Kindred

I have a love-hate relationship with cancer books. They are either brilliantly written, which makes me jealous, or they are terribly written, which makes me think that there is no challenge to getting published once you put the words "I kicked cancer's butt" in the covering letter. 

If they are too close to the bone for me, I wince. If there are too many crystals and angel therapies, I sigh. If they are too sentimental, I throw my eyes up to heaven.

I started reading Stephen Bradley's book "Shooting and Cutting" with trepidation, because I wanted to like it. Not too much, but enough. I like his missus on the telly and, from the little I know of him through Twitter, I like him too. 

Unfortunately though, he has the same cancer as me, with massive liver metastases at diagnosis, a large bowel cancer primary, and a few errant lung nodules after the fact. He has children close in age to mine. He works in an industry with which I have long been fascinated and am innately connected, since my granny was an actress eighty years ago (thus making me a Hollywood Expert). Surely I would be disappointed, with so many potential bone-wincingly-close parallels. 

Nope. 

It was gripping, moving, intriguing, enlightening and funny.

He mentions some of my favourite things, like John Creedon, and Muiris Houston, and general anaesthetic. 

He is able to talk blithely about his fellow patients and the doctors who treat him, unconstrained by the confidentiality clauses that hang over the heads of doctor-authors. 

He is warm and kind and gracious about those who have cared for him, which I take as a personal compliment on behalf of all of us much-maligned HCPs.

I read the book in two days, during which time I also watched his movie Sweety Barrett, which is a lovely redemptive tale but also has the added bonus of Cillian Murphy and Andrew Scott at roughly age 12 with the worst haircuts of their lives.

This is a cancer book that I am happy to have read. 

Sheeran

Many years ago, we went for an early afternoon pint in a famous pub in Galway. We had a few shopping bags with us, which legitimised us, made it okay for us to be having a swift one in between the middle-class pursuits of spending money on overpriced clothes and, later on, on overpriced food. 

There was a small group of people at the table next to us, who were very definitely the Wrong Sort. Three men. Too loud. Cider. Obviously had been there for a while. Two of them left suddenly, knocking over a stool and creating a ruckus. The third fella decided he wanted to stay for a chat. I stiffened up, apprehensive and unwelcoming, wishing he had followed his boyos into the street to go and mess up someone else's afternoon. But he started to tell a story, and I found myself being drawn in. 
He described his school days, where he had sat in the classroom, the name of his teacher. He told us that he felt shy and awkward all the time. 

He described how, any time he tried to answer a question, his teacher would say to him, "Put your hand down Sheeran. You're wrong."


I think about this a lot.
About how many of us are told, verbally or otherwise, to put our hands down.