I had my first radiotherapy session this morning. The process was easy enough although, as I am getting used to, there was a lot of sitting and waiting. The sitting and waiting is not inefficiency but is itself part of the process and specifically it is what they politely call ‘preparation.’ In simple terms the radiographers like ones bladder to be full and back passage empty and the waiting is to ensure those desiderata are achieved; truly one goes placidly amidst the noise and haste.
In the waiting room, Smooth Radio is playing, Kate Garraway the presenter. It is bland fodder, enlivened by the appearance of the Pet Shop Boys who enliven everything. I suspect the choice of station is calibrated to the likely age of the patients but excludes those like me who saw the Grateful Dead and listen to progressive rock or any who were into heavy metal or punk.
The session itself was easy enough: lie down and let the machine do its thing for five minutes. It reminded me a lot of a medical bay in Star Trek and, just as I was thinking that, Elton John was quietly singing Rocket Man.
My main takeaway is to remember to take a book with me.
I intended to have a dry-ish January, not out of any fashionable health concerns but because of very real health concerns and an attempt to be as healthy as possible when the radiotherapy starts next week. And I have – mostly – stuck to my intent until the last couple of days.
On Sunday I was at True and Bold, a tribute night for Dick Gaughan, a grand show with far too many highlights to list. I met up with some old online friends beforehand and beers were had. Prior to that I’d wandered along Argyle Street to Glasgow Cross and noticed an intriguing 12-string guitar in the window. The shop was closed and unlit so I couldn’t see detail, I just lodged it in my memory.
The day after the show I did something I haven’t done for a while; an inner voice said the time was right: I took my Martin 000-15 guitar out of it’s case and, despite protesting fingertips, reminded myself that I can still play a little and that the muscle memory is there.
Then yesterday I spent the afternoon with an old friend. Once again, beer was implicated. Brian and I have several things in common, including encounters with oncologists. Something that is heavily promoted in cancer care is meeting others in the same situation and talking with them; Maggie’s and Macmillan do good work around this. It is fair to say, though, that it is better when you’re talking with a friend and you can mix the serious stuff in with a right good laugh around common memories and interests – and we certainly had a right good laugh while also talking about diagnoses and dark nights of the soul, conversation that felt right though might have sounded irreverent to any civilian listening in. I’m happy to insist that, as the cliche has it, laughter is the best medicine.
Another thing we have in common is guitars. Brian has a more accomplished semi-pro background than me but we have similar interests. One thing led to another and we’re giving serious thought to working up a set and trying a secret gig at an open-mic night at a convenient spot, possibly in Dundee. I’ve been thinking about potential songs all day; one or two of them would benefit from a 12-string guitar …
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Three videos: Dick Gaughan and his long-time set opener; Gaughan again with 5-Hand Reel, the first I ever heard him, and Simon and Garfunkle.
I use a lot of notebooks and have opinions about what I like, opinions that boil down to squared paper that will take fountain pen without the ink bleeding through to the other side. I use various notebooks in varying sizes – A4, A5 and B5 mainly but my pocket notebooks are A6, more or less, and after an initial flirtation with the ubiquitous Moleskine I now use cheap ones made in China that are at least as good as Moleskines and considerably cheaper.
For some time I’ve toyed with the notion of making notebooks for myself, forming and stitching the paper signatures and case binding them. The photos are of my first effort, made over the last couple of days using materials I had in the shed, although I bought needles and linen thread. The finished article is a bit rough but I’m pleased with how it turned out. More to the point, now that I’ve made one I know that I can make more and make them better, with various papers in various sizes and with various covers. The one in the photos is covered in what looks like leather but is in fact a wallpaper sample that I’ll rub with beeswax tomorrow when the glue is dry.
outside
There is something pleasingly analogue about it, something homespun, even if all the constituent materials were made elsewhere.
Next up will likely be several A5 notebooks in various covers: I have a piece of thin leather that will do the job and I plan to experiment with making my own book cloth, as well as finding creative uses for other wallpaper samples.
There is a point to this besides the inherent pleasure in making the notebooks. I had my second hormone implant today and have a CT scan tomorrow preparatory to radiotherapy in a couple of weeks. I’ve mentioned before that one of the effects of the hormones is low-level fatigue and energy loss. This impacts in various ways but one of them is that I’m not always sufficiently with it to do anything that requires focus and creative imagination like writing fiction. This fatigue will become more pronounced as the radiotherapy progresses. Making notebooks is a handy way to keep myself active and occupied without having to think too hard about anything more than making the signatures, kettle stitching them together, making the cover and putting it all together.
My original plan was to record a version of this post to video and use it to revitalise my dormant YouTube channel. The video would have included me reading Eliot’s The Journey of the Magi to you, however I would have had to record it in the office/shed and it is too cold up there, so you have been spared that.
January sixth is traditionally known in the West as the Feast of the Epiphany but it is a very ancient Christian celebration that predates what we now know as Christmas. In its original form it celebrated several things but the common element in both Eastern and Western Christian traditions is the visit of the Magi to the infant Jesus.
Mark, generally said to be the first of the canonical gospels to be written, has no infancy narrative at all and begins with the man Jesus being baptised by John the Baptist. The Gospel of John, generally said to be the last of the gospels to be written, follows Mark very closely but has as an added bonus a prologue that introduces the whole thing in the light of Greek philosophy.
It is generally thought that Matthew was the second gospel to be written and it is in Matt ch.2 – and only there – that we find the magi – here meaning Zoroastrian priests – who observe the rising star of the King of the Jews and journey westwards to pay their respects (the verb used, προσκυνησαι does not mean ‘worship’ as we now understand the term in a religious sense but is closer to the root Old English meaning of worship as paying respects to something or someone worthy of it.) Luke, who seems to rewrite Matthew for a more Graeco-Roman audience, wants nothing to do with magi and replaces them with shepherds washing their socks by night.
One might wonder, as many have, why Matthew thought it was important to have an infancy narrative at all and why he has Zoroastrian priests come to visit (note that they were neither kings nor, alas, underwear salesmen of Leicester Square.) It could be that they were a symbolic representation of gentiles in general; it could be that, like the gospel writers’ obsession with John the Baptist there is an echo of religious turf wars; it could be something else entirely.
Eliot’s magi, or rather the aging magus who narrates the poem as a memory from his past, is focused on the end of ‘the old dispensation.’ Importantly, the death of the old is presented in conjunction with the birth of the new: the magus says that he thought death and birth were different and Eliot leaves it to us to understand the implicit suggestion that the opposite is true, that they are the same. Eliot and the writer of Matthew have in mind the primacy of Christian mythology no doubt, but Eliot also taps into much older myths of the death of the old and the birth of the new. Death and birth/rebirth are at the heart of festivals everywhere, from solstice to May Day to Harvest.
Eliot’s magus concludes,
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
The final sentence can bear several readings, and Eliot, the Anglo-Catholic, is perhaps looking at the death of old religions and the birth of Christianity as well as the aging magus himself recognising it is time for him to go and welcoming it. But I do wonder if the final sentence should also carry an implicit echo of rebirth.
A cold coming the magi had of it, at just the worst time of the year but, as Edinburgh temperatures fall to -5C, I reflect that it is now, when the year is at its coldest, that snowdrops emerge.
It was a year ago today that I had my first PSA test and got the phone call to say that it was high (24.8 ng/ml). Naturally, the first thing I did was to go online and find out what the number meant and what it meant was that I probably had prostate cancer. It took several more months of tests to confirm that I do have cancer, for a long time the consensus was that the high PSA (it had stabilised at circa 20 ng/ml last time it was measured) was a result of an enlarged prostate and a prior UTI; an MRI was inconclusive.
Be that as it may, the possibility of cancer triggered a week of wrestling with the idea of a somewhat more imminent encounter with mortality than I expected.
What was a surprise, and, surprisingly comforting in its own way, was the realisation that I was OK with it: not happy, but accepting. It also triggered an extended period of self-reflection through all of 2025 which shows no signs of letting up.
I’ve made a series of changes in my life since as I figured out what is important to me and what isn’t: it’s why I stopped watching and reading the news as there’s no point in getting caught up in things I can’t control. I am more appreciative of family and the mundanities of living. Also, I read and enjoy a lot of poetry, something I’ve neglected for decades.
One particular consequence was that I began an occasional journal for what I loosely call ‘spirituality.’ I say loosely because the focus is on Self and Being (and by implication Non-being) rather than anything overtly religious. The theme is to question the essence of the ‘I’ is who is writing this. I haven’t put any of it online yet – although hints have surfaced – because there isn’t a lot to upload and I am wary of uploading woo, but I do hope to do something with it eventually, perhaps here. Aside from the risk of woo, the other danger is that clichés lurk behind every sentence that I might write, and it isn’t as though life and death and being and nothingness have not been themes of human thought and writing for as long as they have existed. I don’t presume to originality, but, cliché alert, however early caught and however treatable, cancer concentrates the mind on life, the universe and everything and, me being me, I write about it, longhand with a fountain pen.
And I have other things to do, a novel to finish in draft, heaps of family tree research to write up and one or two other odds and ends.
I’ve been blogging since September 2002 (my first post on this site was in June 2009 though I’ve since copied in one or two earlier posts from the old site); what appears here is mediated, of course: I choose what to publish and what to keep to myself. Over the years, my choice of what to publish has changed, not least because for most of that time I was working and I was conscious that employers would have a view. I’m no longer under that restriction and the ‘inner’ me – what Chris Jary at the old Civil Service College called ‘the real Ian’ or ‘the whole Ian’ – is likely to come to the fore. I’m not sure if that is a threat or a promise.
Next week I have a final scan prior to radiotherapy starting at the end of this month. I mentioned previously that the main impact on my daily life of the hormone implant has been weight gain; I’m also aware of getting tired more easily and last week in Glasgow Kirstin asked why I was walking more slowly than usual. I get my second implant next week too. I’m trying to keep life as normal as possible while all this is going on. I’m not sure how frequently I’ll be writing here but I do intend to use this as a central point for news.
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