There’s been brilliant news in the last week or so for people with lung cancer and melanoma too – it seems as though the scientists have managed at last to stop cancer hiding in the body. This means our immune systems can suddenly ‘see’ the cancer cells and attack. I’m not going to attempt a …
Although I’ve been on Facebook for years, I’ve never been on Facebook. I’ve used it as a blog platform, and I’ve occasionally signed in only to find messages from old friends withering away in corners like unloved pot plants. I always assume people I know will contact me in other ways, and believed, and hoped, Facebook …
I think it’s really important to keep trying to move forward. I want to get a lot of projects sorted out which will move me smoothly into the future, and out of a present where I keep nervously checking bits of my body for sinister developments. My first idea was to get on with an …
I’m very thrilled to have been inspired by Stork to bake a cake for World Baking Day on 17th May. As you know, it doesn’t take much encouragement to get me donning my pinny, but this time, the incentive really is brilliant. We are all – all over the globe – going to bake ourselves …
Now nobody snigger …. but I spent a day this week at a decluttering seminar. Anyone who knows me will appreciate the irony. I cannot bear piles of stuff around me and much prefer throwing things away to almost any other activity, except eating cake. So why the seminar? Well, I went with a friend …
At last, in the dustbowl of dry dullness which has been election coverage so far, a glimmer of life, positivity and fun – Milifandom. This wonderful phenomenon has been sparked by the yearnings of teenage girls who have taken poor, belittled Ed Miliband to their collective bosoms, to love and to cherish, loudly, on the …
I saw a friend today for the first time in a few months, and she was very apologetic about not ringing. ‘I knew you were having Troubles, and I didn’t like to intrude,’ she whispered, even though there were only the two of us there. Cancer is still a hushed-voice kind of illness, and rightly …
I was at a memorial service last week in a seaside town. At the gathering afterwards (what is one supposed to call it? It’s not a wake, and just a lunch or tea sounds disrespectful and wrong) someone pointed out a couple our sort of age. ‘Their son is the internet sensation X,’ they whispered. …
I was lucky enough to be invited along to the Gala performance of A View from the Bridge the other night. It’s a play by Arthur Miller which, in the wrong hands, could now be as dated as a 1950s Coca-Cola poster. With Dutch director Ivo Van Hove in charge, it is electrifying and quite …
There was an odd moment the other night. We were at Up the Creek, the comedy venue in Greenwich, and it had already been a curious evening. There was a restless air of violence, as though the whole crowd was saying, ‘you looking’ at me?’ in that moody, twitchy, dying-for-a-fight kind of way. Someone had …