Cancer 238

We are away on holiday in the Lake District. Ever since I started my second line treatment I have quite ill on the Sunday and Monday following the chemotherapy. This time I am trying to reduce the imact with a range of drugs, including morphine, metoclopromide and parcetamol. This is in addition to my usual 15-20 tablets a day. We will see if it works. It is Saturday evening, I have eaten rich lamb, been to bed and got up again, and apart from immense tiredness I still feel ok.

Stress is always a problem. Cancer causes a bit of stress, but so does arriving at a holiday cottage and finding the central heating doesn’t work, and then the car window decides to play up and not close properly. The ordinary stresses of life, but put against some of the biggies it can cause misery. I am really trying to learn that a dodgy car window or the absence of central heating really don’t matter in the scheme of things. I have bigger things to worry about – though in the end it is best not to worry too much about any of it. Worrying doesn’t change a thing. If I am going to fret upon the stage then I should be fretting about getting my MA finished, or finishing some of these half written articles I have, erm, half written.

If anyone is seriously interested in having a living wake then let me know. I have a date in mind and need to look at numbers. It will be nothing exciting, just a pub meal, but I would like to be alive for it so it will have to be soon.

I have just found a copy of the Krypton Factor, on which I ‘starred’ in 1993. I haven’t watched it yet, apart from the scene where I crash an aeroplane onto some sheep rather than a runway. I came third if anyone is interested, but I won the intelligence round, There, now you don’t need to see it. It was great fun filming it in those days when TV companies paid out quite a lot of expenses (expensive cars, hotels, food), but t was worth it because the audience was, I think, around 12,000,000 viewers, which is a little more than the numbers of books I have sold or audiences I have spoken to. I had good psychometric arguments with Gordon Burns for three of the rounds, but I couldn’t come up with an excuse for not winning the assault course. The intelligence round shows up as lasting a couple of minutes, but I took half an hour and the next person took an hour or more to solve the problem. Editing is quite important for a half hour show.

I recently found an old photogtraph of my psychology group at Hatfield Poly. There are only around 20 people on it, because undergraduate groups were far smaller than nowaday, and the rules harsher. Several people failed a module in the first year and were thrown off rather than gven a second chance. Quite right too. If we applied that rule now we would have a better system. I enjoyed the degree at Hatfield. Not only did I study psychology I also studied philosophy for two years (that should be compulsory in a degree), and obtained a qualification (ok a module pass) in planetary astronomy and astrophysics. Please don’t ask me anything about astronomy or astrophysics. It was a long time ago, before the big bang.