Notes from an ageing writer

Vikki's poem

Looking out of the window, the old adage that ‘it never rains but it pours’ has come quite literally true these past couple of days where I live. (And I feel confident I am using the word literally there in its proper, rather than modern-vogue loose, sense.) My therapist, wiser and more educated than I, has a better phrase, citing Shakespeare in Hamlet: “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.”

I’ve spent a lot of time looking out the window, my bedroom window, these past four days having suffered severely and inconveniently from bloody Covid, probably picked up at last Thursday’s Footballer of the Year dinner in London. Today it’s a relief to be surfacing from it and to be able to write again. All that came on top of having been told that my cancer has spread. It has meant that I have had to postpone until next week my consultation at the Royal Marsden to discuss dates for 10 sessions every three weeks for the rest of this year, along with whether or not to accept an offer of a drugs trial alongside.

I’ve agonised about it all, even, to be honest, considering not having any more treatment. I saw what Vikki went through towards the end and just do not want that. But then, I could hear her telling me not to be daft (flat vowel a) and not to give in, the way she didn’t give in until she had no more choices. And I have kids who want me to stick around, for my daughter’s kids and my son’s wedding. I just can’t be that selfish. Besides, I’ve paid a king’s ransom for my Tottenham tickets for next season.

As I was making decisions, I read again a poem Vikki wrote and saw published in a beautiful collection by Royal Marsden patients, and which she read out at a moving evening event to an audience that included Andrew Motion, then the Poet Laureate, and me, bursting with pride. It captured the sentiment that I too felt when I was told a few weeks ago that I was going to need the chemo. Yer tiz, as we say in Dorset:

March Morning

If you had told me a few months earlier

That one Monday morning in March

Just as I was reading the newspapers

I would discover that I had cancer

I could only guess at my probable reaction.

Scream hysterically

Plan to go to the rest of the 1,000 places I still hadn’t seen before I Die

Scream hysterically.

But I didn’t scream

Didn’t get on the phone to the travel agent

Didn’t scream again.

I just wanted to go to a place I’d seen 1,000 times.

Home.

It’s strange, though not strange. V always still seems to be there when I need her. The way she intervened - I believe - in getting a better price for the house. How she guides me towards taking the chemo, confirming the urgings of my kids.

I’ve also been concerned physically about what it will do to my quality of life, in narrowing my horizons, due to a compromised immune system. (And I’d better be allowed to see Bruce Springsteen at Wembley in July or I may be telling those wonderful oncologists at the Marsden that they are not so wonderful after all.) I just don’t want just to be able to stay in and write books that very few people read any more.

But there it is Vikki’s poem. The value of the sanctuary that is home, above any far horizon. I’m liking my new flat. There are boxes to unpack and jobs still to be done but it’s looking homely now, and she is here in more than just the orange stripe in my new bathroom tiles and the Taschen edition of Some Like It Hot on a bookshelf in the living room. Now that Covid has begun to relax its grip on my throat, and that relief, reality and a modicum of optimism return, I expect to hear her saying any day now: “Just get on with, for God’s sake.”