No breaks

Raining. The Willow Foundation cheque arrives special delivery (I nearly missed it as the doorbell still doesn't work). It is about £150 short. The reason of course is not the Willow who have been exemplary throughout but the hapless Marcella, manager, apparently, of Litro. First she cannot grasp the concept of a third party wishing to pay for the party, then she insists she cannot provide an invoice and we will pay in cash, in advance. Then when the Willow take control of the situation she decides quote them the costing without VAT and service and finally decides that she can invoice them and includes the service and VAT. Quite an effort.

The Willow have pledged to make up the difference and I've been to the bank to cash in the cheques. It's a rotten day; pissy and raining. Tomorrow should be better but it will only be better if Kelly can enjoy it. She's very sick. Her stomach has been aching for two days and Vida and Kate, our two live in medical professionals, are wondering whether it might be her appendix. Kelly is plumping for constipation and is necking the warm prune juice for all she's worth. She has a doctor's appointment at four (it's not the doctor's appointment - it's hers!*). It would be ironic if after all she has been through she now dies of appendicitus. She's been in bed for most of the day and I'm praying she'll be well enough to go tomorrow. It really isn't fair.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The doctor advises her to go to A & E. We go to A & E. We are there for 8 hours. They do blood tests and further chest x- rays and at one in the morning they finally admit her with a canulla in her foot because they can't find a vein and nobody in the world knows how to work the porta-cath she has had surgically embedded in her chest. So that was a good idea. They don't think it's her appendix just the tumors on her liver and codeine keeps the sting away. She should be able to attend the party but not in the capacity she probably wishes to. Fuck sake.

*I'll nick lines from Terry's Chocolate Orange adverts. Oh yes!

Charlotte Desperado

Back to the hospital again for the last English oncology appointment. We're here to beg medicine really, Kelly's not been on any drugs since they discovered that the last super chemo deluxe failed. So we'll see what happens. That's all we'll do - we'll be unlikely to influence anything one way or another.

The Breast-care nurse and the Willow Foundation both contacted us yesterday. Yet more forms to fill in but it looks as if the 19th is go - good job as I sent the invites out yesterday.

We were wandering around London most of yesterday with Kelly, first to her massage at the Marie Curie Hospice Centre in Belsize Park (where I wander around for an hour). From there Kelly wanted to walk to her psychologist's appointment in Archway. So we power up to Hampstead, along Hampstead Lane and on to Highgate and on to highgate proper. By the time we get to Highgate it is five to four and we still have to wade down Highgate Hill. There is crabbiness. Kelly makes the appointment ten minutes late and I retire to the Charlotte Despard for a white wine. There is only the bar-man in there and he has a broken arm. This means a chat. I take a swig of chablis and ask him about it. He gives me about half an hour on one breath, sparing no detail, being carefully specific about the ethnicities of the various people who have caused him upset. It transpires that he hasn't enjoyed his tenure at the Whittington Hospital. He objects to the A and E for not treating him for two whole hours and that there were tramps in the waiting room. People were rude to him. A man shouted. It goes on.

My mother's genes fulminate, bubbling within me; I need to compete. I can totally take this fucker apart with my hospital misery stories. He's got nothing. Two hours in A and E? Try 12 hours straight with no bed waiting for me at the end of it. Tramps in the hospital? Try an obese monoped in a wheelchair coming out of a ward toilet with no lock on it, reeking of fags and giving me a conspitatorial wink. But he carries on and on while I tenderise my tongue.

There is gap, a breath. I don't miss my chance and launch into my tale. I give him the volcanic-bubo-of-green-pus-as-a-result-of-an-MRSA-infected-pin-in-my-knee and he looks suitably aghast. I build to my rhetorical climax when, tragically, other customers come in and he waddles off to serve them clumsily with his knackered hand, immediately launching into another tirade against the NHS. I look at my phone and find that Kelly's psychologist hasn't turned up and she's been sitting in the astonishingly 70's foyer of Hell House on her own!

I rush to meet her and we walk home. I estimate that she's walked between five and six miles today. She seems so well that it's hard to believe that there is anything wrong with her. She's off to dinner in Finsbury Park's fashionable "Season" restaurant.

I stay in, clean the flat and watch a 1985 documentary on page three girls. It's a perfect night in. There are hardly any tits in it but the hair! The anklets! The blouson-style leather jackets! The smoking a cocktail cigarette with a moustachioed man in a nightclub! The bleached film-stock! Part of it was about a girl called Sharon Jay who wanted to be a page 3 girl. She won't be: she's caked in make-up and frazzled by high-lights. She's fifteen going on sixteen, getting her tits out on national television. A year older than I was in 1985. All I was worried about at the time was getting the grass stains out of my white, pleated chinos. I resist the urge to look up her career and what kind of career it was. She's docile and modestly pretty; an exact cross between Kim Wilde and Spagna. Nowadays she'd be orange, tattooed and miming blowjobs on Babestation.

"Hello Image"

Nothing from the Willow Foundation. Nothing from Kelly. No nothing*. Meeting the Steel boys later. I say "boys" but in truth we're all in our late thirties, though we act like boys.

Have been listening to a lot of early Cure for some reason. Clearly reverting to a sort of palsied adolescence.

I think I'll go for a walk. Get cold. Don't eat. Feel better.


*actually plenty o' nothing thanks.

Party fears, too

We are behind with the Willow Foundation. The Willow Foundation is a charity that provides "special days for seriously ill 16 to 40 year olds" and Kelly wants a party before she goes back to Ireland. Admittedly given my rather unstructured life-style and the continued fug of depression, days do tend to bleed weakly into one another, but I think it was well over a week ago that Kelly's breast care nurse agreed to fax her application form to them as "she knew someone". Well she evidently knows no one as they were posted and arrived only yesterday and, from what I can gather, without the notes that she was supposed to write alongside the application.

I'm terrified (read: worried) that we won't be able to get a venue for the 19th of March now (I had also completely forgotten about St Patrick's Day, which is a factor in North London).So I'm going to scour the neighbourhood and put my name down on anywhere I can find, as you would if you were hedging your bets with a wedding reception; praying that they don't ask for a deposit. Again flagrant hyperbolic language that I really must rein in: if they ask for a deposit I'll obviously just walk away. I won't be praying to anybody, especially "not you-know-who"*.

I would like to actually pull this off and not have everything go as woefully tits-up as everything else I do. I really am the King Midas of Bizarro-world. Which is a place in the D.C. universe, okay? Bizarro, a sort of rock faced anti-Superman, lives there. The planet is a cube because a cube is the exact mathematical opposite of a sphere. That's just science!


*He hasn't done us any favours. And is incorpreal anyway, so you couldn't call him "anybody" anyhow.