Moving On

Cara, Lydia, Niamh, Hester, Kelsey, Orla, Susan, Smaira, Amanda and Alison. Thank you again for taking care of me at the cancer centre for the past five weeks. Just thought I should mention you all by name on here. You are the best.

I now have a six week wait to find out if the radiotherapy was successful in reducing the size of my tumour, to make it operable, which seems like forever, but is probably not. It will be a nervous few weeks I'm sure, so must keep myself busily occupied, see some festival shows, a film or two and maybe take a trip, up north or down south, or possibly to Portobello, where I'm told there are many pleasures to be enjoyed.

I don't expect to have anything more to report on my health situation until early October. I have a couple of appointments with Dr McLean, my oncologist and some scans late in September and then an appointment with my surgeon, Mr Speake on 9th October, when, all being well, I hope to be told it's all systems go for an operation to remove the little bugger. My tumour I mean and not Mr Speake, who's not little and certainly not a bugger. Though he did stick his finger up my bum, but purely in a professional capacity, so we forgive him for that.

A new David Walliam's comedy called Big School began on BBC on Friday night. One of the funniest shows I've seen on tele for a long time, excepting Family Tree with the brilliant Chris O. Dowd, it had me laughing out loud. I don't know where Walliams went to school, but his teachers reminded me of the madmen and women who taught us up there in The Nicolson Institute, maybe he was there in the sixties. Is he that old? Catherine Tate plays a mad French teacher and Frances de la Tour is the drunken headteacher.They are both superb.

There's one scene where Walliams addresses the school assembly on the thorny subject of graffiti and is egged on by another teacher to describe the graffiti in question, so that the kids know exactly what he's on about. Of course it's a drawing of one of the craziest of the teachers having a good time with a sheep. The whole assembly of kids start chanting BAAAA BAAAAAAAAAAA with the teacher in question hanging his head in utter embarrassment. Hilarious, and yes I know, quite childish, but you have to see it and just be childish with them.

I promise a higher tone in my next post, maybe an ode from Horace. So get your Latin dictionaries out.