Take Off Your Running Shoes

The Third Dimension

I'm on my second Louette Harding novel, Women Like Us. "Oh please don't read those terrible books!" she said to me. "You know, I had an idea for one, and then I got tied into a contract to write three..." "They're fun," I said. "Why did you stop writing books?"

In fact, she hasn't stopped, and the next one, about Alzheimer's, is a work in progress. Her husband is a potter, and he sometimes does some therapeutic pottery with a group of Alzheimer's patients. When they work in three dimensions, Louette told me, Alzheimer's patients start remembering things their minds otherwise can't get round at all.

How does he do it?

Russell Julius is by far the most effective fundraiser on my CTRT page, as you can see by looking at the messages posted with people's donations.

You want to know how he's doing it? He's handing out people's bonuses at the moment, and as he hands over the envelope he's giving them the appeal information at the same time. Cool.

Heating, who needs it?

Having just this minute found out that the children's writer Jenny Nimmo lived without central heating until her book sales in America took off about four years ago, I offer the following survival guide to anybody else who is, like us, entering their second week without heating. You only need three things, here listed strictly in the sequence in which they came into this cold, cold house:

1) sunflowers, in my case courtesy of Louette Harding who brought two huge bunches from a place she called "that supermarket", because, she told me, in her experience they have the longest lasting ones. Still casting sun-drenched light all round my kitchen...

2) Jean Shindler's vegetable soup - immaculately cut cubes of potato, courgette, celery, carrots (I think), laden with pearl barley and doused with dill.

3) Pink Martini's debut album, Sympathique, the cover the same sun-baked yellow as the sunflowers, and hot, hot music. Thank you Kasia.

Small slice of heaven

This weekend could have been unbearable - post-herceptin which has started to make me feel incredibly groggy; husband in San Francisco, older children away on a youth weekend, NO heating - but in fact it's been ok, thanks to leaving our two gas fires on continuously (which the lady at Amazing Grates said was fine to do, they left theirs on a whole week when their heating broke down), and copious use of hot water bottles.

So now, weekend with five year old alone survived with minimal shouting, and he's in bed with three hot-water bottles, (one Bert from Sesame Street case, one masquerading as a cashmere sweater case, one fluffy number with a heart on it case), and fast asleep, and so I'm in bed too, with similar number of hot water bottles, two full cups of hot chocolate carefully frothed with my whizzy frothing machine, a pile of today's papers, a portable phone, a laptop and a book, and it's heaven. You have to be really cold, I have decided, in order to find heaven.

You'd better come home Anthony, I'm about the watch the last two episodes of The State Within without you....

Things I learned in hospital yesterday

1. Tykerb is now up and running in the UK.

2. When I finish six months of capecitabine, I am going to get a break from drugs. They give you a break to recover (yes, I know, "recover" from the treatment - an upside down world, cancer care). I didn't know that, or perhaps hadn't taken in that information, and I was so happy to hear it; I was surprised how incredibly relieved I feel at the thought of time off taking these tablets.

3. These days it is no longer a simple matter giving nurses a box of chocolates, or any sort of gift really. I bring in some Jo Malone (the perfumier, who also had breast cancer, although she moved to the States for a couple of years to be treated at Sloan Kettering) products for one of the staff, and within minutes a corporate sort of body appears to make sure I haven't been "propositioned". Apparently nurses at Bishopswood, the private wing of Mount Vernon hospital, have to declare everything they are given as gifts these days, because, so the corporate body tells me, one of the patients was taken advantage of by a nurse who told him she needed some money.

4. Insurance companies, the corporate body also tells me, are starting to withdraw cover from cancer patients, on the grounds that it is becoming a "chronic" disease. They will cover treatment for one year. I tell the corporate body, as I tell everybody who asks, that - so far - Standard Life, my insurance company, have paid every bill without demur, except when I ventured over to Sloan Kettering in New York when they said quite firmly they wouldn't cover me outside the UK.

You magazine

...is printed on silk. I bet you didn't know that. But Louette Harding, who comes to interview me loaded with sunflowers which fill the (cold) kitchen with light, tells me that she has to have her story written by this coming Tuesday for the magazine coming out in March, and that's because You magazine is printed on a fantastically high quality silk-based paper. This is useful information because I may be able to turn several copies of it into a party dress. The Guardian has very sweetly asked whether I possess such a thing - a party dress that is - to have some photos taken to publicise the book.

Aaargh! no heating....

I pull the cancer card, as I get home from hospital to find out that Graham the plumber (who has just lost our very lucrative business, not that he cares, why should he, there's always plenty of plumbing emergencies) who has just made his third visit this week has once again left without fixing our heating. "You need the manufacturers, love, sorry," are the plumber's words. Wow, I think, that's the first time I've ever heard the word "sorry" from a plumber. The manufacturers of the boiler, a company called Glowworm, say they can't send anybody until next Thursday. "Please," I say, and I can hear my voice shaking, "I have cancer, and I have small children in the house, please can we not just get this fixed for the weekend."

The woman taking the call does sound genuinely sympathetic, and calls back within half an hour. "I've had a word with the supervisor," Helen tells me (cancer puts you on first name terms with everyone). "We can get someone out to you on Tuesday, instead of Thursday."

Ah, the all-powerful cancer card. Wish I had a genuinely influential illness.

Anthony stuff

If you click on this and look at Wed Jan 24th, 9am (their time) you can get the San Francisco take on anti-semitism. It's interesting.

Blogging incidentals

Nobody says hello to me any more; their first words these days are, without fail, "now this is not for the blog, but...."

I've been a journalist for ages, and always been surprised what people were prepared to tell me even though I stood there with a tape recorder and a notebook. Family secrets, hot gossip, the lot, it all came tumbling out, but now, all of a sudden, there's a blog instead of a national daily newspaper, and suddenly nobody's prepared to say anything on the record at all. Extraordinary.

Perfectly ill in the snow

Today there is snow, and of course, Sky Plus has stopped working, and needless to say our heating has packed in, but the patient is happy as a sandbunny out in the snow in green snow trousers and grey and orange scarf, hat and gloves, singing "it's so fun out here" and - from what I can tell from where I am blissfully inside with a newspaper - spending happy hours moving the snow from one bit of the garden to the other with a tennis racket. I will probably get another book written today.