wavelteats' Journal

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I didn't realise at the time

For some reason - well for work reasons - I keep ending up in Germany or German-type places recently. Munich about a month ago, Duesseldorf last week and then Zurich this week. In August I am going to Vienna for a few days with my aunty.

Last night we went out for dinner to a restaurant in the Schloss Laufen at Neuhausen, which is on the Rhine at the border with Germany. I've been to the Rhine before, but usually it's fairly sedate. At Neuhausen it was racing along and there were some magnificent waterfalls. All very nice. Today I discovered that these are the apparently the largest falls in Europe. And I didn't realise at the time!

Anyhoo here is a shaky picture I took with my BlackBerry which quite fails to capture anything except that I am not a natural photographer.

Across the falls is GERMANY! It was a bit like the end of The Sound of Music. But in reverse.

Der Rheinfall

I haven't been here - at the Teats Data Uplink Nerve Center, I mean - for YONKS. Just been so busy at work and getting on with things. Today is the anniversary of my leaving the Royal Free, which I suppose should be a big day. But I didn't realise this either - until I was on the Heathrow Express this evening.

Otherwise... I've been doing the usual things with The Gay Dads. Went to Northern Ireland for a week with my parents... Who were in very good form.

My parents at Downhill, County Londonderry

See. I can't resist calling it Londonderry rather than Derry. I'm that SQUARE...

And here is me lurking in the shadows at Mussenden Temple at Downhill. This is me in holiday leisure wear.

Let's party

Voila ma vie...
My BlackBerry server at work is down... So I'm not getting work emails pushed to me... And this is a busy work weekend with a lot of prep going on for tomorrow... So I keep having to check into Outlook on my laptop to see whether any emails have appeared. This is what it was like in the olden days! Though not so olden as 1995, as Bengo was recalling. Yes! all that paper! Though I still have a funny thing about paper... I get a kind of erotic thrill from stationery shops...

It all kicked off in Eason's when I was a kid... and I then developed a funny crush on EDCO in Queen Street and Erskine Mayne and Bradbury Graphics. These shops sold sexy things like cartridge paper, every grade of pencil from diamond-hard to soft doughy 3B, tubes of oils and watercolours and mysterious Caran d'Ache coloured pencils ("mysterious" in that they exerted a strong appeal over me, and looked gorgeous in their neat Swiss protestant way... and yet entirely failed to live up to their promise of watercolour effects from a coloured pencil)

I still like to hang out in stationery shops... and while I DESIRE everything, in an abstract kind of way... I am not sure what I would DO with it, were I to buy it. It's a bit like a rather transparent metaphor, for OTHER AREAS of my life!

I loved the Martine stuff on Eskimo's last week... I must try it out on my French colleagues. Although I'm not sure they always share my Weltanschauung... when I bubbled over with enthusiasm for samizdat ortolans, I detected a sudden froideur develop...

Harlow furlough

Well I was at a loose end so I decided to check out one of the closer NEW TOWNS with a view to getting a move on with my gossipy tell-all bestseller on this topic. It's not fair to keep the world waiting.

I feel strangely DRAINED by my experience today - not that it was negative. But I do find surface trains a little bit intimidating and I'm never really sure how they work. The timetable thing is very stressful and not knowing what side to get out of... Anyway. Today in pictures!

I hope it doesn't seem like I am sneering - I CAN'T BEAR things like those Crap Town books. Which only have value in that they identify some of the snottiest snobs in the country. Harlow's not doing bad for somewhere that didn't exist 60 years ago - and it was very bustling and lively.

This was erected by Harlow Development Corporation to commemorate the founding of the new town in 1947. I wonder why they put it up in 1980? I guess the exhaustive research for my bestselling book will reveal all.

No shortage of amenities

I liked this groovy clock

This is called Terminus House

One of the precincts

I liked this breezy and modern deck-access elevated shopping experience - this was how the future looked, circa 1956

Harlow Pool, from the Town Park. It looked like the pool has closed down and the flume has seen better days, which is a shame as I loved these as a kid. Who doesn't! I'd love to go on one now but I think I would be too embarrassed.

Now this did puzzle me... It was on the back of a kind of coconut shy thing. Why would you want to associate any commercial enterprise with Del Boy and Rodney?

My last view of Harlow New Town: the station

Pirate Christmas

So... Gareth, Clayton and I decided to do another of our seaside Christmas specials. This year the theme was to be pirates.

Warming up for Pirate Christmas

We went to Rye Harbour in East Sussex, because we thought this would have the right piratical ambience. And it did! Plus it had a festive feel, as you can see.

Christmas Day at Rye Harbour

The plan was that we would spend around 72 hours living as pirates. Looking like pirates, eating like pirates, seeing what pirates see and thinking what pirates think.   I got into the swing of things very quickly...

Cap'n Wavelteats

I had the whole look down... Cutlass, wig, pirate's hat, big ruby ring, stripey pirate top, eye patch... I got into my pirate gear on Christmas Day - further embellished by a gift beard (thanks boys!) - and I think you'll agree I looked the part.

My "shipmates"

However my housemates had different ideas - and hadn't brought any pirate clobber at all.

It was very humiliating. For them, I expect. Still there's always next year. My pirate look with keep...

In other news... well there isn't any. And most of the rest of my Christmas Period can be pieced together from Bengo's blog.

I've been back at work this week and keen to get into the swing of things. I think that's the only way to grind through January - but it's been very quiet... lots of people are still off and it's been a bit of an anticlimax. Still I guess it will pick up next week.

Royal Free Update System

Healthwise... things got quite busy in December as my consultant suspected I was relapsing...

I was in Paris at the end of November when I got a call asking me to go for a CT scan on a Saturday (which sounded non-routine and scary)... This showed progression of SOMETHING in my neck (which was weird... cos it would mean that my cancer had jumped from below the diaphragm)... So I was referred to an ENT surgeon on the following Friday who did a procedure the next Monday to cut out some node for a biopsy... That was under general anaesthetic ... The labs came back a week later and said it was clear of malignancy... but then Haematology said the sample wasn't clinically significant... so I had to have another CT scan... Which showed no further progression of whatever it was that was in my neck (which is good news).

It was all very upsetting - worse than the first time because I knew what would be in store if I was relapsing... plus it didn't look very good and my consultant had initiated the tissue-typing thing with the Anthony Nolan bone marrow people as radiotherapy PLUS chemo PLUS conditioning PLUS a transplant looked like the most likely course.

They got my sisters to give blood samples to see if they would be suitable - and my London-based sister started a marrow drive thing to get all her friends and colleagues tested for bone marrow transplant matches. Which I found almost unbearably touching.

The thing dragged on through December and up until the 19th or so I wasn't sure whether I would be doing Christmas - pirate or not - or spending the next months back in the Royal Free. It was really exhausting and I don't feel I was terribly brave or magnanimous or all that other shit you're supposed to be when you have cancer.  It all felt so UNFAIR - I'd done a year of this and I thought I had come so far and it looked like I was going to be dragged back. I was quite teary when the consultant first told me at the start of December that she suspected relapse and began to talk about booking me in for a bone marrow aspiration (not very nice)... And that mode of self-pity and anger and fear lasted for quite a lot of the month. I was not very proud of myself.

Plus it was / is pretty exhausting for everyone around me I feel. I wanted to give the people who had supported me for so long and through so much a happy ending. But it doesn't seem to work that way. I don't know if you really get an ending (well not the ending I want). I guess my consultant is being very careful, which is good. And she says I'm too intelligent to fob off with the stuff they tell everyone else. Which is flattering, I suppose. And she says I deserve a very high level of certainty that I am OK that won't be rocked by my tendency to ask questions... But still I would like a break from it all. That's what was so good about the general anaesthetic - time off without worrying or getting angry or having funny dreams.

It was fantastic to get positive news on the 19th; the news that there had been no progression. But it's not an all-clear really and I am back in the Royal Free the week after next for a needle biopsy on the node...

Still I feel pretty good and I am enjoying life - neither of which are consistent with my flavour of lymphoma which I understand is the fastest moving form of cancer and is supposed to wipe you out in a matter of weeks.

That's not very festive, I know. And I am so fed up with it - and fed up with myself having it running round my head all the time.

On the upside, the biopsy on my neck was stitched together with 15 metal staples that looked really PIRATICAL. But it's healed up now really well.

My gripe

I bought an 8GB Nano a few months ago thinking: "oh I'll never ever fill that up with pop tunes"... But of course I did... So I bought a Touch on Sunday last. It is a thing of immense beauty - but it's a bit CRASHY... Worst of all, it crashes on my most favourite records, like Tracey Thorn's King's Cross (Hot Chip Remix) which I got from Bengo's List ... It really seems to match my mood right now.

Have you had CRASHY iPod Touch experiences?

Victimisation

So... I felt I had to share this... It's part of a demo thing outside the Royal Free at the moment (Pond Street main entrance)... I don't know why they have singled out ME to receive this attention. And what's the message here - am I being OUTED? Or are the medical staff trying to send me a message...

Anyway... today I had to go for another CT scan for boring frustrating reasons... and I went in THE BACK DOOR to avoid this strange un-festive protest.

Current Music: Smash Hits Xmas Flexidisc

Métro-Boulot-Tesco-Dodo
Yes that's pretty much the pattern at the minute - although instead of Tesco a couple of nights a week it's Restau.

Apart from work, and recovering from work, I'm really not doing very much except the basics to keep the domestics ticking over. Plus trips to the Royal Free, which still average about once a week. On Friday it's an ultrasound scan... Which is great although I don't think I'll like that jelly stuff you see them smear on pregnant ladies on TV programmes. (And do ultrasounds really work - because those shadowy bubbly things you see on the screen don't look like babies to me).

I'm enjoying being busy with work and having my energy used up by it - but it doesn't, until my energy levels return to normal, leave time for other things.

A recent highlight was Jelly's Birthday, and that's been about it (was fun to see Jody and few other Livejournal people there).

This weekend I've got more stuff lined up, and a fortight after that Gay Dad Sean and some other friends and I are going to Belfast for a weekend. Ostensibly for a cultural trip (the festival is on at Queen's University)... but in fact everything is sold out / not on while we are there.

Anyhoo... the upshot of all of this is... that there's not much to write about at the moment.

The high cost of living
Yipee! I had a haircut today - my first since January! It cost £20 including the gratuity. Then last week I bought razor blades for the first time this year, and they were like £9 for ten or something. But I don't begrudge the expenditure cos it's for growing hair.

Something that DID phase me this week was a bill from the Royal Free for £24,000. Which by anyone's reckoning is quite a lot of money. I rang the insurance people and it seemed that £6000 of it or so is due to the hospital administration dragging its heels over some admin. The other £18,000 is still up in the air.

That £24,000 is just scratching the surface, of course. In April, the insurance people told me I would soon be clocking up £100,000 on hospital bills.

Makes you think, I suppose...

Current Music: Sunshine on Leith - The Proclaimers

The Discovery of France

While we were in France a couple of weeks ago I was getting very excited by the typography on the motorway signs or the excitement of accelerating away from a toll plaza (which I think is the closest you ever get in real life to what it feel like to zoom off from the starting line in the Wacky Races) when my pal Mike observed: "For someone who professes to hate France you seem to be completely in love with the place!"

Which of course is completely true. I love all the standard stuff about France - the food, the poise of ladies driving on autoroutes with a perfectly angled cigarette in a manicured hand, the quaint towns, the vastness of the countryside, etc... But I've also been fascinated by the modernity of France.  The TGV, the Minitel, the hovercraft suspension on sexy low-slung Citroën cars, the exhiliration of driving at speed through the underground city of tunnels at Châtelet - Les Halles, the villes nouvelles like Évry, the trains à deux étages ... The latter still exerts a strange fascination as my colleagues can attest when I start jumping about with excitement in my Eurostar seat as we enter the final sudden approaches to the Gare du Nord.

Here's a picture to show how fab they are - this one was a TER regional train at Arras in the Pas-de-Calais.

A train à deux niveaux!

That said, there is much that is completely infuriating about France for an Anglo Saxon such as myself - much of which is, I suppose, the flipside of the centralising and elitist philosophy which makes the trains a modern wonder of the world and allows you to enjoy a standardised - and excellent - cup of coffee in even the remotest corner of metropolitan France (and, I am sure, in les DOM-TOM too).

So France is something of an enduring puzzle to me (as I suspect it might also be for Eskimolimon?). Particularly as I work for a very French French company. Which is why I have been devouring The Discovery of France by Graham Robb. It's an account of how modern France was ruthlessly forged from a hugely disparate jumble of identities, languages and geographies in surprisingly recent history.

The contrasts with Britain are huge - in comparison with the parvenu France the UK looks incredibly cohesive, ancient and unfied around a common language and long-shared values. I was surprised to learn that Britain operated in lots of different time zones until the railway and the telegraph finally brought the entire country under the sway of Greenwich Mean TIme in the 1880s.  But I think you can understand how technical difficulties - and the lack of speedy communications - made it impossible to impose standard time and, above all, unimportant. It didn't really matter if Bristol time ran 10 minutes behind London time if it took a whole day for a galloping horse to travel between the two.

In France however, which one thinks of today as the home of efficient and scientific metric system, the most basic measurements differed between neighbouring towns in a way that seems to defy common sense or explanation.  According to Robb, even after decimalisation was introduced in 1790, a pinte was just over one litre in one Limousin village, and well over two in another. The Nord département (which in my pro-Northern pro-Lille prejudice I assumed to be modern and Britishy) had thirty-five measures of capacity, all bearing the same name.

These kinds of differences were replicated a thousand times across a country the size of a continent - a country so vast and unknowable that even as late as the 1930s the cartographers of Paris could not be certain that they knew of all the pays that traditionally divided up France.

In essence, Robb argues that what we now know as France - and the French - was the result of an aggressive colonisation of the seemingly boundless periphery by a tiny elite in Paris. Which, I suppose, would explain a lot about how France and the French think today. The elite worked very hard and for centuries to make France into the functioning cohesive unity that it now is, and are damned if they are going to change their ideas now. Which is admirable in its way - but can be tricky when the French way of thinking runs up against a very different Anglo Saxon tradition.

I suppose it all adds to the gaiety of the nations...

My Big Gay Wedding

Not my wedding - but the civil partnership of Sean and Rob. AKA The Gay Dads. It's good that they have finally gotten round to tying the knot and legitmising me.

The ceremony was at Marylebone Town Hall on Saturday, with about 100 people squashed into the room. The proceedings were a little late getting underway, due to other weddingers failing to turn up on time for their Big Days. How rubbish is that!

I had a special job - pressing the Play button on the CD player at key moments during the ceremony. It was an awesome responsibility but I think I acquited myself OK.

The reception was held on a boat on the Thames. We cruised from the Tower to somewhere east of the Thames Barrier and then westwards to Putney while we did drinks, had dinner and did the usual wedding things. I had to give a sort of Best Man speech on the part of Gay Dad Sean. This was tricky as Sean - who can be quite frightening - had ruled all the juiciest potential subject matter out of play.

Sean directs passengers to the lifeboats

Oh! We had some stowaways! Here I am apprehending them with Jonathan

Emma and Jonathan and FLAGS...

Travel Special

A motorway in France on Friday 24th August 2007

Last week my pal Mike and I went to Nord-Pas de Calais. It was a semi-repeat of our wildly successful 2005 trip to Rouen in Haute-Normandie.

On the Thursday we went to Arras for lunch but got distracted along the way so it ended up being dinner. We called in at the Canadian National Vimy Memorial outside Arras. It's an impressive and moving place, with a huge monument on the Vimy ridge surrounded by thousands of north American trees to commemorate the 11,285 Canadians who died in the First World War. They are also named around the pedestal of the memorial. One of them was my great uncle, after whom I am named.

The Vimy memorial

Just down the road at Neuville-St-Vaast is a memorial cemetery for German troops from the Great War. It has a very different feeling to the Vimy site, and somehow is more poignant. This is the largest German military cemetery in France. It is laid out very simply, with thousands of grey crosses ranked in lines with - for want of a better cliché - military precision. Each cross carries the name and rank of four soldiers. Altogether there are more than 44,000 men buried at Neuville-St-Vaast. Every so often the exact rows of crosses are interrupted by stone memorials, marked with the Star of David, to commemorate Jewish soldiers who died for Germany.

Neuville-St-Vaast

By the time we got to Arras we were way too late for lunch but also too early for dinner so we went and booked in at a hotel. It was my first Formule 1. Here, for €31, you get a room with bunkbeds for the night and the opportunity to experience 1980s self-cleaning toilet technology.

MIke and the Petite Place in Arras

The next day we drove over to Lille. I stayed in Lille for about a month or so when I was at school, working on an archeological dig organised by the city council in Place Rihour, a square in the city centre. I've been back to Lille many times subsequently and I have grown to love the place. In some ways it is unprepossessing - before I went in 1990 my French master had described it as the Birmingham of France. He added that it was chiefly famous for its unemployment rate, sprawling and notoriously dismal suburbs and the world's first fully automatic Metro system.

I soon saw that there was much more to Lille than that. Working for the municipality I was able to get a good grasp of Lille's energetic attempts to re-make itself as a centre for the service economy and tourism. The city had lobbied hard to make sure it was on the route of the Eurostar TGV lines between Paris, London and Brussels and was painstakingly rehabilitating the run down but quaint streets of the Vieux Lille quarter.

The TGV certainly put Lille on the map and the municipality's attempts to build up the city's cultural life paid off when Lille was made European Capital of Culture in 2004. Lille still has its rough edges - but for me that's part of the attraction.

Grande Place / Place du Général de Gaulle, Lille

I popped into le Furet du Nord to get some French music after Mike had broken down my resistance by repeatedly playing Michele Torr, Julien Clerc and Serge Gainsbourg in the car.

If her greatest hits album is anything to go by, Michele Torr's repertoire doesn't stray far from her tales of her native Provence and histories of the development of popular music through the years. One song - J'Aime - sounded more than a little like ABBA's Arrival. From the 1976 album Arrival!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip2aS8b0rDA

Some holiday snaps

This will be a lazy post where pictures do all the talking - and where the pictures will be bereft of meaning to ALL except marycigarettes, eskimolimon and that bengobaz (who if I remember correctly used to have the odd holiday in Northern Ireland when he was a child DJ). That said it will be packed with FACTS, some of them checked.

Help, mommy! It's the GHOST TRAIN at Barry's in Portrush. This ride looks a bit lame but it is much improved if you spend your entire time shrieking at the top of your lungs like a girl. When else does life afford an opportunity to do that?

Apparently this is the tallest freestanding grandfather clock IN THE WORLD! It was built by Sharman D Neill in Belfast in 1892 and used to stand in Portrush railway station.

My secret weakness. I borrowed two quid from my dad and LOST IT ALL on the 10p push-and-drop machines. For about five minutes I was way ahead, with literally TENS OF PENNIES plopping into my eager sweaty hands. But eventually I was beaten by the odds.

The Bushmills - Giant's Causeway Railway, which ran just below our cottage at Ballylinny, Bushmills. My two-year-old niece asked: "Where's Thomas's face gone?" I replied: "Oh they take his face off to change the expression..." WRONG ANSWER!

My sandcastles at the White Rocks beach. I got my sister to build the defensive sea wall which proved to be absolutely useless - even when I did a Canute and specifically forbade the Atlantic to advance one foot further.

I didn't want my picture taken. Can you tell? This is me sporting that gaunt post-chemotherapy look at THE GIANT'S CAUSEWAY!

Basalt doesn't get much more columnar than this. More of THE GIANT'S CAUSEWAY / LA CHAUSSÉE DES GÉANTS (for Eskimolimon)

What you don't see: The Flash in the Pan chip shop on Main Street in Bushmills. The old Dolphin has gone - but The Flash in the Pan was very good. You get two pieces of fish in the fish supper!

As well as going to Bushmills in late July, I took a trip to NI earlier in the month. Most of this time was spent with my parents driving me round County Down and into the Republic at Carlingford. Here's a couple of pics from this...

Tractor rally in Portaferry. We got misdirected by a policeman and ended up as part of a tractor rally through Portaferry. It was quite embarrassing because we were in a VW Golf and we felt a bit incongruous.

The Strangford ferry. I love taking the short ferry ride from Portaferry to Strangford town across the lough. It's a bit like the kind of ferry you might get in a Stephen King novel.

Erm... a festive patriotic tea towel. My friend Phil got me this to take me back to my roots. Gratifying it was actually manufactured in Northern Ireland. My fridge magnet of City Hall in Belfast was made in China which is quite a depressing thought (although I am not sure why).

And that's it for now. Told you it would be lazy...

Current Music: Life's A Scream - A Certain Ratio

Sean's Prawns

On Saturday evening I got back from my second quick trip over to Northern Ireland - this time to the north coast where I did loads of marycigarettes type things.

I came back for Sean's stag do - which was perhaps more sedate (and interesting) than stag do's as I imagine them to be.

Anyway rather than take pictures of people Laura the organiser got everyone to take a picture of their starters at Veeraswamy. Here are the results. (One of the dishes below is a MAIN course! Can you guess which?)

Current Music: I'll Remember Tonight - The Mamas & The Papas

First month out...

Thank you for your kind messages - on here and elsewhere.

So I've been out of the Royal Free for a month now - although going back plenty for outpatient appointments. That's OK really because you get to go home after - and I now know so many people at the hospital that I always feel quite welcome. Having lived there for four months odd and been treated by so many different clinicians and specialties I can be sure of seeing more than a couple of familiar and friendly faces.

Before I moved back into my flat I spent a week living as a guest of The Gay Dads, and then a further couple of days with Agent French. This was a good way to ease back into the world - and it was certainly good fun.

I got back to my place at the very end of June. At first it felt a little strange being back but I soon got into the swing of things. It was great being able to do things for myself - stupid things like filling the washing machine and deciding for myself what to eat and when.

Here are some of the things I have been doing...

Buying frenzy

It's tough being shallow and defining yourself through consumerism when you can't get to the shops. This was the sad position I found myself in for most of 2007. In the last few weeks I've been able to make up for all that missed time. I finally took possession of a frankly creepy Eames rocking chair I'd ordered months ago, bought a ZZ Top Eliminator keyring I've craved for years and finally got a new pair of cheap trainers.

Music catch-up

I had really missed my Homechoice VOD when I banged up so it's been nice to get back to the cheesy music videos. Bengobaz had made me one of his fab compilations a few months ago and I had become obsessed with a really plasticky little number called Perfect by Princess Superstar. Finally I was able to see the video - and it's fantastic. Lots of sugary colours and gymnastics and false eyelashes and arch winking. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UObmcnQtzs

Something else I've gotten into is iTunes - after resisting for years. It's fantastic! As everyone else in the world knew already except me.

I also bought a piano keyboard as I thought I should put this recuperation time to good use. The keyboard is huge - and quite intimidating. I've been eyeing it warily across the room for days. But it's surprising how much I can remember once I get down to it. I seem to be much better at finding the relationship between the notation and the notes on the keyboad - it's a lot easier somehow than when I was nine years old.

BB8

During my last spell in hospo the hotel in my room only picked up Channel 4 so I had little choice but to get into this year's Big Brother (even while most of my chums decided to eschew it). That said, the constant whining and arguing often makes it difficult to watch. I like Gerry but I've decided to back Brian because there's something winsome about him.

The evil of Facebook

While I was at the Agent's she made me get a Facebook and I'm afraid I've found it horribly compelling.

Trip to the Wee Six

Last week I went back to Northern Ireland for a week to stay with my parents. It was fantastic. We went all over the country (Portbalintrae, Strangford, Carlingford, Belfast...) and my mum force fed me throughout. As a result I feel I am finally regaining some of the 40 or so pounds I lost since last November.

The return of my eyebrows

I am also gradually regaining my eyebrows, which is a plus. It means I look less like "a peg in some horrid gypsy's basket" as Finton generously (and accurately) described me. The rest of my hair is also making a painfully gradual return. So far on my head it's emerging as a blond fuzz, which worries me that I could end up looking like Art Garfunkel. Bets are off for how one's hair grows back after chemo. I am kind of hoping it comes back ginger and curly, so I can look like I am in The Thompson Twins (but not like Mick Hucknall). Hair is also growing back elsewhere (they never warned me this would disappear courtesy of the chemo) - it's like going through puberty all over again. I hope my voice breaks soon...

What is a bonbonniere?

Now you know...

I may not be an ambassador - but now I can certainly entertain like one.

Where I have Been - Part 2
Well I said I would try to bring this thing up to date by going through les événements of H1 2007. But really it's a bit depressing and not something I feel like lingering on. Here's the skinny (just to wrap this all up)...

Christmas 2006

I was in a bad state over Christmas - I'd lost lots of weight and was in quite a bit of pain. The Gay Dads took me in and looked after me brilliantly. I've been very lucky to have them.

January 2007

After a second colonoscopy I had a sudden and surprising return to some kind of health. I went back to work for about four weeks and got a lot done. I was eating again and felt really great. But then the cramps and sickness returned with a vengeance and, with my gastro mystified, I got referred to my very suave surgeon.

February

At the start of the month I went into the St John and St Elizabeth hospital and had about 40 centimetres of my bowel removed. My surgeon had raised the less than appetising possibility that this procedure might result in my having to have a colostomy bag. Thankfully that was all OK - the first thing my surgeon told me in the recovery room was that he hadn't needed to take this radical route.

The St John and St Elizabeth was about as good as a hospital experience can be. It had great food - especially the breakfasts - and just two days after the op I was able to eat pretty much anything I wanted. The first time in several months.

As I began my recovery I felt great and I had various people in the medical trade come to ooh and ah over my rapidly healing tummy. But at the same time the section of bowel they'd removed from my was being biopsied and graded. On the day my staples came out the surgeon told me I had a high grade lymphoma.

I really didn't take in the seriousness of this and was quite relaxed about chasing the histology report (the detailed analysis that tells you what kind of lymphoma you have and which determines the next stage in your treatment).

My friendly doctor, however, was a lot less relaxed and told me that he was going to write a letter there and then which would remove me from work for a year. If we don't act on this immediately you are going to die was the message.

Within the next two days I had a CT scan, blood tests, a bone marrow aspiration and trephination (the details of which I will leave to your imagination) and was admitted to the Royal Free for a course of very potent chemo that would keep me in hospital for the vast bulk of the following four months.

March to June

There's not much I want to say about the chemo... it was a very potent variety that works by blasting out your bone marrow and destroying your immune system and capacity to make red blood cells. The first two rounds were scary and physically unpleasant and I became very ill (how ill I had been would only gradually emerge). Plus one of the chemo drugs caused a condition called peripheral neuropathy which, at one time, looked like it could be quite seriously disabling.

However by the third and fourth chemo cycles I'd gotten used to the routine and the main issue for me was the boredom and frustration of being held in hospital isolation for long periods.

I was lucky to have the support of many friends who were tireless and upbeat visitors through my time at the Royal Free. In the short periods - usually of around five days - when I was allowed out of the hospital I was able to rely on the hospitality of the Gay Dads who kept me fed, watered and entertained. Sean in particular was very good, throughout my stay coming to see me several times a week and taking care of the boring practical details that make all the difference (like doing my laundry).

Now

I have been out of the Royal Free for about two weeks or so - although I am a frequent visitor as an outpatient. They continually check my blood to see if my bone marrow is producing enough red and white blood cells. This week I felt there was some real progress when the doctors removed my Hickman line. This was a plastic tube that fed direct into a blood vessel in my chest. It had a couple of dangly things called lumens which they used to attach intravenous drips and take blood. The lumens clicked and clacked all the time like some horrible rosary and the line was a physical link back to the hospital. It was wonderful to have it taken out.

It's almost unbelievably good to be easing back into the real world and to be able to pretty much do what I want and go where I want and eat what I want (this is really important as I lost 20 kilos during my illness). Apart from the persistent neuropathy (which is more of a bore than anything else) I feel pretty good. I also seem to have acquired a superhero super power - the power to be really sensitive to smells like dirty hair, unwashed and stale clothing, and bad breath.

At the moment I am proceding on the basis that everything has worked with the chemo and that I can start to rebuild my life. In August I will have PET scanning and re-staging to determine whether the cancer has returned and its extent. For now though - for my sanity and to allow me to function at any level - I have to assume that I am all clear. If the worst happens I will deal with it then.

Artistic Interlude

Today Sean and I went to Dulwich Picture Gallery for lunch and a look around at the Uffizi exhibition of self portraits.

After we had a chance to create some ART ourselves. This is what I created. Can you tell which is which?

Where have I been...

So... I wanted to try to begin to get my thoughts in order on what's happened in the last six months.  And a lot has happened. I was very ill, I had major surgery, was diagnosed with cancer, spent four months on chemotherapy in the Royal Free... At the same time, not much happened at all. For much of the time I've been stuck in a series of hospital isolation rooms and experienced the world second hand through visits from friends and family.

The beginning

This is how it all started. At the end of November I flew up to Glasgow to speak at a conference. It was a fairly rough flight and I was sitting in the very last row on the Airbus, beside a very nervous flier who spent the hour or so it took to get to Glasgow with her hands gripped on a sick bag which she then made loud and copious use of as we went into the final and very bumpy approach. I can't help but pick up on other people's tension and this woman was radiating waves of STRESS. By the time I got to baggage reclaim I had a knot in my stomach.

After a few drinks at the SECC I'd relaxed somewhat but an hour or so after I went to bed the knot returned and progressively tightened through the night. It was ridiculously painful. By 3am I was on my hands and knees on the bathroom floor with a rolled up copy of The Spectator between my teeth. And then it got worse and worse, particularly if I lay down. The only way I could bear it was to walk round and round in circles until dawn.

Obviously the conference was a write off. I got a cab into Glasgow and spent what seemed like an age to find a chemist. Probably I should have just gone to A&E but, stupidly, I didn't want to make a fuss. I went to a Boots on Sauchiehall Street where they gave me Buscopan, which is apparently just the thing for crampy nastiness. But it did nothing at all for me, even as I scoffed down most of the blisterpack.

My original plan for Friday 1st December was to do the conference, cruise into the citycentre, meet an old mate Chris from school, do a nice long boozy lunch then fly back to London with Chris in the late afternoon for a relaxed weekend. As it turned out I passed the day in Chris's office clutching my stomach before it was time to head out to the airport.

I was very lucky to have Chris to keep an eye on me for the journey back - I really don't feel I could have done it alone. And Chris was great for the rest of the weekend, going out for supplies once we'd got home and taking me to the doctor on the Saturday.

My first brush with, what Jelly calls, the medical trade

The doc prodded and poked but didn't have any answers. He got me an appointment with a gastro specialist for the following Thursday.  I was OK with waiting a few days. The Gay Dads had come round to mine with more supplies and a hot water bottle, which gave me quite a lot of relief when kept pressed against my abdomen. I thought I'd probably be comfortable but by the Tuesday evening the pain was getting so bad that I went to the Royal Free A&E. Not then, of cours, knowing that very soon I'd be pretty intimately acquainted with pretty much all the imaging, biochemistry and care services the hospital has to offer.

I was bent over and looked a wreck. I hadn't been able to keep food down for days and was pale and dehydrated so I got through triage pretty quickly. In A&E they wired me up to a drip, put me on morphine, did bloods and an X-Ray. But still they couldn't tell me much, apart from the fact that I'd burned a hot water bottle pattern onto the skin of my stomach.

At about midnight Agent joined me in A&E and with her usual black humour she really took the sting out of the situation. At four in the morning they let me go home with some painkillers and antibiotics and no answers.

The gastro specialist couldn't tell me much either when I saw him a couple of days later, but he did book me in for an endoscopy - colonoscopy which felt like progress.

I don't recall much about the procedure. I was fairly heavily sedated and before I dropped off I remember the consultant saying that the anaesthetic throat spray should taste like burned bananas. I was just thinking "Hey, that's what crack is supposed to taste like" when I went out.

The endoscopy was fine but the colonoscopy revealed a mass in the small and large intestine which the consultant thought could be an intussusception, where the bowel wall had folded back on itself. Sort of like when you pull your jacket off too fast and the sleeve telescopes back on itself.

There wasn't much the consultant could recommend except that I maintain the low residue (white bread, white meat, no roughage) diet I'd been on to prep for the procedure. With Christmas and the brussels sprouts season approaching this was not the most welcome advice. And there was still no diagnosis for the cause of the intussusception. It could be a fluke of the way my tummy was built or it could be some kind of growth. At this stage no one was talking about cancer and I was most concerned that I might have Crohn's or colitis.

I was booked in for a further colonoscopy / biopsy and a CT scan immediately after Christmas...

God, so far I am finding this exercise quite a downer and not very cathartic. Things get brighter in the next chapter as the first of a couple of false dawns allows me to convince myself that everything in the tummy department was OK.

At the Gay Dads's for a few days
I just saw my last entry from November last year... A *sore tummy*? Ha! That was an understatement! Maybe one day I will write down the story of the last few months. Not necessarily here. At the moment though it's all still a bit raw.

On the up side, I am out of the Royal Free for a few days with The Gay Dads. Last time I was out it was very busy and great fun. I don't know if I'm quite up to that on this outing. The last chemo was like getting hit with a big hammer... anyway, with hope I won't have to go through that again.

Amazing how everything has moved on while I was away... all the trees are out and London looks like summer has properly arrived, even if the last few days have been really cold.

Right - time to go out.

I think this might be a mistake...
... these colours, I mean...

A Spaced Odyssey

For the last week I had a right funny tummy... it's something I've had, every so often, as long as I remember. What seems to happen is that I get progressively dissatisfied and pent-up about things, perhaps over a period of many weeks. I barely notice it's happening - in fact, I can be really productive in these periods. And then - snap - my tummy goes into crampy knots and I just have to stop everything. And I do mean everything. No booze. No fags. No coffee. No rich food. No moving about. No thinking even - because as soon as my mind drifts into anything remotely exciting, good or bad, I get these terrible cramps. Even from dreams... which means I don't seem to get much sleep either.

It's stupid that I let it happen, because I know that it does happen and I know how to manage it. But then it only occurs every few years...

Anyway... after a few very up-and-down weeks I crashed into one of my crampy tummy periods and had to go into stasis for a few days. (I did wonder if it might be Thalium Sulphate poisoning... or maybe Polonium... I've always been sure the Russians would be out to get me... particularly after I bought rubles with dollars in an illegal transaction at a Leningrad hotel in 1987... The Russians have long memories... eg. Peter Ustinov).

So there was nothing much to do except listen to the wireless and watch old TV. I started to watch an episode of Spaced - the one with David Walliams as Vulva (painter Brian's collaborator... like a terrifying cross between Leigh Bowery and, oh, Boogalu Stu). Well once I watched one I had to do the whole set. Series one and two. It's fantastic stuff and it really draws you in to their world... so it's a bit of a downer when it all ends.

That's that really. Nothing very much else happened. Which was the plan.

Oh. On TV right now... there's a thing about John Wyndham. Interesting. Most shocking fact: nectarines were invented by nuclear scientists who harnessed the power of the mighty atom to make peaches less hairy!