Cancer 49

I have just developed a new fear. It happened while I was scrambling down a vertiginous slope while walking at Hadrian’s Wall. I realised that if I fell, and it was rather precarious, especially with my aching bones, I may well break a leg ir two and spend the rest of my foreshortened life in hospital, in traction, in pain unrelated to any rapidly spreading cancer. To be in hospital with cancer is a nightmare, to be in hospital because of my own stupidity when I could be at home dying of cancer is a worse nightmare. I don’t think I will walk anywhere ever again just in case I get injured. I had better not drive in case I am in an accident. I had better not stay at home in case Libyans decide to blow up an airliner somewhere above my house – sorry, that is in bad taste. We have just driven past Lockerbie. I drove past it 36 hours after the plane crashed there and there were bits of aeroplane everywhere, especially lining the sides of the road.

The problem with black humour is that while a lot of modern folk disapprove (how can you make jokes about race, sex, the Holocaust, pet cats, etc?), when you are sitting dying black humour is one of the best ways of staying cheerful. I have heard some good cancer jokes while I have been ill. I can’t remember them partly because I never remember jokes – my humour is spontaneous folks! – and partly because for the last few months the part of my brain critical for inputting new long term memories, the hippocampus, seems to have metamorphosed into a cancerous lump. I can’t remember new things in the way I could. Actually I have no idea if I have cancer in my brain if anyone is worried.

If anyone knows any good cancer jokes, the sicker the better, please send them to me. Perhaps they could become a blog.

The part of Hadrian’s Wall we were visiting is near to that part that is somewhere between where Robin Hood Prince of Thieves landed on the south coast and Robin’s Dad’s castle presumably in Snottinghamshire. If anyone isn’t aware ofnthe basic geography of England you don’t need to go via Hadrian’s Wall to make this trip.

The story of Robin Hood (not the Prince of Thieves version) has always inspired my basic socialism. I realise that many people do not think Robin existed, but of course he did. Who else wouls fight against the basic inequities extant in the feudal system sometime in the (probably) 13th Century? I know he existed. My Aunty May made me a Robin Hood suit when I was little. Armed with a Dad-made bow and arrows (a bit of a plastic downpipe for a quiver, baling twine for a bow string), I conquered our woods and extracted a toll from all comers to give to the poor.

And don’t give me this nonsense about Robin coming from Nottinghamshire. He was from Loxley on the disputed Derbyshire-Yorkshire border. He holed up in the Peak District when not robbing ruch people on the Great North Road, in both Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, and the Sheriff of Nottingham at the time was a Peverill from Castleton in Derbyshire. The two counties, Derbyshire and Snottinghamshire were a unitary council at the time.

I just thought I had better make that clear.

What kind of punctuation mark am I? A semicolon cancer.

There, those random jottings might convince you my brain is addled (riddled?). I will just sit here quietly.