Cancer

In 2014 I was diagnosed with cancer. As a consequence my online professional presence paused. This personal blog became an opportunity to randomly rant on my interests and obsessions and this helped me feel better. It still does. Be warned this is neither a reassuring-sentiment – I-won-my-battle-with-cancer-so-can-you blog, nor am I setting out to be funny in adversity (I am not funny so don’t expect it). The reason for writing this is it gives me pleasure – nothing else.

I am very lucky – not to say smug. I am loved. I am not in pain. I have the NHS and thus I have excellent doctors and nurses to look after me. I have a comfortable life. Not so luckily I have cancer plus a rare additional disorder caused by the cancer. It can be treated but not cured. From this position I believe I am able to write a blog with the inflammatory title “cancer without god”. Had some of these things not been so, I am not sure I would be doing this. In other words my situation is very specific and is not intended to serve as a model or a recipe for anybody else.  Should readers miss this  point, they are bound to get very cross with me for presumptuously setting forth a treatise on ‘living with cancer without god’ that has some sort of general application beyond me, my specific circumstances and my cancer. I am not.

Along with me and my cancer I am interested in that most absurd side of the vocal arts, opera, as well as computer voices, telephones and ventriloquism.

‘Gravity is a hat’ is a schoolboy answer to a test question; what is gravity? It was also the name of our family rock band. 

For the curious and for my legacy

When I first wrote this prelude I was in the first throws of a cancer diagnosis. One way in which this manifested itself was in somewhat drug induced outpourings for or against my pet topics. The topic that most energised me at the time was my disgust for religion of all kinds. I went as far as buying the domain name ‘Cancerwithoutgod’ as a bate for the Evangelical right – sadly something they never responded to. I have since allowed the domain to lapse. As you may gather I was pretty much a budding Richard Dawkins. Since then my views have remained consistent but the bile has abated and I feel somewhat embarrassed by my vociferous and childish shouting however … I firmly believe rewriting history even for something as trivial as this blog is a desperate form of vanity, so here is the additional text that I deleted in January 2020, now presented as an ‘indelible’ tribute to my shame.