Spring and Singing

Well, the soft touch of Summer is here again and I once again find myself drawn to my super duper astronaut designed gravity defying garden chair (should there be commas in that?) which the family bought me for my birthday last year. To some, it appears to be quite a normal chair. But to me my chair is what a hammock is to a sailor - my refuge when the seas are rough and my rest when the skies are smooth and blue.

I really should be ashamed of myself for not updating my blog more regularly. Especially since, in moments when I am practising self delusion, I call myself a writer. But such is life. My husband chastises me for not leaving something of myself behind. He thinks I should write more so that some part of me will remain after I am gone. But I am not feeling particularly guilty. I will leave my shoe collection instead. That will surely take many years to dispose of and holds my imprint and my smell much better than words could.

Health wise things have been up and down - much like my hair which has develped the ability to defy gravity and greets me every morning in the mirror like a faded exclamation mark. After a really difficult time on chemo, and some pretty horrible infections over the Summer when an old wound refused to heal and I ended up sampling the care of different UK hospitals, I had started to pick up by the Autumn. But then I received more bad news. The cancer, which had been knocked back by the chemo, had started to grow again.

I was given the choice of an experimental drug or conventional chemotherapy. Being the sort of girl that wants to be first at everything I opted for the experimental drug and I was the third woman in the World to go onto Abiraterone. The doctors at the Marsden were really excited. They thought this might be a breakthrough drug for people like me. But after two months I learned that it had only been partially successful. While my bones were holding up well, other places were showing more cancer growth. So we made the decision to halt the trial and go back to conventional chemotherapy.

I was dreading it. All those hours sitting in the chemo chair while the poison drips slowly into your veins. The sickness, the hair loss, the fatigue. But actually this chemo has been OK. I have kept my hair, and my immune system is holding up so I don't have to be so worried that I am going to die of a cold every time somebody around me sneezes. I can even go swimming (if I could find my cossie). Early scans show that this conventional chemo drug is being effective, so let's hope that it continues to do its stuff for a long time yet. Certainly I feel good, and nobody who meets me for the first time has the slightest clue that I am actually quite seriously ill.

In fact, I don't behave at all like an ill person. I have been so busy - helping my eldest daughter learn how to drive, taking short breaks abroad, going out for meals and lots and lots of theatre. We have seen some brilliant productions - a magnificent Othello (NOT the Lenny Henry one), the Cirque du Soleil, a gothic production of Cinderella (too scary for one sensitive little girl that came with us), War Horse (we all cried) and other things I have forgotten. Next month we are off to see Sister Act, which is based on the film with Whoopie Goldberg (not the film with Julie Andrews). You might remember it features a gospel choir.

Which brings me onto singing. In the Autumn I joined the Rock Choir - a gospel type choir that sings rock, gospel and pop. It's got quite a reputation here in the South having performed at the local rock festival and other places. And it's reputation is growing - we were on the Paul O'Grady show last week and Breakfast TV the week before. There are currently five Rock Choirs who all learn and rehearse the same songs and then come together to perform. Next month we are doing something with the Band of the Royal Marines and there are plans for Glastonbury coming up. The woman who runs it plans to have Rock Choirs running all over the country in the next couple of years and is hoping that the Rock Choir might sing at the opening ceremony of the Olympics in 2012. Oh, how I hope to be there.

I did singing of a different type on Saturday when I went to see Chelsea play in the FA cup semi final at Wembley. I was so proud to remember the words of Blue is the Colour and sung and bounced around for the best part of ninety minutes. The noise and the atmosphere was fantastic. Back in the 1970s we were all Chelsea fans (well, all seven of us living in our house were). We all had knitted bobble hats and scarves and my dad and uncle Fred even painted the cabin cruiser they had built in Chelsea colours. We were there, gathered around the TV set and cheering on Osgood and Bonetti, when Chelsea won the FA cup final in 1970. Years later, I spent many a freezing Sunday afternoon standing in the Chelsea shed with my then boyfriend, watching grown men throw beer cans and insults at a team that couldn't win an argument with an imbecile. It was depressing stuff, but the chips and beer were good.

I guess when I go to Heaven (and believe me, readers, I shall be going to Heaven) I will join the choir of angels. I suspect there won't be beer and chips. And it certainly won't be singing the songs we sang at Chelsea. But I wonder whether there will be auditions - and whether some saint that looks suspiciously like Simon Cowell will ask me why nobody told me I couldn't sing. On the other hand, perhaps I will, as Yeats suggests, have paddled in that mysterious and every brimming stream where ..."all who have obeyed the Holy law paddle and are perfect". Can you imagine such a choir? Millions of individual yet perfect voices singing in unison. But will there be football? Will there be theatre? And, most worrying of all, if everybody who goes to Heaven paddles and becomes perfect, how will I recognise any of my friends?