It’s spring. The same blackbird has started singing again. Soon, the same swifts will have returned to the same patch of sky above my garden. Arcing low over the same lawn, they’ll shriek their arrival, screaming summer is on its way.

This morning, when I woke, for a second I thought everything was the same. I forgot, for one blissful moment, that the distance between yesterday and today was a lifetime.

And now I remember, when Mark asks me to hold his hand, and his hot tears fall on my palm. I remember that nothing is the same.

Big hands. Thumbnails twice the size of mine. Remember that. Remember everything. Or it’ll soon be gone.

I’ve seen a thousand expressions on his face. But I’ve never seen the one he’s worn today. It’s not an expression at all. It’s that moment in a low rent sci-fi, when the android is unplugged. It’s that moment, when refracted light returns to white, and every colour slips away.

It’s hopelessness and fear. Confusion and resignation. Heartbreak and anger. It’s every memory he’s protected, and every plan he had.

An advert is telling me everything will be alright if I give my skin the appearance of firmness. Pundits overheat on the radio, frothing over the same football teams winning, losing, scoring or conceding, as they will again, in a slightly different order, next week. All season. Next year.

Like that difficult second album, or cynical summer film franchises, long term illness is a law of diminishing returns. We’re hard wired for resolve. Five years of illness – four tumours, fourteen operations, an entropy of independence and what have you got to show for it? Fewer get well cards with every repeat performance. A creeping impatience from friends repeatedly let down, postponed, apologised to. A holding pattern. Not holding, but falling.

“Dave, this can’t go on like this,” my Dad said, sometime last year, when Mark’s tumour returned, stealing his sight, sapping his co-ordination, weighing me down.

I understood what he meant. And I understand the frustration of others. Win or lose, Illness is best played out in short spikes: sudden, rude interruptions. A narrative. A beginning, a middle, an end.

This is a story about a benign, recurring meningioma. Mark’s meningioma. And my life with it.

Dad was right. Yesterday, Mark’s consultant told us plainly. It can’t go on like this. His tumour’s turned nasty. And this is where the story starts.

It’s the same story, it’s been told before. This one, though, is set right here.

16 April, 2011.

Someday, all Christmas lights will be like this

You know those Christmas lights in town? They’re back again. The one with the LED tableau of the little lad throwing a rock at a barman (or maybe it’s a snowball at a Wise Man, it’s hard to tell, m’lud, it was dark, and the tubes of LED aren’t that clear…)

Anyway, this year, there’s one that spans the road between the Beehive and that pimped up MacDonald’s proclaiming, in the best B&Q LED, ‘LIVERPOOL – CITY OF THE FUTURE’. Odd, when, on the next banner there’s a depiction of four lads frozen in time forty years ago, on a north London zebra crossing… Continue reading →

Absorbent kitchen roll to be used for life drawing classes only

So, I’ve got a bit of time on my hands. And, after a summer spent writing travel guides while listening to Ken Bruce’s Popmaster, I’m figuring it’s time to give my head a bit of a workout. I consider myself a lifelong learner. Just these past few months, thanks to a daytime TV correspondence course, I’ve become an expert at working out the value of random Franklyn Mint plates snatched from the walls of poverty-line pensioners. I can put a fair estimate on any three sink estate houses in Sunderland, and, thanks to Deal or No Deal, understand perfectly which floral prints work with inappropriately bleached hair. And they say Daytime TV’s the last refuge of the smackhead and the out of work journalist.
Continue reading →