So we’re onto the new edition of the Rugby World Cup. This is not an inconsequential thing, rugby being the only form of sportsball that I follow with any real attention (golf doesn’t count, not being an actual sport). It’s also a marker of the times, given that World Cups come around in four-year cycles. The last edition was thus happening at around this time in 2019, a very different world.
To speak of the local team, Ireland are coming in as one of the favourites once more. Last time, under the stewardship of Joe Schmidt, they were a little past their best, their time as world number one a distant memory, other teams having figured out Schmidt’s meticulously drawn playbook. Ireland were shocked by Japan in the group stages and mercilessly dispatched by New Zealand in the quarter finals.
This time around, Ireland look a more formidable package. Under Andy Farrell, they rebuilt towards retaking the number one spot, but this time they’ve defended it, against opposition clearly also building towards this tournament. It’s a misfortune of the draw (held, oddly, only a little after the last edition) that finds them in the same half as the three other favourites: New Zealand, hosts France, and champions South Africa, who are in Ireland’s group.
I’m watching Ireland’s first game as I’m writing this, and at this point they’ve just replied to a surprise early try by opponents Romania to the amount of three tries. Ireland remain an efficient machine, and I may get the chance to follow their progress beyond the quarter finals for the first time. If they can break that hoodoo, there’s every chance they’ll make it to the final.
It is, honestly, hard to remember the last edition of the Rugby World Cup. Held in Japan, I’d hoped to go to it but ended up on a eclipse-chasing journey to South America instead. My brother who did go to it posted to the family group this morning a picture of himself and his baby girl in matching Ireland tops. Four years ago: a different world.
We’ve had Covid and lockdowns in the interim, of course. The lunacy of Trump ended, or seemed to, and the U.K. government buried its head in the sand and screamed madness to the worms. For myself, I’ve had the ups and downs of cancer and a new job. And then of course, there’s dad.
I haven’t been to a rugby match since lockdown began. Before, I’d go to several a year, almost always with my dad. He had a grumpy appreciation of the ups and downs of sporting fortune that he passed down to his sons, and if I was the one who followed him in supporting West Brom (an even more lost cause), we all picked up a passion for Ulster and Irish rugby.
Just as Covid was first impinging on the public consciousness, Dad and I had planned a trip to Treviso in northern Italy for an Ulster away game. Northern Italy was, of course, where Covid started spreading first, and we decided it was safest not to risk it. Not long after, flights were being cancelled and lockdowns coming into place. It would have to wait.
Except it wouldn’t. Just over a month after lockdown began, I got a call from home. Dad had died suddenly in his sleep. The world was different. I made it up home for the funeral, but I had to head back to Dublin soon after. Then we all just tried to adjust and make it through the next few years.
They haven’t been bad years, in general. Quiet ones, of course, as the world got ever stranger and more perilous. There are two new babies in the family now, and there’s a wedding to look forward to later this month. Strange to be enjoying events like these without dad. Perhaps that’s what prompted this post.
I’ll keep watching the Rugby World Cup for the next month or so, of course. I’ll probably even go to a match at some point in the future. And I still plan to travel to Treviso some day and finish that interrupted plan.
It’s only half time in the match, after all, and Ireland are well ahead. Hope remains.
Starting to write this while watching an extremely aggravating Six Nations match is probably not the best way to kick off a review of the past year. Better to have a clear mind, surely? To offer a dispassionate view of the past thirteen months and all that they’ve contained.
Nah. This particular repetition of the Six Nations has already caused me heart palpitations, during the epic first half between Ireland and France, so I think I can handle a ramshackle Ireland trying to avoid falling apart against Scotland in Murrayfield. Probably. In any case, I’ll provide a final score when the match gets to that point. (Currently it’s 7-8 to Ireland at 54 minutes.)
So, to my own situation. It’s actually pretty good, all things considered. As my late-year catchup post probably stated, I had a pretty good 2022 overall, despite getting caught with Covid not once but twice. In fact, the second time, coming around the end of November, presaged something more serious. The cough wouldn’t shift and proceeded to get worse. By the time an early January CT scan rolled around, I was pretty certain I knew what it was going to show.
My old friend alectinib had, after three years, decided to hang up its boots. The cancer was back on a growth path and new options were needed. Luckily there was a new candidate ready to go. Second choice it may have been, but lorlatinib was an able deputy: one pill once a day instead of four twice a day, and a new suite of side effects to take stock of.
Three months down the line from that changeover and I’m pleased to report that things are, if anything, better than they were. The cough and raspy breathing are gone, I have plenty of energy, and the side effects seem restricted to a rising cholesterol level. For which I need to take another pill. The final count on the pill front has thus halved, so I’m pretty happy, and if I get another three years out of lorlatinib, I’ll be ecstatic.
Thinker/crank Aubrey de Grey has a concept called longevity escape velocity, according to which there will come a point at which expected lifespans will be increasing so fast that that mortality itself will be left behind. There’s not much sign of that yet, but I have my personal version of “cancer escape velocity,” in which advances in cancer treatment outpace my cancer’s ability to colonise my lungs.
On that front then, so far, so good.
(The match has now ended, with Ireland winning 7-22, so add that to the good news. Six days to a showdown with England in Dublin, a Grand Slam at stake.)
As for the rest of life, no complaints and onwards and upwards. The job continues to be fascinating and engaging (and the office is walkable in good weather), and the family are all well, with the gaggle of nieces and nephews expanding in recent months by two of the former, Clodagh and Brigid. There’s even a family wedding to look forward to later in the year and Best Man duties to be executed in a fashion that suggests I might actually know what I’m doing.
It all suggests something of a return to normality, and in truth I’m even planning some travel for later in the year, Brussels this month and something new and worthy of a blog post or two around September time. I might even (whisper it), dig out the running shoes in the next week or two and see if the lungs are up to a light jog.
So everything seems to be going pretty good for me. I wish I could look around and say that the same is true for the rest of the world. While politics in Ireland seems to be running along more-or-less standard lines (which is to say, venal and dishonest on the part of the ruling power block), things either side seem to be taking a distinctly nasty direction.
The U.K., of course, remains consumed by the mire that Brexit was always going to become, and it trundles on seven years in, currently trying to heave its bulk over the largely flattened roadblock that is Northern Ireland. (Where the fundamentalist DUP have come to the end of the knots they’ve spent the last few years tying themselves in, only to find that they’ve, well, run out of rope.)
The Conservative regime, desperately unpopular and now on its fifth Prime Minister since Brexit, is reduced to culture war gestures, targeting refugees and trans rights in a desperate bid to gin up a bit of good old-fashioned hatred. Their latest efforts on this front have led to them going to war with the BBC’s Sports department, or rather its personnel, who have left work en masse rather than condone one of their number being victimised for having a public opinion contrary to that of the government.
Transphobia, meanwhile, is being used as a wedge issue by the U.S. far right—sorry, the Republican Party—as it plays its own games of hate and works to make the Hunger Games a real thing in time for the next Olympics. There’s a weird cultural cross-contamination process going on, as right-wing groups on both sides of the Atlantic spout the same talking points within days of each other, even when they’re wildly inappropriate.
The claim that “15-min Cities” were a globalist conspiracy to restrict movement may have made some sense in car-addled Los Angeles, but in much of British suburbia it’s just how life is lived. And faking moral outrage at children being brought to drag story time at libraries is a lot harder to do in a country where most children grew up watching drag performers on stage during pantomime season, every Christmas.
But logic and common sense require a firm footing in reality, and there’s precious little of that to be had these days. Facebook groups share all the poison gossip in restricted circles while Elon Musk burns Twitter to the ground in the desperate hope that someone, somewhere might someday like him. You’d be forgiven for forgetting that there’s a war on, but though Ukrainians are bleeding for Bakhmut as I type this, there’s a breed of online narcissist who’d as quickly blame them for the bloodshed.
Beyond even that, there’s the accelerating degradation of the world we live on. The increasing desperation of fossil fuel companies to extract as much wealth as they can from the planet before their business model crashes into the ground and takes us all with it. The way that market-driven capitalism cheers them on, a system for extracting value, never suited to run a society filled with complex human beings, now governing the fate of a planet. The only planet we know of that we can live on.
It’s all a bit much, and far beyond the compass of a blog post to comprehend. I can only reiterate what I have read and found to be good: that no person is illegal. To which I’d venture that no person is good or evil either. Only deeds. People are complicated and sometimes broken, sometimes by choice but more often not.
Given the option, most of us would help and share rather than hoard and compete. I believe that. I still see it regularly, even in the middle of myriad systems that encourage the opposite. Green shoots push through concrete, given time.
And if nothing else, there’s a Grand Slam to look forward to. Now who do I know might get me rugby tickets?
It should have been Two Years On, really, but I was around a month late last time, and if 2021 was good for anything at all, it was procrastination. A year in which not much went forward and not much went back. A year of holding your breath and waiting to see which way the spinning coin falls.
Plus, if I keep up this trend for long enough, I get to skip year 13 entirely, and that gives me something to aim for. Grab for those slender straws!
Let’s frontload this post with some updates of the kind that I dropped around this time last year. In keeping with the theme of the year, my cancer hasn’t really advanced or retreated in the past thirteen months, though it has thrown up some interesting curveballs. To wit, a small anomalous blob in my left lung was identified as something of concern, so my pill-based treatment was supplemented with some judicious Stereotactic Radiotherapy.
My high-tech chariot awaits.
If you’ve never heard of this before, it’s a refinement of older generations of radiotherapy treatments, designed to deliver pinpoint radiation to small targets, like the aforementioned anomalous blob. Quite a bit of setup is required: I had a prep session in which I was fitted for a moulded beanbag bed and marked with some targeting tattoos, rendering me unsuitable for salvation according to several religions. Ah well.
The treatment wasn’t a barrel of laughs, but I’ll take boredom and discomfort over pain and ill health any day. Under the care of the excellent medical staff, I spent five sessions of an hour or so breathing very shallowly (observing the motions of my chest on a monitor so close to my face that I couldn’t focus on it) while the rotating sensor zeroed in on my problematic portions and the emissive elements zapped them into oblivion. Hopefully anyhow. Further scans will tell more.
On the similarly high-tech but much more invasive front, another anomalous blob further south in my torso called for a couple of cystoscopies. On the bright side, this anomalous blob appears to be entirely benign. Similarly brightly, I’ve now enjoyed live HD footage from inside my bladder. Not brightly at all: everything else about the experience, including an infection that dropped me in hospital for a few days after the first scan. The staff as always were excellent, but there are places where cameras are not meant to go, no matter how small and flexible they may be.
The year in a headline.
Of course, there’s whatever I went through in 2021, and there’s whatever the world at large was going through. 2021 was the year that refused to get better, as Covid worked its way through the Greek alphabet with a series of resurgences as the moneyed powers of the world tried to persuade everyone to go back to spending money even as the elite creamed as much off the top as they could get away with.
Does that sound a bit radicalised? Maybe I’ve been reading Twitter too much, but there’s a depressing refusal among western governments to look towards long-term solutions with regard to anything, pushing climate legislation down the road even as the Antarctic melts and the permafrost vanishes. The sclerotic nature of political systems occupied by people for whom government is a career rather than a job more or less guarantees a conservative status quo. I’ve said before that I think we’re heading into another cycle of revolutions driven by the tendency of wealth and power to accrue more wealth and power, but this time around external factors might end up intruding before any sea change is effected.
It’s funny when having incurable cancer isn’t the worst thing about your life. It’s bad when it isn’t in the top two. Covid and isolation take top spot, and I’m really hoping to at least escape into the wilds more often in 2022. Second place is taken up by the recurring nightmare of waking up in a world where fascist talking points are increasingly aired in public and creep in on the edges of “respectable” media. A world where Trump, Johnson, Peterson, Rogan, and Musk are defended by armies of vehement fanboys online and bitcoin and NFTs are promoted as the be-all and end-all of putting a price on everything in existence, no matter the cost.
I baked some bread.
Thank you for listening to my rant, and if you haven’t made it this far, please excuse the logical impossibility. 2021 was far from a terrible year for me. It was too quiet for that, in the first place. I got to spend time with my family, adjusting ever so slowly to the absence of dad, and when I was able to, I met up with my friends, whose presence I remain entirely grateful for.
I baked bread, I wrote a novel (NaNoWriMo once again), and I enjoyed the summer as best I could. I also got a new job, and if there’s a positive side to the year, it was this change: the job in question is as close to my dream position as any I’ve ever been in, and the fact that I’m still learning as I go is just the icing on the cake. At some point in the year to come, I may even meet some more of my workmates in person (I’ve met a few, but mostly it’s been a work-from-home year).
So 2022, or the ten and a bit months of it that remain, is not without things to look forward to. There are medical worries hanging over my head, but that’s par for the course these days, and as long as I can enjoy the open air and the working day, I’ll consider myself fortunate enough. Hopefully the year will bring enough good things that others will be able to say the same.
Early morning calls are rarely good news. When the call is from your brother, his voice freighting two words with loss and grief, it’s about as bad as it gets.
“It’s dad.”
The call came at 6.45 AM on Sunday. For a few hours, I ran on automatic, alternating between doing what I normally did and trying to figure out what to do next. Actually confronting the news would wait. Would have to wait. My family were a hundred miles away from me in the midst of a pandemic. Could I be with them? Through the morning, I narrowed in on that question, and by lunch I had an answer from my doctor: yes. A visit to the hospital and a Garda checkpoint later and I was heading north.
I arrived not long before the body came back. He’d died at 6.00 AM, and as always with these things, matters followed their own course. My parents were lucky enough to have most of their immediate family living close by, so my mum had support as what needed to be done was done. By the time I arrived, I was there to fill in a missing piece. To offer support and presence, and to help figure out what came next.
My big contribution that day was to provide a photo of him that people could use. He wasn’t the most comfortable photo subject — in most photos of him, his smile was thin, if there at all. Perhaps he’d just gotten used to the formality of the job he’d held as head teacher of a primary school for 40-odd years. I found a different one. One where he was laughing. One of him and me, as it happened. I cropped myself out of it and sent it on.
The original photo, with tart.
The photo came from a couple of years before. My mum had been ill, needing heart surgery and then a lengthy recovery in hospital. I was between jobs, so I decided to head north and stay with him for a few months. Despite the circumstances, I appreciated that time we had. I think I told him that. I hope I did. The photo was of the two of us attempting to bake an apple tart. Despite it being the middle of summer, we’d decorated it with the only pastry shapes we could find cutters for: Christmas trees. Maybe that’s what he was laughing at.
The tart turned out pretty well, in the end.
After the pressure of the first day, the next few were all waiting. We had time for realisation to sink in, as the body lay in repose in the house with us. Mum fielded condolences from her and dad’s expanse of family and friends. I did useful things, like cancelling his satellite TV subscription (awkward) and deleting his Facebook account (easy enough, as he’d never really posted much there).
The last missing piece arrived on Tuesday night. My brother flew in from Australia and arrived a little before midnight. Like me, he’d needed permission to travel through the pandemic, but his journey had been much longer and the prospects for his returning after were far more questionable.
The day of the funeral was … strange. I suppose it always must be, but then 2020 hasn’t been a normal year so far. The weather seemed to feel the strangeness. There was sunshine before and sunshine after, but during the funeral itself, there were two hours of squally, cold rain. Even so, the road between our house and the chapel was lined with people seeking to pay their respects. Not able to attend the funeral due to the pandemic, they did all that they could.
I helped carry the coffin to the grave. Helped lower it in, along with my brothers and uncles. Then we walked home again, through the easing rain. I found myself wanting to do everything I could but not knowing whether anything I did could make a difference. The funeral was over, and now the living without him had to begin.
It’s a huge gap to fill. Most people probably feel the same way about their parents, so please excuse me if I talk about him for a bit. I often tell people that I know that I’ve been pretty lucky in life. A strange thing to say, given my medical history, recent and otherwise, but my mum and dad are at the base of why I believe it.
He was born in Ardglass, County Down, a few years before World War II ended. Grew up there, made friends, got an education, saw a bit of the world, then came back. Got a job in a local school, became headmaster, got married, had four kids, retired, played golf. A life summed up in a paragraph; accurate but missing almost all of the important things.
His four kids are pretty different in temperament. We each took different things from our parents, but all of us learned from his curiosity, both about the world and the people in it. How to treat other people is the most important lesson that parents can teach, and he and mum aced that.
When I was young, I was constantly amazed at how many people would come up to him on the street and start chatting. As a shy kid, it was incredible that so many people knew him. Part of that was down to his job, which brought him into contact with so many. But mostly it was because he was interested in them, and they picked up on that. Not that he always remembered who they were on first meeting, but he never let on and usually figured it out quickly enough.
You could see that attention repaid in the crowds who braved rain, wind, and pandemic to line a narrow country road and see the coffin go by. You could see it in the generous tribute in the local paper, written by the father of several children he’d taught years before. The letters that crammed into our letterbox as the days went past after the funeral. He’d given out love into the world, and the world gave it back.
He loved sports, though for different reasons. Most of his sons picked up on his love for rugby and football, but I was the only one whom he snared into supporting his beloved West Bromwich Albion. He was a little more successful in passing on his contempt for Manchester United. He liked horse racing too, and golf, and he’d watch cricket as well, if only to see England lose.
He loved history, a love that kept my own love for it alive after school had done its best to bore it out of me. We’d planned to visit Venice and maybe other sites before the lockdown came in. He loved stories, both reading them himself and reading them out to his pupils. He’d have drained the local library dry of books if he could.
He loved quizzes more than almost anyone I knew, and they gave him an outlet for his curiosity and ability to retain odd scraps of information. It’s a love and a trait that I inherited too. He took part in several TV quizzes, most notably Mastermind, where his specialised subject was the Second Punic War. As a kid, I accidentally taped over his recording of that appearance. As an adult I retrieved a copy of it from the BBC archives.
Above all, he loved my mum. An ex-girlfriend of mine once turned to me after meeting my parents and said “They never argue!” or words to that effect. Which wasn’t exactly true. I imagine they were being on their best behaviour at the time, but the fact remains that they were together long enough to see several of their kids get married and have kids of their own, to build their own house in a beautiful part of the country, and to enjoy a retirement that saw them travel to various parts of the world both sunny and historical on a regular basis. If they argued, they loved and knew each other well enough to know that the arguments weren’t the important thing.
He wasn’t perfect. He could be a grumpy sod, especially when West Brom were being managed by Tony Pulis, the Irish rugby team were hoofing the ball into the air for no good reason, or Rory McIlroy was failing to putt properly. He had a tendency towards temper when driving that I’ve inherited as well. The world is full of idiots, and most of them are on the roads (a good proportion of them driving BMWs).
He never quite settled into retirement. His curiosity and need to be doing something wouldn’t let him. He churned through library books, wrote a book of his own, joined the local golf club and ran it for a while, volunteered to help out with charities and his old school, and did his best to fill his days. When his grandchildren came along, he loved them too, though they at last managed to remind him of the value of moments of peace and quiet.
I could go on adding detail until my memory ran out and all my readers had given up, but no matter how many words I added, it wouldn’t amount to more than the barest glimpse of a life. That he died so suddenly, without warning and a chance to say goodbye, hurts for those of us left behind, but the silver lining is there to see if you can manage it. It was a good life — it could hardly be a better one — and it ended without suffering. He left behind the best of memories and having done his best to leave the world better than he found it. We should all be so lucky.
For his family and friends, we now have to adjust. As much as death is an inevitable part of life, saying goodbye to a massive part of your life isn’t something that we’re taught to do. We have to figure out what our lives will be like in his absence. We’ll have to cope with the grief of all the moments that will never be. To be reminded every now and then that there won’t be another chance to talk with him. To see a photo, or read something and think of sharing it, and be pierced to the heart in an instant.
The sun is shining and the world is still. There are terrible things going on, and it sometimes feels like the worst people are running everything. But most of us have examples we can look to and know that it can be better. My dad was that for me. He is still.
Cancer Update
I normally think of myself as a pretty stoic person, but starting to cough up blood the night before my dad’s funeral, while waiting for my brother to fly back from Australia in the midst of a global pandemic pushed me as close to panic as I’ve been for a long time. Exactly what the cause was, I don’t know, but the odds are that wearing a mask for extended periods of time was too tough on my lungs and a blood vessel went pop somewhere. Then I made it worse by taking part in the funeral while wearing a mask too — though that part I don’t regret at all.
As a result I haven’t been able to stay at home as I wanted to — even with the pandemic, there are still people dropping by to offer their condolences, and I need to be isolated so I don’t have to wear a mask. I did get myself checked out at the hospital and there are no signs of anything worse going on, and it’s now been several days since the last spot of blood, so I think I’m on the mend. Still, it’s a reminder that despite the good scan results recently, I need to take care. Especially amidst everything that 2020 has become.
The Clarity of Now 