Second check-up looms

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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!