me wonder if he is having some sexual insecurities. Next to his work it said, “Price on application.” Much of the work was wildly overpriced, it would have been interesting to make that phone call.

He didn't win any prizes and neither did I. First prize, £5,000, went to a sickly looking confection called, “Strawberries and Ice-cream,” showing just that, one of those airbrushed, photographic things, without a visible brush mark. This was rather worrying as I thought the Discerning Eye was one show left which eschewed paintings which aren't paintings but copies. I can't understand why judges go for them.

Helena hurried off to get her train leaving Ann and I together. It was as if we both breathed out with relief – like two compatriots from a foreign country, eager to speak their own language together – ours is the language of cancer-land; symptoms, pains, lingering effects of the operation, what this doctor said, what that one said that was different, things other people have said, the reaction of her partner, feeling our way towards prognosis, and the fear which is the culture and the continent we share.

Friday 13/11/10

Letter from the hospital saying that when they last saw me I had, “no residual disease.” It added that we had had "a candid talk about the future."

All I need now is the faith to live fully. But I want to know that I am cured. If an angel appeared in my living room and said that I certainly was, I wouldn’t be that surprised to see him, after all this praying before old master paintings, but I probably wouldn’t believe him.

Living With It

2010-11-08T02:41:00.000-08:00

4/11/10

The doctor said that if it comes back in a year they will be disappointed, if it comes back in two that won’t be so bad and they can treat it again. And then presumably again, and again. So, a remission of two years is good, not sure, her words are all muddled in my head, lost in a fug of dread.

She also said, “It is so early in your treatment, that we can’t tell.”

I’m at the early stage of it, the long haul, contortions which often prove so futile. I am not that scared of death. I can imagine lying in a hospice somewhere gently fading away, it’s the wretched journey you have to go on to reach that point which is so fearful and daunting.

To try and get on with a normal life again I arranged to meet a friend at the Royal Academy to see the Treasures of Budapest Exhibition. She is a “friend” of the RA and has a card for the Friends’ Room; I gave up my card sometimes ago as it seemed like an unnecessary luxury. Now seeing the queue for the restaurant and the impossibility of getting a seat in the café decided to join again, £85 just so that I can sit in the Friends’ Room without hassle or queuing. I don’t even like the Friends’ Room much, it is full of rich old ladies with short cropped hair and must be one of the most genteel spots in Europe. What the hell. What am I saving my money for?

The exhibition of the work once owned by the amazing Esterhazy family of Budapest is so extensive that I only get part of the way round, no where near the modern stuff, including the lesbians by Schiele, so craftily put on the poster.

It’s a wonderful collection but a lot of the work is about death and suffering. There are also some polychromatic wooden carvings of St Roch, showing his ulcerated leg, and St Sebastian wallowing in his arrow wounds. While the gallery attendant was looking away, I quickly touched the shiny wooden toe of both saints - invoking the ancient idea that touch can heal, magical thinking.

They are similar to the Spanish sculptures I saw right at the beginning of my ordeal. I can just about focus, but the doctor’s words keep reverberating in my mind. Realise that I am in a fix – it’s like a bad dream from which I just cannot wake and never will.

I asked her if any of her patients live to be old? She side-stepped me by saying that most are diagnosed when they are already old. I take that as a no, and the number five haunts me, as if I have been given a death sentence suspended for five years.

Being with my friend helps a lot, but no words can change anything and there is no escape.

5/11/10

Decide to buy a new car. Approaching garages and the strange creatures who work in them is as tormenting as anything depicted in those Mediaeval paintings, Hieronymus Bosch meets Arthur Daley, and that should take my mind off things.

Try out a Vauxhall and arrange to see a Ford, then decided to take the advice of the men in my local garage and go for a VW Fox. In times of stress, get a German engine.

Luckily for me, Adam, the salesman is Polish and quite civilised. It is actually quite pleasant being with him, he’s not some spiv from another planet who speaks an entirely different lingo. We go for a test drive. The clutch feels oddly high and stiff but I manage OK.

It makes me think of when my Dad used to get a new car, the excitement of joining him on the test drive, then the strange pride of the “running-in” notice he’d put in the back. In those days cars had an infancy and difficult adolescence before they somehow matured into smooth running purring beasts. He understood that process just as he understood how to deal with the senility of TV sets. We would shout out, “Dad, the telly’s gone wonky,” meaning that the line hold had gone again making the picture zig-zaggy, or people on screen looked attenuated or stumpy, as if they were in distorting mirrors. He would settle it with a simple bang of his fist on the top of the set.

Adam offers me a car warrenty of 36 months. I wonder which will run out first, me or the machine. What does he think, with me sitting there as bald as a coot? He gives no indication that he has noticed anything strange.

Signing papers I remember that I’ve also got a mortgage which has to be paid off in ten years. I might not even be here by then. It’s mind and spirit boggling.

I’ve got an endowment policy coming up in 2012 – what a magic sounding year; the Olympics, the Queen’s Jubilee, my endowment, and perhaps my death, or my mother’s.

6pm bonfire party at the vicarage in Ealing. Parking is restricted till 7.30pm By the time I find a parking space I have missed all the food and the fireworks. There are pans of greasy water containing no frankfurters and a slew of used plastic cutlery. People stand about in the dark as a small fire dies down inside a small brazier, eating rolls containing nothing except tomato sauce. Apparently there are vegetarian sausages in the kitchen, but no one wants them. Enjoy standing about in the wet holding a sparkler and chatting.

On the way home pay a call on my friend who looks after Maisie when I go away. There are a lot of guinea pigs on the carpet and they all stop whatever they were doing when they see me. They huddle together warily, except for one who stays in bed by herself watching me from a distance. Elaine has a new hamster. Another sign of modern times – it doesn’t look like a hamster to me. When I was a child hamsters were very small, square, pinkish colour and they were utterly boring. This is obviously a rat which has been crossed with a hamster or perhaps just lost its tail. It’s long and large, with a pointed nose and fine whiskers. He is also delightfully clever. He sorts everything she gives him into groups, putting all the things he doesn’t like into the area he uses for a loo. He keeps what he likes in his play area. Hamsters never used to put anything anywhere but in their pouches. They must be like A level students, increasing their intelligence exponentially every year defying all previously known laws of evolution.

In the evening when I get home and sit by myself my spirits sink and I think I might go mad. There is no one to help.

Saturday 6^th Nov.

The shock of the doctors has passed a bit and I feel more confident. There is so much to do – I have to clear out a space under my stairs so that I can have the damp treated. There are boxes and paintings that have been in there since 1995. I am going to the church to volunteer to sell Christmas cards. American actress Elizabeth McGovern, currently starring in Downton Abbey on ITV turns up to open the new Christmas shop. She has tiny little eyes like currents and the skinniest legs I've ever seen. You don't get to see them on TV when she is dressed like an Edwardian.

The rest of the day is busy, I've got a painting to get on with, have to research my forthcoming trip to Venice, a friend is coming over in the afternoon and I am going to a film with other friends in the evening. Seeing people, being busy is the only way to feel that life is flowing normally again even though it isn’t.

In the church meet a young woman from Brazil whom I have seen there a few times before. We have a chat, she doesn’t speak much English but reveals that she thinks St Michael’s is a Roman Catholic Church. She obviously doesn’t notice that the Pope is never mentioned.

I tell her it’s protestant, Church of England but she looks blank. Realise I have no idea how to explain this to her. Someone from Wembley recently told me he has had the same experience with some Rumanian Catholics. There is a new kind of ecumenism, by mistake.

In Turnham Green tube hear two young Sikh boys chatting. One says to the other that it is very difficult to get by tube from Ealing to Hampstead. He says this is “social engineering,” and “by no means an accident.” I would like to talk to them about this, but they are going west while I am going east and as usual everyone is moving at a terrific rate.

Years ago I heard almost the same thing from the late, unlamented Bernie Grant. He said there was apartheid in England and if he set foot in the leafy streets of Hampstead he would be arrested. I never think about Hampstead as it is so far away, as remote from me as Inverness. Perhaps they have a police state up there and have influenced the BBC to keep quiet about it.

The young man’s words also indicated to me that he thinks Hampstead is wealthy and posh, and Ealing rough. That is another change. Only a few years ago Ealing was a very select place. A bourgeois suburb of expensive family houses. Now you can see the population is poorer, a lot of women are veiled, the shops are going down market with “pound-stretchers,” and charity shops arriving. The high street no longer looks elegant and expensive and seems to be joining up with Southall further down the track.

In London these changes can happen so quickly you don’t notice it until it’s become a new reality around you.

Goodbye Garry

2010-11-03T02:17:00.000-07:00

3/11/10

Since my last scan I have been going through the motions of normal life but most of my mind is fixed on dodging cancer, as if I am on the run trying to evade an implacable enemy. I do this by considering everything I eat and drink, and even how I sit and stand, whether any elastic is sticking into me, adjusting my clothes in case they are too tight, trying not to make any wrong move, holding my breath – waiting to exhale but knowing I can’t.

At the weekend I had a very full diary - cinema, theatre, dinner party, lunch. I had a brief chat with Michael Gove in the National Portrait Gallery. I used to know him years back when he was on The Times and whether he really remembered me or not he was charming. As a result of seeing so many people I started to feel almost normal again. The anxiety began to fade but then I had the final consultation at Garry to face on Tuesday.

In the clinic I met Ann and Loretta and the nurses now looked familiar. It was nice to sit and chat, but then I had to see a doctor. I asked to see a woman as in my experience they are just so much more empathetic. This one was kindly and thoughtful, picking her words carefully. We spent some time looking at a cross section body scan scan of my insides, as if I had been cut in half and viewed from above. I saw my heart for the first time. What a bag of wonders, and the not so wonderful. "There is the poo full of air holes," said the doctor sounding fascinated. It's odd how doctors now choose to talk in nursery language.

“I want you to go away from here and forget us,” she said. That sounded good. But then we got into the longer term view. She seemed to think that the cancer would probably come back within two years. Worse, this seemed to be considered a long remission! There also seems to be a five year cut off point beyond which few people go. She did admit that no one can know what will happen. "It's so early yet in your treatment," she added. Not what I wanted to hear.

Back in the clinic Ann and I sat for a long time trying to convince ourselves that we would be among the lucky ones, bargaining with fate and statistics, reasoning that considering our blood, our scans, our treatment, we have every chance. A doctor had told her that it was 50/50 all a matter of chance – so we cling to that.

This England

2010-11-03T01:57:00.000-07:00

27^th October 2010

Visit Garry Weston for the results of the scan – all clear.

Don’t feel any elation or even much simple joy at having come through so well and got the whole thing over, because everything is overshadowed by the doctor’s grim prognostications. I was obviously an idiot to once think that it was a simple matter of getting the treatment and being cured.

I have heard that this is the way of modern medicine; kindly patrician doctors once kept information back, but now they give you the full works. It’s one of the many aspects of modern culture that puzzles and disturbs me.

Leaving Garry I discovered I’d lost my Oyster travel card. I was directed to Security. To my surprise, I can still be surprised by these things, the man in charge of security could hardly speak a word of English and had no idea what an Oyster card was. He asked a young man behind him who was sweeping the floor in the dark, closet like office. This man seems to have no English at all. I am sorry to say it but he looked just like a Coolie, a Chinese indentured labourer from an old Hollywood film. By a lot of shaking of heads they indicated that they hadn’t got whatever it was I was looking for – no point in asking them to have a really good look, as we would have needed a phrase book if not an interpreter.

Perhaps calling these people “security,” was just one of those modern euphemisms. They might have been what used to be called, “lost property.” There may be other forms of “security” in the hospital, but this encounter didn’t suggest anything very secure to me. The Imperial College hospitals are currently investing heavily in vivisection and a new block is going up at Hammersmith specialising in testing animals, this includes working on the best treatment for wounds sustained in military combat – any animal rights activists out there should take note – security very leaky under Imperial College umbrella.

On Sunday I had another surprise. Got to St. Michael’s early intending to sit outside on the war memorial to read for awhile before the kick off. Along with the smokers, I like to sit surrounded by the elegantly named Chiswick dead; Lyonel FC Wall, Derek Lutyens, C. Cecil Brooks Ward, C. Edgar Allinson, C. Ernest Brooks, Cyril Faustin, etc. It started raining so the smokers departed and I went into the vestry.

The jolly, friendly woman who works for a fair trade charity was setting things out for the small Sunday School, or "children's church" as it's now called, which goes on during the service. Her assistant hadn’t turned up so she asked me to help put out some crayons. I was quickly stopped by another woman who said I couldn’t do anything more unless I’d got a Criminal Records Bureau certificate to say I was safe to work with children.

I did have one, two years ago, when I was doing some tutoring, but that was not enough – to put out more crayons I needed to have another certificate authorised by the church. “But my assistant hasn’t shown up,” the fair trade lady explained. It was decided that I could stay when the children arrived, but only if the official teacher stood beside me at all times, making sure I wasn’t doing some compulsive kiddy-fiddling. I explained that I don’t even like children much, but that doesn’t wash these days.

The service included the baptism of a beautiful baby girl. As we left our pews and crowded towards the font the vicar beckoned us further forwards so that I was right up close when he poured what looked like a pint of water over her head. She looked surprised but didn’t cry, and when he up-righted her she looked quite content. He is terribly good with babies they hardly ever cry in his arms. Surprisingly no special CRB certificates were issued for the congregation but I expect he has to have one.

The baby had beautiful relatives, including a grandmother dressed in a velvet suit the colour of damask roses. In true Chiswick tradition the service was followed by champagne in the vestry. It amuses me that among those we are praying for is someone recovering from a skiing accident. We haven’t yet prayed for hedge-fund managers down on their luck but I might have missed that one.

Along with the champagne we had some shortbread and jam biscuits made by young Father Stephen on his day off. They looked like Jammy Dodgers.

A neatly dressed little boy came up to me. He was so small that I had to crouch down to talk to him. He told me very seriously that Doctor Who was a great fan of Jammy Dodgers. He described a conversation between the Doctor and a Dalek who’d never heard of Jammy Dodgers. Damn foreigners! I asked if he would like to have one. He said, “No, thank you, not at the moment,” and beetled off. I could see him as a Radio 3 presenter of the future. He was adorable and fascinating but happily I did not feel like molesting him.

Perking up again

2010-10-25T07:23:00.000-07:00

I need other people to give me encouragement at the moment, and as usual they do. My new friend Ann from the clinic points out that if Agerwall’s 98 per cent failure rate were true, the Garry Weston centre would be overwhelmed with patients. It is crowded but that’s because it’s in such a small, narrow space.

Conner Middelmann Whitney conner@nutrelan.com who wrote Zest for Life, the “anti-cancer diet” book and runs the cookery school in Toulouse, suggests I look at David Servan-Schreiber’s book, ‘Anticancer,’ which tells the story of the author’s fight with an aggressive brain tumour. His cancer was diagnosed when he was 31; he is now 49 and still in good health.

Conner says: “that he writes in great detail about all the ways in which we can improve our chances of recovering from cancer, touching on a wide range of anti-cancer factors such as diet, exercise, stress reduction, meditation etc. He talks, among others, about these dreaded survival statistics, and how they’re just that: averages, means, numbers. His point is that you can transcend statistics by following an anti-cancer lifestyle. Accused by some critics of giving cancer patients false hopes, he accuses many oncologists of giving people a feeling of ‘false hopelessness’ and thus sapping them of the energy needed to play an active part in their recovery. Maybe a useful thought to hang on to? ”

“False hopelessness” – yes! That is exactly it. The result of being clubbed over the head with raw statistics. All you can do is forget them – and try to live.

Jo at 4myhead.com, replied to my blog and suggested cooking the “mind meal,” featured on the Mind Mental Health Web site.

On Friday 22^nd I went out for the first time since I got back from Italy. I arranged to meet the friends I stood up before, while waiting for the nurses. We decided to have supper in Fortnum & Mason’s then go up Jermyn Street to the little theatre there, to see Black Bread & Cucumber, a one woman show by Caroline Blakiston, to celebrate Anton Chekhov's 150 birthday. She made history as the first British actress to play Chekhov in Russia, in Russian.

I enjoyed pottering around Fortnum’s, a thickly carpeted shop which sells groceries at unfeasibly high prices. It is strangely soothing just to move about between the stacked shelves of crystallised ginger (£20 a box) past the small chocolate Santas, (£20) and the packets of tea with accompanying silver strainers and spoons. I bought myself a 100 grammes of peanut butter fudge. The girls selling it were very pleasant, not sniffy about my little bill among people spending hundreds of pounds.

I did a bit of Christmas shopping in there, shortbread, Stilton in a jar, and ginger biscuits in elegant tins, then slipped out the back to Paxton & Whitefield which sells “exceptional cheese, since 1797,” at exceptionally inflated prices. It’s a good shop though, authentic, the stink of the cheese reaching right down Jermyn Street. They might have some of the original cheese behind the counter.

The customers always seem to be men, large ones in crombies, and young city gents who look as if they might be dining with the Camerons. It reminds me of the old El Vinos on Fleet Street, a rich but rough place with a masculine atmosphere where ladies definitely weren’t welcome. Women shoppers presumably prefer the safer less pungent climes of Waitrose.

I allowed myself a small triangle of Munster. It tastes good at the front of the mouth, melts on the tongue like chocolate but you get a strong bacterial, mouldy aroma as it hits the back of the throat. Always a good sign with cheese and cider.

The staff in there are friendly, but many of the clients are not. I said “excuse me” to a large ox like man, who looked a bit like Princess Caroline of Monaco’s husband, Ernst August, Prince of Hanover. He glared at me as if I was a fly on a bit of Gouda and ignored me for a few pointed moments before moving just a little out of the way.

While I was waiting for my friends I by passed Hatchards, the famous book shop which has hardly any drama, for Waterstones to pick up a copy of If So, Then Yes by N.F. Simpson. If you miss a play at least you can read it.

From the beginning there were some very amusing lines: Maureen Somebody said that life is like trying to put together a gigantic jigsaw puzzle by the light of a small torch in a dark room.

Geoffrey Though partially sighted.

Just what I have been feeling the last few days, about ambition, failure, unwanted change and the unknown future.

I have a different attitude to old age now, and to old people, like Simpson himself at ninety one. If they complain about their lot or about life itself I think they might have missed the point. What wouldn’t those people in the Garry Weston clinic and I give to know that we will live to be old?

The show was fascinating. We weren’t told why Caroline Blakiston decided to work not just at the Moscow Arts Theatre but in some very remote parts of Russia, but she gave a fascinating insight into life in the Soviet Union just before it gave up the ghost. She seemed to have acquired Russian easily and is obviously a very gifted woman. She came out afterwards for a brief chat. I asked her if she was going back to Russia again to work. She said there was nothing on the cards but she might. As I left she called out to me, “If I live.” Our eyes met and there seemed to be a spark of amused recognition. I wondered if there was something wrong with her too.

Next week scan on Monday, results on Wednesday, with Mr flippin it’s all going to go wrong Agerwall again. Better get used to it.

Blues

2010-10-21T08:57:00.000-07:00

21/10/10

Lots of travel in the offing - just been to Italy for the D Telegraph and they want to send me to Toulouse in early December. Also have Venice on the horizon for Private Banking Magazine. Physically I have no sign of cancer in my blood or on the last scan. I should be really happy now, but the doctors have taken away my hope.

My GP was so concerned about the views of Mr Agerwall, who told me that the chemo was unlikely to work, that he rang the hospital. He Spoke to a doctor today who said only a tiny percentage of people don't go back for more chemo and it is likely to come back within six months! This is worse than Agerwall who said within two years. How does one live with this? They don’t give any advice.

Doctors like to speak of ovarian cancer as a "chronic disease," no one ever seems to get completely cured, that would be tantamount to a miracle.

I don't look forward to a life like where chunks of the year are taken up by intravenous drips and nauseating drugs and how many rounds of chemo can they give before they call it a day I wonder?

This illness or rather the threat of it, seems to highlight that part of my life which has been a complete failure. I spent years worrying about not having a man, aching for love, yearning for a mate, “my other half,” envying people their weekend breaks and companionable summer hols, now that tumour on my soul has been replaced and largely shoved out by ovarian cancer in the groin. One nail drives out another nail, so strengths by strengths do fail – as Shakespeare put it, in his pessimistic play, Coriolanus.

The future looks bleak; no choice but to live from day to day to day, not looking ahead or envisaging the future and not looking back to such a short time ago, when life jogged on in a normal, hum-drum way, and there is no way this situation will ever change.

Epistle from Planet NHS

2010-10-19T02:35:00.000-07:00

I wrote this letter 7/9/2010

Dear Claire Perry,

I am currently attending Hammersmith Hospital for chemotherapy. I am receiving good treatment, all is going well for me, but I must make a complaint about the treatment I received in the Victor Bonney ward, Queen Charlotte’s hospital after I was admitted there on May 4^th this year for a hysterectomy.

While I was in there, there was no cold water on the ward. We were not assisted to wash in bed and I tried to take a shower. The water in the shower on the ward was scalding hot and I was left completely alone in the shower room, although I had just had an op and still had a morphine bag.

When I asked for help I was taken to a bathroom near the reception desk, where there was apparently cold water, again I was left completely alone, and I could not turn the cold tap on although I struggled to do so.

The nurses were curt and unwilling to help us. I asked for a drink of water but a nurse couldn’t give it to me although she was standing next to a sink. I lost a new nightdress which was taken away with the sheets and disposed of. The nurses I told about this laughed and found it very amusing. I spent some of my time in tears.

We were then told to leave the ward after only three days, regardless of how well or ill we were. The doctor who dismissed us did not examine anyone.

I realise this might be a separate issue as hospitals were required to meet targets on operations performed, without having enough beds. But the manner that we were pushed out was very unfriendly and distressing.

I knew I should make a complaint about the nursing on Victor Bonney but I was inspired to get on with it when my neighbour told me she had been in the VB ward too, and had received bad treatment. She told me the nurses were “rude and unhelpful.”

My counsellor, Philip Alexander, who works with cancer patients for the NHS at Charing Cross and Hammersmith also told me he had received several bad reports from his clients about Victor Bonney.

Yours truly,

13^th October 2010 I received a letter from Imperial College Healthcare, Planet NHS, from a Keith Ingram, "Acting Associate Director," who deals with “Service Quality.” Sounds a bit like something from the railways but in this case you don’t get any complimentary vouchers.

He lists four people who’ve apparently investigated my complaints and states that “after checking the ward report book,” there were “no reported problems with the water supply during the period of your stay I am sorry that we are unable to provide you with any additional information.”

I go around making up complaints about water supplies for the good of my health do I? What is interesting is that my chief complaint, more important than any lack of cold water, was that twice I was left alone, attached to morphine bag, with scalding hot water. No help to wash, no supervision while I was feeble and light- headed. This was surely a lack of basic nursing care – but that is not mentioned early in the letter. Perhaps nurses no longer help people to wash, or stick around to see they don’t get turned into boiled lobsters?

Instead as a kind of defence, the letter brings up my cancer support nurse and says that I didn’t tell her there was any problem about going home after the op and being on my own. So we have moved on quickly to an issue which lies outside the Victor Bonney ward. A full page is then given over to this. Apparently we patients were “mobilised,” to avoid blood clots.

I pointed out that we were not examined before we were booted out. He says that Dr Yazan Abdullah, Senior House Doctor, “felt we were feeling well enough to go home.”

Yes but he didn’t feel us! Never put a finger on human flesh that morning if our round was anything to go by. Then there is a mention quite far down the page about my complaint that the nurses didn’t help me to wash – Keith Ingram has never been taught to write in clear paragraphs, his points are all mixed up. He says that a “Lead nurse” has discussed my concerns with her nursing team, “so they can think about events as part of their reflective learning.”

I can just imagine them sitting round on the nursing station, dunking biscuits and quietly reflecting on pesky patients unable to turn on cold taps and demanding assistance. When I dipped my toe into the cold waters of Further Education we had to keep a “reflective learning diary.” It was important to write one’s mistakes down, show how one would act if the situation recurred and this act of penance could get you a lot of marks at the end of term. The more “reflection” that had gone on the more you were, theoretically, a good teacher. "If a student spits in my eye I will never throw them through a window again, instead I will walk away," you write, and no one knows what will happen if that situation occurs again, least of all you.

Mr Ingram goes back to my cancer support nurse, who apparently doesn’t support anything I have said in my letter, because I didn’t mention it to her. I had no idea that I was obliged to discuss nursing care with her – we’d only recently met. I hadn’t even had my final diagnosis as a cancer patient. She was offered as someone to consult in the future. The letter says she would have “approached whichever nurse was in charge of the ward,” really? She is usually terribly busy and no one ever appeared to be in charge of the ward. There was a woman in blue uniform who would come in and glare at me in the early morning, but I don’t know who she was, could have been a passing member of the WRVS driven mad by the axing of trolleys. We never knew her identity and she was so scary it was better not to ask.

The upshot is – nothing to do with my unsubstantiated, mischievous complaints, but “a series of interactive workshops” were held, from May to April, called “The Caring Dimension,” to give nurses and their interpreters, “an insight into the Trust’s new values and behaviours.” Note that word “behaviours,” good old “behaviour” is no longer enough, it has somehow acquired a pompous sounding plural.

The trust’s “new values” involve nurses in “Caring.” Sadly they were only just getting the hang of this new notion when I was there. They obviously weren’t practising this new skill on patients and we missed out on it.

Q: Wouldn’t it be more economical in terms of money and time, if nurses and midwives were given a good basic training in the first place? Nursing used to be a “caring profession,” so why is this aspect only taught after they are qualified and there are complaints? Could they not even assess whether people are “caring” before they accept them for the training? There could even be a questionnaire along the lines of: Do you kick the cat? Do you deal in crack cocaine? Do you actually like people?

Due to a brand new checking system, in July the Victor Bonney ward received 93/100 as a rating for staff courtesy, with overall care rated at 88. It has shown “further improvements,” if that is possible this September. A bit like the A level grades – a hundred percent pass rate is in view!

So much for me, my neighbour and all that hospital counsellor’s clients who also left Victor Bonney recently, disappointed, appalled and upset.

Joke. (Not side splitting but it amuses me!)

2010-10-14T11:07:00.000-07:00

14/10/10

I had a letter in the Daily Telegraph today – to my great joy and surprise. It also had a small headline on the page and a large amusing illustration.

I made one of my favourite jokes. An unpleasant vicar called Simon Shouler was on Radio 4 this week demanding the right to murder badgers that stray into his church yard and he wants to get rid of the bats in his belfry. He said he should be allowed the right to do this, “in his own way.” Very sinister if you ask me.

I pointed out that all he has to do to the bats is baptise, confirm and marry them, and he will never see them again.

I once made this joke to Fr Rodney Bomford who was then vicar at St Giles Church in Camberwell. He was not amused and gave me one of his chilliest looks. Strange people vicars, you never know what will upset them.

Recommendation

2010-10-14T10:49:00.001-07:00

While I am feeling a big Old Vic, trouble with my crust of bread, totally Mutt and Jeff, I have been reading an interesting cookery book.

Zest for Life, The Mediterranean Anti-Cancer Diet, by Conner Middelmann-Whitney is treat. Not whimsical, neurotic or faddish, it provides information about cancer – and how to avoid it and escape its return to the maximum possibility. Also a selection of delightful recipes from what is probably the healthiest diet for any European.

Olive oil, fish, feta, aromatic herbs, fruit and wine – this is the food of the Etruscans and the Greek Gods. She will tell you how best to put them together to make delicious simple meals.

Reading this book I have so far lost all interest in my old diet – no more toast and butter, much less red meat, sweets and pastry. I really enjoyed replacing my usual boring potatoes with her cauliflower mash. Mine was a bit brown because of the turmeric and slightly damp as I put too much stock into it, but the taste was divine.

Conner once suffered from cancer but survived and now lives in south west France, where she is able to buy abundant fresh local produce, and she runs a cookery school.

www.zestforlifediet.com

Zest For Life is Published by Matador at £12.95

Happy Holidays

2010-10-13T00:31:00.000-07:00

Saturday 9^th October

Wonderful break at a spa, 500 metres above Lake Garda, but perhaps it was too soon after chemo for such adventures.

It was a two hour drive from the airport to the resort, 500 metres above Lake Garda. I arrived hot and as soon as I saw the long, blue infinity pool I dived right in. Glorious! There is nothing to beat breaking the surface of a swimming pool, especially after months of being virtually house-bound. A few hours later my left ear went rather numb. I ignored it but three days later I had a really bad infection and the pain was getting worse.

My own stupid fault – I had wax ear plugs with me. I will never swim without them again. On the plane home I nearly wept with the pain as the cabin pressure made it feel as if someone was applying an electric drill to the side of my head. Start crying silently with the pain, hiding behind my airline mag in case anyone notices. The side of my face was swelling and I remembered doctors at Garry saying that if you ever get an infection or a fever you have to go to hospital immediately.

At Victoria I thought of going to their private medical walk in centre. Years ago, when I was well off, I walked in there for an ear infection. They were pleasant and treated it effectively and charged me £65. I’m not so well off now and there is the complication of the chemo, so I took a taxi with all my luggage, suitcase, bottles of wine and olive oil, to Charing Cross A & E.

The plane landed at 5pm. I got to the hospital at about 7. 45pm and didn't see a doctor till after midnight. It was a kind of torture, apart from the real pain in the ear, sitting there under bright lights as the floor gradually filled up with old copies of the Sun and the Standard, food wrappings, plastic cups, water, vomit and urine. A young lad next to me vomited into a kind of grey cardboard top hat.

I was freezing when I finally got to see a doctor, shaking and hungry but so relieved that the long wait was over. They did a few tests, including a chest X-ray and I got home at 3am.

Charing Cross issued me with a prescription for antibiotics but the doctor apologised, saying: “We haven’t got any here. We’ve run out, as usual.”

The idea of having to return next day loomed up like a dire punishment for having wasted their time and further stressed them out.

It was a ludicrously painful night, the throbbing pain turned to grinding and I couldn’t move my head or get comfortable. Neither could I listen to the radio unless I lay flat on my back as otherwise I had to lie on my good ear and the other one was stone deaf.

Maisie, who decided that she didn’t want to eat any of her remaining cat food, sat by me, bolt upright but staring down at me, meaningfully. I should have given her a big fish treat as soon as I got home but I had hoped she could wait until morning.

The next morning, Sunday, a quick glance in the mirror, something I avoid these days, showed a distorted face and an ear sticking out like ET.

I got up at 7 am to get the emergency fish sorted and be ready to schlep over to Hammersmith Hospital to collect my drugs. A friend gave me a lift and I pictured another queue winding down the street. At 10am when I arrived there were only two of us queuing, including two pharmacists waiting to be let in to the locked department. They took our prescriptions in with them. As I sat waiting a lot more people began to gather.

When I got home, longing for my bed, I realised that this was the day I was supposed to be starting my duty on the coffee rota at church. I had let them down without realising it. Went to bed feeling dismal, reflecting that the spa and its good effects were like a vanishing dream.

While I was away I received two phone calls from a Jill Wickens asking me to call her about the complaint I’d made about the community nurses and the inappropriately named “Harmony.” She sounded anxious and really keen for me to call.

On Monday, after unpacking, apologising to the cat yet again and giving her more fresh fish, taking pills, trying to sleep and sorting out washing and work schedule, I screwed up courage and called her. I do not recommend calling anyone connected with the NHS – if you value your sanity - and lo, at the number she’d given they had never heard of her.

I was immediately back on planet NHS, a dead star most furthest removed in the universe from the planets known as Happy Holidays and Relaxing Spa Treatments. The bored voice on the line put me through somewhere, and another bored voice put me on to an extension where I heard a female voice, but not that of Ms Wickens.

I started again and redialled. A young lad on the line seemed to find the situation amusing, he was certainly not bothered, but he gave me a number for a centre in Acton. They knew Jill Wickens. What a relief! She had gone on holiday for two weeks and handed over the case to someone else who “will be dealing with it.”

Planet NHS again – 13/10/10

I am taking Clarithromycin for the ear. They are making me feel rather ill, headaches and nasty taste in mouth, rather like the old chemo taste. Daft fears spring about in my head – maybe this drug is undoing the chemo, perhaps my lymph glands are too busy coping with this infection to deal with the free-ranging radicals?? Is all this spinach I’m eating enough to cope with all this infection?

I rang NHS Direct at 9pm just to ask about any possible side effects of the anti-biotics, perhaps I should change to something else? They took down my details at length then said that a nurse would ring me up, "In about eight hours time."

I said thanks but no thanks. Couldn’t quite believe that a nurse would be on the line at 5am anyway. I think there would have been a deafening silence.

25/10/10

Just remembered that someone was supposed to be dealing with my Harmony case. Not a word since that phone call to Jill Wickens.

This morning on the radio hear that Violetta Aylward, a nurse employed by an agency called “Ambition 24 hours,” an even sillier name than “Harmony,” switched off a disabled patient’s life support machine, leaving him with severe brain damage. A video passed to the BBC shows her struggling to revive the patient, applying the resuscitation bag in the wrong place. Aylward is a foreign nurse and the agency didn’t check her qualifications. The only real surprise is that there aren’t many more similar cases, but most people probably die quietly of neglect.

A Way Out of the Wood

2010-10-04T04:00:00.000-07:00

October 4^th 2010

That's hopefully the worst night over, with its wild chemo dreams. In the best of them I had borrowed £250 from Ann Widdecombe to buy a skirt and blouse, but I lost them, or couldn’t remember where they were, the garments had vanished and I was very worried. The Blairs were mixed up in that one too. Then I was invited to go on Woman’s Hour on R4 to speak about the govt’s plan to cut Child Benefit. When I got there I thought that two women producers were making fun of me with sinister nods and winks, verbal abuse took place. Then I couldn’t remember the name of the presenter, Jenni Murray, and no one would tell me. I woke up thinking, “Well, they will never ask me back, what a mess I made of that!”

An email from the redoubtable Loretta Oliver, Chief Exec of Ovarian Cancer Action.

She says she has spent the weekend walking through a dark tunnel after her last chemo. She had forgotten how bad it is. I was in that same tunnel – I am sorry we didn’t meet!

I spent the weekend feeling so lonely and neglected. London is a going out place. I had a lot of invites to go out, from Friday night when I was waiting for the nurse, onwards, but if you can’t go out you feel you are finished as a human being.

I was shut in thinking of that doctor of doom with his two percents and his “highly unlikely,” saying I had no chance. Facing this alone, with just the radio and the cat for company, I ended up thinking that even in the condemned cell at Newgate prison they sent someone to sit with you.

On Sunday night I suddenly started hearing from friends, messages came towards me like a flurry of birds and I immediately felt better.

This morning I know I am almost through it. My feet are very numb, can hardly walk, but feel that I can keep going out of this, and as an example of forward going, I am off to Italy this week, my first break since I visited the Felix Nussbaum Haus in Osnabruck in the rain last October. I’d just broken up with someone and was going down with flu.

Among the Christmas catalogues arriving on the mat I found a parcel from Fiona Kenworthy, containing a beautiful black and white headscarf. She sent me my turbans a couple of months ago when I turned into Joan Collins, and keeps in touch. Such a kind person. I recommend her. www.christinesite.dk

www.christineheadwear.co.uk

Cathal, who lives in Luxembourg and sometimes buys my paintings, has also sent me a £50 Amazon token. If he was one of the Medici he couldn’t be a better patron. Kind acts actually do help one to stay alive.

For lunch try a recipe from the River Cottage, never bothered with Hugh Fernly Whatsit before. It’s a Sardine Bake, but replace the sardine with salmon as that’s what I’ve got in the fridge and it’s about to go off.

This turns out to be a truly delicious marriage of softly fried onions, potato, fish, butter and milk. Absolutely yummy – one of the best meals I’ve ever had and it makes me think about the character in the Tin Drum, late in the novel, when the war has just ended, everything has been blown to smithereens, but he meets a friend and they eat a sausage together. All the food that went before doesn’t count because this meal marks the start of something new and different. They’ve survived and there was a future, even if it was east Berlin.

Harmony Breaks In Again

2010-10-02T04:11:00.000-07:00

“Harmony” first broke into my life way back in May, at the start of all this, when I first came out of hospital and needed a district nurse – and couldn’t easily get one. I did get one eventually, but she was called a “community nurse,” didn’t have a uniform, instead she sported a great fat bosom sticking out of a silk blouse, and came with a capacious bag full of equipment. She took over an hour to apply one dressing as she had been given no information about what was needed and had to rummage through so much to find the right size.

I am still not sure where the “Harmony” bits come in, I thought it was the name of a nursing agency which was obviously out of control, but I now discover that those nurses from Ealing and Acton are part of the Primary Care Trust and “Harmony” is just their call center.

On Wed 29^th Sept in the chemo clinic, Nurse Eileen made a referral by phone for me to have three injections, on 30^th, 1^st and 2^nd at 5pm to increase my blood count to prevent an infection.

I was with her when this was done and felt slightly nervous. I asked for the nurses’ number, just in case, but she quite blithely said it would all be OK, she had fixed it.

5pm was OK by me – I would have to miss an invite to supper with a friend, but I would be able to make it to meet her at the Jermyn Theatre in the West End by 7.30pm. We were going to the first night of If So, Then Yes, a new play by N.F Simpson, who is 91 and hasn’t had a new play on since 1972.

Thursday 30^th 5pm. No nurse in view. I had some how expected this. At 5.15 I rang the Acton Vale surgery and happily there was a receptionist who kindly called the Harmony call centre. I also called Clio and the Harmony people myself. I got the bad news that the nurses changed over from day shirt to “twighlight” at 5pm. I knew this was bad news. Harmony knew nothing about the referral and said the night nurses had no information either. They suggested I should call my doctor back and go there for the injection. I called the surgery again, but my doctor and his practice nurse had gone. I called Harmony again and the injection was then arranged for later that evening.

The hours ticked away. I could not ring my friend at the theatre as she doesn’t carry a mobile. Two nurses arrived at 9.30pm one bustling and black the other lethargic and Irish. “I can see you’re a bit stressed,” she said. I was even more so when the black nurse told me they were not authorised to give the injection as I had, “no letter.”

Feeling all those microscopic cancer cells creeping back and opening out like jelly fish with all this stress, I said, “I must have that injection.” They tried to call out a Dr Raj. We sat and waited and the Irish nurse told me about her beagle puppy which kept breaking out and leaping her fence. He is apparently locked up in her home all day and bored to death.

Doctor Raj was not available, so in the end I gave myself the injection while they watched.

All friends by now, they assured me they would give information back to the community nurses on the day shift about what had happened. I wondered how I was going to get these injections at different times, or if they would all have to be this late, which would mean cancelling more plans. I could not see that I would be able to get them in the mornings and evenings, that would be far too complicated.

On Friday 1^st just after 10am I got a call from Harmony, someone speaking in the most harmonious voice imaginable, with an almost forced joyfulness, saying they had just received a referral for me that morning, and a nurse would soon be arranged.

I explained what had happened and the woman on the phone said they had received no previous referral, no phone calls at all, from me, Clio or the doctor’s receptionist. They said the nurses from the previous evening had not contacted anyone either.

They said that if I had a problem I would have to call the nurses myself directly, but then said they could not give out any of their numbers. Nurse Clio also had this problem when she tried to contact them.

I again called your receptionist and Clio, who phoned Harmony again. I was told by a nurse that she had seen the original referral, and put a note by it on her computer for someone to pick it up. She was very vague about what had happened to it then. Later in the day I got a call from Harmony, from someone called Alex, who called herself “the supervisor,” Which is apparently not her job title.

She said that the problem was that the day time nurses “were already on their team visits” when the original referral arrived. “I don’t know why you are upset, your doctor should have sent this referral three days ago,” she said. So that put me in my place – the place of a bald headed, stressed out chemo patient who should shut up and disappear.

After they’d gone my friend who I’d missed at the theatre rang me, not cross at all. She’d been with a doctor friend of hers. “As soon as you didn’t show up we looked at each other,” she said, “and both said, “the nurse hasn’t come.”

The play, was apparently excellent and very funny. N.F Simpson was actually there in the audience! I would love to have seen him, with his impish face and bushy white beard. Oh well, nothing can be done and it could have been worse.

I made the calls and since the two “twighlighters” did their flit I have been doing the injections myself, but if I had been much older, frailer, or not so able to deal with all the stress of the situation by myself, I would have been left by the community nursing service with no injections at all.

Just before I went to sleep there was a bit of news on the radio that big, bushy eye brows are back in fashion and all the girls on the cat walk are striding around looking like Denis Healey, as if they have large wriggling caterpillars walking over their faces. Perhaps it was a good thing I didn’t go out to the West End then, I fear I am falling far behind at the moment in the area of high fashion.

Chemo Six - Last One - who knows?

2010-09-30T02:34:00.000-07:00

28^th September

I was quite up; last chemo, blood clear, scan clear, but the words of that charming doctor changed everything, like a weather-forecaster on the evening news who announces calmly that an unstoppable meteorite is heading for earth, or at least my bit of it.

According to him I can expect two years at most before the cancer comes roaring back and if we are just looking at the statistics, as he does, less than five years of life. He has given me enough stress to trigger off any stray microscopic bits of disease.

I thought I would have no story to blog now, but instead I am left wondering whether to go and pester another doctor for reassurance, trying a woman as they tend to be more empathetic and not such ruthless show-offs, should I complain about him and enter a fight? I don’t know his name, on the phone when the nurse repeated it, it sounded like a gurgle in the throat. I don’t remember his appearance except that his face was like a wholemeal fruit scone.

Cardinal Newman said that everyone has a mission in life and should try to find it, is fighting with glib, supercilious doctors to be mine? I have no strength for it, and defeated at the start as I need them and what he says can probably be backed up by those good old stats.

A chemo ward is not like a concentration camp when you know you are going to die so you get stuck in and try to blow up the crematoria, we need these doctors of death as they are the only people who can offer any hope at all.

Hope? Well I had that, it was like a small, gusting wind, an erratic zephyr inside, until scone face punched it flat.

29^th of Sept.

Slept quite well but as soon as I got up on my last chemo day, I remembered that according to stats, I will be back there for more perhaps within a year, and I have a life expectancy of about five years.

Did some crying in the shower. These are tears of shock, of having to adjust rapidly, not those deep agonising tears of despair often to be heard emanating from shower units all over the country. Heard on the Today Programme, about a report conducted by Relate the marriage guidance people and TalkTalk the mobile company, about how unhappy and unfilled most middle aged people are. I don’t feel bad about my life; the writing and the painting have come back to me with renewed vigour, I am not sad, just knocked off balance by that smiling, brown faced bully.

Need to change my future plans too – in fact all plans on hold. I was going to buy a new car and was looking at the Vauxhall “life time warranty,” for cars doing under 100,000 miles, that is now pretty much a cert! I was going to buy a very basic model as I am trying to save money to move, sometime after a policy comes up in 2012, but I can’t make plans like that now.

Rang the hospital to find out about the message they’d left the night before, and mentioned to the nurse that I had been upset the day before, and wanted to speak to another doctor, preferably a woman as they seem more empathetic. She said she would mention this quietly to the lady doctor on duty. The one I saw previously, whom I liked has now left.

Before I set off for the hospital I prayed for a short while, asking God to send me an angel pretty damn quick, someone to help me as I was at such a loss, unable to cope with this new situation; thinking I might be cured but being told this was next to impossible.

My two angel friends Chris and Melissa were waiting for me when I arrived, but in Garry I was told I could only have one guest as there was such little room in the corridor/clinic. They worked out a shift system between them.

Rather than mention it quietly, the young nurse had announced what I said in a full staff meeting including all the doctors. This seemed to set up a bit of a flurry. While I was getting the canula stuck in my arm, a Spanish looking woman doctor, with a large silver crucifix round her neck came over. I told her quickly what had been said. She said, “I have no words for you about this as I was not there, but he was behaving professionally and a lot of patients would welcome that.”

Worse, she said that Proff. Gabra, the head man, he of “this is a Rotweiller not a poodle,” back in May when I first got my results, said he wanted to see me in his office on Tuesday. No thank you, I do not want to hear any more statistics telling me I must die, and soon.

I saw a Russian woman looking at me cynically. Her cancer has returned after less than a year, but they never removed it all in the first place. No doubt she thought I was screaming out denial about my own condition.

Then Loretta Oliver strode in, the mighty woman who has been ill since 2007, who helps to run a charity called Ovarian Cancer Action, as well as running a home and being a mother to two young children.

I told her what had happened. She looked horrified. At his words, only between two and four percent of women do not have cancer recurring, which means that about 98 percent do, she looked appalled. “The figure is 50 percent of women returning,” she said, and she went off to find him, and challenged him.

She said he backed down and admitted that his figure was wrong.

She didn’t ask him the interesting question of WHY he said all that to me. In 2007, her GP told her husband that she would be dead within six months. Doctors, do they just go mad and start to hate their patients? “Inappropriate,” was the word Loretta used to describe both these events.

She was my angel and as soon as she spoke to me, with that 50 percent my spirits went up. Scone face knocked me off balance and she righted me.

Before I left Nurse Eileen took my hand and stroked it. “I never want to see you here again,” she said very quietly. She could not have said anything sweeter.

Now I have so much work to get on with – on, on.

What was it all for?

2010-09-28T09:02:00.000-07:00

28^th September.

I had a great Saturday. Attended the London School of Painting and Drawing in Kensington, such a good class. I have been going there since it began about ten years ago. They have a life class once a month, with two models in natural and artificial light. When I got home I carried on painting till about 9pm then I noticed a red ring right round my middle, and itching under my arms and down my shoulder blades. It went on growing from there, a terrible rash, which spread all over, up the back of my head, behind my ears, but not on my face.

I was scared and had a night of Lord Peter Whimsey and other crime and sci-fi hours which all blurred into one.

On Sunday I could not go to church as I was covered in Calomine lotion and would have looked like a zombie. As usual in this day and age, I looked myself up on the internet and saw under side effects of chemo, a rash that covers the body and spares the face. Something called, macupapular which can strike at any time during the post-chemo cycle.

Feeling anxious I rang the oncology dept at Hammersmith, some how the word “oncology” doesn’t really seem to apply to me. No one answers. Try Charing Cross and get a friendly doctor who says it is a reaction to the Steroids. He suggests I go in to the A & E.

Decide not to go in as I would almost rather die than spend Sunday sitting in an A & E department, and I do not have a temperature so it can’t be that bad.

Spent the day feeling listless and lost, longing for company. The shock of it and realising that for once I had nothing much in the fridge made me feel lonely. A friend called at my request, dropping off some washing up liquid and a she added a box of chocolate éclairs. She didn’t ring the bell though, as she thought I was asleep.

Living alone certainly has its down; the art class, I hadn’t been there since April, before the start of all this. I was uncertain whether anyone would greet me or say anything about my bald head. They were friendly but I wasn’t sure. As a single person I am always like a college fresher, out to meet new exciting people, always waiting, hoping for a good response but always uncertain.

Felt very gloomy by tea time but got on with some painting. I’ve set up a still life tying to make objects and ordinary things suggest unease, they probably will without my trying.

Tuesday it’s Garry for my last blood test before my last chemo. I hardly dare say it, I hope so much never to see the place again but feel I can’t really be that lucky. This feeling stops me being really happy that the thing is nearly over.

The clinic has become part of my little world, a tiny Ambridge full of gossip and human feelings. It's my lucky day, for the first time there is only one other person there waiting. Anne has been chatting to the Singaporean phlebotomist, who says he is Spanish. Apparently he has been in the job since January and before that he was in catering – in a restaurant.

Well now he gets to swank about in a white coat, touching up the nurses. In the narrow corridor between the doctors’ rooms and the nurse station see him put his hand on a nurse’s back and let it lie there until she shrugs it off, not looking up from her sheet of notes.

Ask to see a doctor, I didn’t have to, but I am looking for reassurance since the last one said that as my cancer was “aggressive” it was more likely to come back than a non aggressive one.

See a doctor I haven’t seen before, two other people, probably students are sitting in. The atmosphere is jovial, even skittish. When I tell him about the rash he laughs says it must have been caused by fruit juice. He says it would only have appeared right after my last treatment not a few weeks later.

He also says that statistically ovarian cancer is almost certain to come back within two years.

“There are only about two to four percent of patients where this doesn’t happen," he said, as if this would cause no reaction in me.

"With that level of disease, it is very doubtful that we can have found all the microscopic cancer cells out and removed them," he went on cheerfully.

I remembered a letter passed to my doctor saying that the disease was "well contained within the ovary" and had not spread. They had removed all the cancer, and my blood test was down from fifteen to ten, totally normal. But his words struck me such a blow that I couldn't keep hold of this information against his.

As I went out he said, “Fingers crossed,” with a cheerful grin.

Walking out of the hospital, up the tunnel which leads from the north side, feel I want to burst into tears, but can’t as it is too embarrassing. Desperate to get home again but there is the long wait for the bus.

On the way back, go over it, this way and that. He said most people with stage 4 ovarian cancer have a nodule in the diaphragm, up by the navel, I didn’t have that. Nothing has gone to my vital organs, my blood is clear, everything was well contained, but he said, “It is unlikely that we have removed all the microscopic cancer cells. Only a small percentage don't come back.”

I have to live with this, this waiting for it to come back when I have to start living with it as part of my life, the "chronic condition" they talked about when I was in hospital. It feels like an overwhelming nightmare and I am right back to the first time I went down that passage in tears, thinking, not me, why me?

Too Much Joan

2010-09-22T01:36:00.000-07:00

13/9/10

Who is this in the mirror? Whoever she is, I am sick of her and she’s making me nervous.

After all the talk about looking good and feeling glam, I am having doubts. My face seems to be swelling up so I look more like Ed Balls and Matt Lucas than La Collins, and despite eating acres of broccoli I seem to be pasty with lines under my eyes, like a rueful ghost.

Realise that I am upset because my eyebrows have suddenly gone, and with them my eyebrow pencil. I had a soft old, grey stick, but the lead is now finished. None of my other pencils work well, and if you go out with an eyebrow colour too strong, blotchy or wiggly you look absurd.

Also realise that I have slowed down. My legs ache and my feet feel as if I am wearing wooden boots, so I just can’t progress up the pavement at the speed I used to. I must accept this I suppose. The idea of having a hernia also makes me feel like an old crock, caput really. I suppose I should have accepted this weakness as part of the new person that I am, but I am miles away from doing that.

Tuesday 14^th Young Father Steve came from St Michael’s in Chiswick, bringing communion. Apparently it’s “Holy Cross,” day.

The first time I have ever sent out for it. I wasn’t sure that he was bringing it, I thought it might just be a friendly chat, but he came on his bike with a large black holdall and started unpacking gold candlesticks, a cross and other shiny objects, looking rather like a burglar.

He set up the altar on my small coffee table, putting down a crisp white cloth, then laying out the objects including a shining silver pyx in the centre. It all looked surprisingly beautiful.

He took the service from the Roman Missal. The reading was from Numbers, 21:4-9 about Moses leading the children of Israel out of Egypt only for them to be stranded in the desert where they were bitten by “fiery serpents.” He takes a serpent and ties it onto a stick, not an easy thing to do at the best of times, and holds it up before them, prefiguring the idea of the cross; an object of terror which becomes a symbol of hope. I did enjoy the service and felt if not encouraged, calmer. Not so alone with the idea that I might die soon. It’s probably the most satisfying take-away I have ever had.

I was able to give him a piece of cake I’d made with fresh blackberries, and sherry, well I had that, he had tea. I always try to get vicars to drink sherry and they just never will as if taking part in the cliché will do them serious damage.

Friday 17^th.

Have to go to the Renaissance Hotel, High Holborn to interview Amanda Evans, a former tennis professional about the death of her father. He died from Pulmonary Fibrosis. The Daily Telegraph want a piece about it for their health pages.

This is a bit of a task, not because I can’t do the interview or write it – but because I can no longer get my eyebrows right. I haven’t found a good replacement pencil and I think they look a bit ropey.

At the bus stop, sitting there in my turban, makeup and shiny black mac, a woman walking past gives me a look – I cannot interpret it, it could be, “get you,” or you look ridiculous, or it could have meant that she thought I looked too good for Acton Vale, W3, which isn’t difficult. I can’t interpret it but it’s like a knife cutting me.

Arrive early and look for lunch. There are a mass of tedious chain cafes, but find a Vietnamese café. It’s crowded and when I have finished my rice and aubergine realise that I have to go to the back of a very long queue to get some tea. Mention this to a young girl who has come to my table. She doesn’t reply, just stares at me. What must she see? Some ghastly looking, mad old bat?

Scuttle off and see an Italian greasy spoon up a side street. They are usually quite cosy places although their cakes look strangely artificial. They could well be as no one ever seems to eat them.

Not many people in, and as I stand at the counter the Italian serving comes up, but ignores me and speaks to some young girls who have come in behind me. I must look so bad he can’t bear to look at me at all. I am invisible. Decided to have the tea outside at one of their tables on the pavement. Realise I am surrounded by smokers and I am terrified of breathing in carcinogens these days. The tea doesn’t come, decided to give up and walk away. Half expect to be called back to pay for something.

At the Renaissance, I am treated at least as graciously as if I were Joan Collins, or the late Princess Margaret. Sink into the soft cushions on a large sofa as young men fuss around me and bring me a menu and tea. When I had money I stayed in places like this and rarely saw the other stuff. Money might not bring happiness but it brings you less bruising.

Amanda arrives and the interview goes very well, but all the way home I can only think about that Italian and how rude he was, and wonder, why? Why?

During the week the Pope arrived. This all started out very badly with virulent atheists and pompous lefties prating on at great length. The whole things seemed mired in the disgrace of the paedophile scandal, but as the week went on things changed around and somehow a festive atmosphere emerged. The sight of his little red shoes boosted me. I suppose a change is as good as a rest and he doesn’t come on a state visit that often, about once every four hundred years.

I was encouraged to face my fears too by some of the words of John Henry Newman. I also discovered that Newman largely invented the Anglo-Catholic church, he is responsible for beautiful young vicars cycling about with bags full of divine objects.

Bought a book on Anglicanism, which is suddenly more important and real to me. It’s becoming a bit fashionable again too - perhaps because it is, as Elizabeth I put it, “mere English,” something that is gradually becoming valuable again.

It says in this book which seems to be written by a friend of Peter Tatchell, that the church has lost its congregation because it can no longer speak to a national character, we no longer have, a national character. Of all the appalling ideas flying about over the last few weeks, that is perhaps the worst.