I am relieved and delighted to say I have had a very good progress report from my consultant.. It seems the treatment has done it’s job and I have finished this first round of chemo with flying colours. Many of my numbers including liver function are back to close to normal having been far from it pre treatment. He is recommending that I move on to the more drastic stem cell stuff which is only given to patients under 70 (so I qualify as fit enough humpff). The final decision is with the specialist unit in Leeds who will be in touch with me soon. If they say no then I will be given a couple more of the current treatments then I guess I am on my own but I will receiving monthly intravenous bone conditioning drugs for the next two years. All very jolly! We will be celebrating Maria’s birthday and my current state of deliverance on Thursday – hurrah

Meanwhile –

It’s good to see the myth of compassionate conservatism has finally been killed off. The latest proposal by the chancellor to punish the poor, ill and disabled is striking in it’s overt Daily-Mail-readers-vote-winning cruelty. It makes me ashamed to be part of the same human race occupied by such unspeakably unimaginative tossers.

Dear Misguided Tory Voters

Just for once try to think about people who are not like you. Who may be unlucky enough to be ill or out of work, or unwanted, or abused, or living in a crappy area, or depressed, or addicted to drugs, who don’t go on benefits because they want to, but because for whatever reason, good, bad or indifferent they have to. These people are not scroungers who need a good kicking. Sure there are people who abuse the system, but in the same way as we don’t treat every MP in the same way as we treat the minority who fiddle their expenses – remember the duck house – we should not treat everyone on benefits as if they were on the fiddle. Surely we should take a balanced view and treat the honest majority as the norm and build policies accordingly. I find the Tory propensity to come up with policy proposals designed to appeal to the basest tendencies in humankind truly shocking and I find it hard to believe that any decent person would not feel the same.

Love Chris

I have little enthusiasm for Labour at the moment despite once having been a campaigning party member but the alternatives really are pretty grim so I guess I will hold the line. There is no party that gets anywhere close to the kind of compassionate relativism I would wish to advocate. A society organised according to cool headed perspective on the irrational and inconsistent behaviour of human beings. That is non judgemental (in a way that I singularly fail to demonstrate) but prioritises tolerance and compassion for those who struggle, even for those who appear not to deserve it. Favouring the powerful and ‘successful’ may make sense to the powerful and ‘successful’ like George Osborne but it makes no sense to anyone with an ounce of empathy.

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