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essentials of life were food, drink, and taxis. The best thing about growing old, he said, was ‘slaying the beast of sexual desire’.
    There’s a café in the waiting room. You get a real china mug and carrot cake ‘homemade by our volunteers’. There is a lot of touching of arms and laughter. The nurse who saw me yesterday made small-talk with a grey haired lady (a former patient in for a check-up, I’d guess) for fully five minutes, two yards away from where we sat, never once losing interest or eye contact. Karl, exuding positivity and cheeriness, bounded in at one point and made a joke about her not needing makeup because she looked so young.
     
    Gill let us ask questions (mostly Tatty, as I had gone a bit blank), then talked through the implications of the trial. I can pull out at any time; and it all remains completely confidential. The main things to clear up were that I
won’t
be spending Wednesday night in the ward; and that I am allowed to continue to drink.
    ‘Of course, you may find after a while you don’t want to. Some people just lose their taste for it.’
    ‘OK.’
    ‘Or their taste altogether,’ she said.
    They will want me to drink 2–3 litres of water a day, to flush out the drugs once it has started work on the tumour. And my fruit consumption will have to go up, to avoid constipation. If I go two days ‘without going’ I am to call them. Ditto if my temperature goes over 38 °C, day or night. There’s a long list of numbers I am going to become extremely familiar with. The main givens are hair loss and lethargy. ‘It’s very possible you will be knocked out a bit,’ she said.
    Later Robyn and Rory are coming round to drink with us and eat beef casserole (in that order). Robyn saw Tats in the street today and said plainly ‘Prepare him to feel rubbish, I did.’ Even though the length of treatment is shorter than six months, it does frighten the shit out of me, the idea of entering the tunnel voluntarily, with barely a speck of light at the end of it.
     
    Tatty has been reading the leaflet on NHL to me. It says by2025 lymphoma will be as common as breast, lung, skin and colon cancer. It is increasing in Europe more than the ‘developing world’ and in the UK grows by 4% a year.
    I said: ‘For the first time in my life I’m ahead of the crowd.’
19 February
    A good evening last night with Robyn and Rory and Paul and Sally. Lots of banter, laughter, and alcohol. Bruschetta in the sitting room with fizz and olives, Bourguignon with mash, then Sally’s brownies and cream. They all caught the vibe brilliantly, with Paul brandishing his own bottle of pop as he came in. We talked, like all middle class parents, about schools; and as Rory and I always seem to at some level, about Monkton, but without bitterness. It was good having Robyn there. She was quite clear about the horrors awaiting me, without once being morbid: ‘They are basically going to poison you and you’re going to feel crap.’
     
    We left the debris in the kitchen at half-midnight, then collapsed. I woke at 3, then 6, remaining awake for half an hour to an hour, before conking out till about 9. Feeling pretty shattered, increasingly so, esp. in the evenings. Someone said tonight that I must write it all down. ‘It’s a question of staying awake,’ I replied, mindful of what Felicity Carr had said to me about how I would have begun to feel ‘quite unwell’ had they not found it when they did. I like the understatement here. Also, as in her ‘pretty rough time’ to describe the effects of chemo. She’s been lovely, sparkly, and honest, her remarks like some sort of code you can only interpret by thinking of the worst thing she might be saying, then letting that be the subtext.
20 February
    A shattering day.
    Woke up, for the first time since being in hospital earlier in January, feeling achey, stiff, as if I hadn’t slept at all. Thepattern at the moment seems to be: drop off, then around 3, or 4, wake up