The Joy of Pissing People off.

Well, there you go. ‘Free from cancer.’ Three words you want to hear from an Oncologist. I am contemplating having them tattooed on my arse in Verdana size 16 font.

A little over a year ago, I went through the invasive but necessary tests to determine whether the cancer has returned to eat more bits I need to enable me to function normally. The all-important news, the results of said invasive probing, incredibly took another WHOLE year for an appointment to tell me.

So, it’s been five years since being told I had bowel cancer and subsequent surgery, on tenterhooks since then, not knowing if it’s come back, not wanting to know, avoiding strenuous exercise or anything that will get the heart rate up. Scared in the irrational belief that those bastard little cancer cells will wizz faster around my battered insides and attach themselves to the bits I need the most.

From the moment, I asked ‘How bad?’ the original answer of ‘About nine months without drastic surgery’ put me in a life stasis. Immediately ambition, wants and plans went on hold, time stood still and did for five years or so. Now I’m a bit like an old locomotive rusted to the tracks, with my three new words that may or may not end up on my arse (going off the idea already, I’m so fickle) I’m creaking forward slowly hissing my way to whatever lay before me. Finally.

Cockier than ever it seems, I’m certainly pissing people off. The all clear has made me more of a cheeky fucker than normal; I’ve even recently picked a fight with a little bloke and give my astonishingly supportive wife a lot of lip. My cockney is reasserting itself like never before. Frankly, and apparently I no longer give a flying fuck.

Is there a parable playing out here?

Maybe that cheeky teenager, the abrupt old man or woman with the fuck you persona you met today had a ‘life on hold’ term of stasis recently. Give them a bit of slack, maybe they are finding their place in the world once again. Believe that they are actually glad to be alive and are enjoying one of life’s greatest pleasures. Letting YOU know they are here having stepped out of the shadow of death.

The joy of pissing people off?

Dee-lic-ious.

Poly Styrene Oh Cancer! Up Yours!

Today is my birthday and last night the plan was I'd wake up at whatever time, have a big breakfast and sit in my garden and ponder whether I can be arsed to write something, anything that an editor might be interested in reading. That was the grand plan for today.

I wear a nice silver bangle on my right wrist, haven't taken it off for years. I awoke earlier than planned because I smacked myself in the mouth with my bangle so hard it drew blood and made my lower lip swell.  Well, I did wear it, but after it being chucked at the bedroom wall, it is now sitting on the chest of drawers being taught a lesson.  I slid downstairs and after opening my birthday cards, (I got a lovely one from the Mrs) the kettle was on for a cuppa, I got twenty messages on Twitter full of well wishes, made me smile, nice of them to make the effort I thought.

A tweet on twitter caught my eye by Kathryn Flett, a fellow Random-on-Sea inmate who is more than a little bit good at the writing and journalism thing. We talk...or more accurately  tweet random polite bollox every now and again.  The tweet said...

"Am saddened by the death of (Random-on-Sea resident and punk icon) Poly Styrene."

My day came crashing down. Punk Icon Poly Styrene of the X-ray Spex,  someone I have known for years, had died. She lived a street away from me, she came back to the seaside to look after her mum she once told me a long time ago. She was someone a bit special.

She was someone that waited two hours for me to pick her up from the airport years ago because she didn't want to pay silly money for the airport taxis to take her home.  Someone that craftily negotiated a good deal on some chairs in a second hand shop we were in.  Someone that could dress so innocuously, you wouldn't have given her a second look in the street. (The fame thing, by choice wasn't really that big a deal for her.) Someone that could dress so stunningly she would blow me away.  Simple and classically expensive twin sets with an edge only Poly Styrene could pull off.  Hair so amazingly glossy... well, you can tell I was more than a bit enamoured by her.

There is a lot I could tell you about Marianne Joan Elliott-Said, but I'll keep that to myself out of respect for her family and friends.  I will tell you she launched her new album "Generation Indigo" from her hospice bed nearby, she wrote, recorded and promoted it dying from that cunt cancer.  Something we both battled and I, have made it thus far...

She was truly someone born to make a difference, to influence, her legacy is... Well, Google away to your hearts content on that one and judge for yourself. This isn't really a eulogy about a career and a true Icon of our times, it's about a little lady that lived around the corner from me in a place affectionately renamed by Kate Flett as "Random-on-Sea." A place that Poly styrene knew could be magical in the morning and frustrating in the afternoon.

This is a clip of Poly Styrene explaining her new album track by track, important to note her back was broken in two places and she was heavily medicated and dying of cancer during the filming of this interview. If this little piece means anything to anyone you will know that positivity and courage is something she had an abundance of.

  Poly Styrene, Punk Icon. Marianne, Daughter, Mother, Friend.

3 July 1957 – 25 April 2011

Cancer And Me...

I began writing this about seven hours after being discharged from hospital, after being taken their some seven hours earlier today (Mon 11th Oct 2010) by Steve the paramedic.

The pain was obviously too much fourteen hours ago for me to bear, the phone was picked up and the questions were answered that facilitated the dispatch of a wonderful medical professional to my aid.

My fight with Cancer started four years ago, still chirpy, but grey and ashen, I had just met someone that I had admired from afar for quite some time. That someone made me stand a little taller, smile a little broader, every time I saw them.


I had been losing blood for a good few months, even went to my local hospital and was duly prodded and internally searched, they tutted and reminded me that my own doctor could have dealt with my so called emergency, and I was to think twice before I came to an A+E ever again.


Satisfied that I wasn't dying and I was being a little baby about it all, I carried on. grateful that my new interest was keeping me...interested.


Months passed, a little weaker and a little greyer, I showed my bored GP a camera phone picture I took of a visit to a public toilet and the bath of blood it contained, camera phones have such clarity these days don't they?

Duly dispatched to a consultant, and after quick succession of barium enemas and CT scans and MRI imaging, after the final look with an expensive bendy camera with a snipping tool attached, a large bit of something was torn from its festering mooring and brought out into the cold light of an operating theatre. Still, my strength never left me...


That thing that saw its first light was being gripped by the snakelike scope, its brightly lit l.e.d. eye emphasised this thumb sized slice of cancers grey-red colour. The thing on the end of the scope that grew within me, wasn't something that had Cancer on it, but it was Cancer itself. I was awake, undrugged during the entire process. But, I had some strength to draw from...

They probably call it the big "C" because everyone capitalises the word "Cancer" but from now on, I'm going to write it simply as, cancer.

So colorectal cancer was the diagnosis, its also called colon and bowel cancer but whatever this evil wants to call itself it gave me nine months left to do my goodbyes.

Drastic surgery ensued, quickly. The next eleven days I was medically starved, no food or liquids passed my lips, strangely still I wasn't even hungry during all that time, I wasted away, my body started to eat itself  and it certainly enjoyed its meal, because I lost two stone-that's 28 pounds in American. My strength never left me...

Because of my Strength, I quickly started to wash myself rather than take the easy option of having a nimble fingered nurse to do it for me. My stomach was being pumped out through my nose twice a day to stop the juices that destroy food from destroying my newly shortened lower bowel and half of a rectum that was left.

On the twelfth day I was solo, free from tubes coming out of three places, free of a multi spinal epidural of which one is normally sufficient for a woman to give birth, but was left in for nearly two weeks to stop a pain that truly wanted to be noticed. My strength grew...

The machines that pumped fluids and nutrients into the tree of life that was the mountainous weighty cannula that stuck out of my arm, was removed, my morphine machine that pumped useless morphine that never ever worked on me was switched off, It ignored my screams in the night, and it beeped and watched me praying that a couple of hundred pushes of the button would send me into oblivion. My strength never left me...


That day I was free, I Slowly started to strengthen myself by walking around a table in a visitors room, albeit with a zimmer frame... round and round, hundreds of times, I had to get strong by myself because there was something I had to do...


What was this thing I had to do? Dear weary and patient reader?


In my hospital, their is a multi-faith chapel, its quiet and still. I took a woman that I met some four months previously inside and asked her to marry me.


In the second paragraph above the phone call to the paramedics was made by my wife, I couldn't do it...


In the seventh paragraph when I was diagnosed with cancer, the person holding my hand and held her composure with the straightest of backs, and with just one tear, was my wife...

My strength, the strength I talked about in the above paragraphs wasn't me at all, it was her.

Every step of the process she never left my side, never blinked in disgust at my little accidents in the early stages of recovery, she never faltered or showed any weariness at the long long road to recovery, I had now been given a few more years of life.

When she was at work, I crawled and sobbed my way to the bathroom, sometimes taking up to an hour to get there and get out of the bath, there where times when I lay in bed for a whole day unable to physically hold myself up, going without that all important cup of tea we British find solace in. It was waiting to be made just yards away in the kitchen.

When she came to visit me I walked, didn't show a struggle, didn't tell her of the hell day I just had.


Her just being there made me stand strong. She IS my strength.


You read poems about heroes and angels sent from heaven, well, I'm certainly not going to start attempting to insult you with a silly poem or ode, I feel naked enough now telling you all this, you dear suffering reader!


My children played they're important part in my recovery and their isn't enough electronic ink on whatever your reading this on, that can thank them enough either.


So, there you are, cancer and me. as the title above says, but this piece is not really about me, it never has been dear deceived reader.

...it was about my wife, Carolyn all along.


Until next time...


Oh! My emergency dash in Steve the paramedics car today? well, I still don't know! I will no doubt find out in the ensuing weeks ahead, But, whatever! Everything is alright because as I write this, she sleeps, and its my turn to protect her while she does, as you get to know me, you will know its the night that belongs to me, its when I work, it was when I walked dozens of miles around a five foot wide table in a cold dark visitors room in a NHS hospital that saved my life, so I could ask an angel to marry me.


Alright! alright! I got a bit poetical and weepy when I did that last paragraph, so sue me... Oh! And thanks for reading to the end, dear, now very weary reader...

2020 update!! January of this year I was contacted by my sister whom I have never met and told my of the passing of a father I did not know. He died tragically of a heart attack on the floor of his kitchen at the same date and time aswhat was happening to me in the first paragraph above. Father and son both on their kitchen floors not even aware of each other’s existence, my father lay dying and I thought I was at the same time. The same moment. In the same circumstances. Make of that what you will.