Cancer 218

Tom Stoppard is dead. I didn’t know he was Czech until the other day. He wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, an absurdist play based on Hamlet that I somehow liken to my two forms of morphine, zoomorph and oromorph. I don’t know which is which, but in an absurdist world it doesn’t really matter. In the play it is difficult to distinguish between Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whereas in the real world the zoomorph is slow release morphine that I take twice a day and oromorph a bottle from which I glug when necessary (actually, I don’t. I use a syringe, clearly marked with the correct dosage, it just sounds better to think I just upend the bottle and hope for the best).

I am using increasing amounts of morphine, both types. I have tremendously unpleasant things going on in my abdomen which scream at me regularly and ensure I never get a full night’s sleep. On a good night I sleep for an hour or two, wake for a few hours, and then sleep again for a few hours. On a bad night I don’t sleep. Everything is slowing down now, it is all starting to coalesce around my chair. Yes, we made it to Devon at the weekend, but I am shattered now. I just want to sit. When I say coalesce around my chair I mean it literally. My junk seems to gather.

My latest publication came out yesterday. It is an article entitled the ‘Siege of Leiden, 1573-74′, published in the magazine, Battlefield (The magazine of the Battlefields Trust and the Scottish Battlefields Trust), vol 30(1), pp 14-17. It is colourfully illustrated with maps and paintings of people such as Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, 3rd Duke of Alba. If there is anyone who doesn’t know about it, the siege took place during the 80 Years’ War between the Dutch rebels and the Spanish. Let me know if you want to read it!

In Hamlet, most of the key characters die, a bit like people having cancer. Is that absurd? Not really. What I think is absurd is the way people reference death. They talk of ‘passing away’ or just ‘passing’. On gravestones there is the nonsensical ‘went to sleep.’ I have a rule. I know I can’t impose rules from after death but I will haunt anyone who breaks it. I want no references to passing, passing on, ‘lost’ or any other nonsensical term for death. If you are talking about me and death (and you had better talk about me) then you say dead, death, or similar. I will be dead. I will not have passed from one place to another, from one life to another. We will have no absurdities here, thank you.