It’s been 5 weeks since my last confession (blogging is the new confessional right?) and not much has changed.

Physically, I’ve now had two sessions of R-ICE chemotherapy and am waiting for a new PET scan to see if the cancer has gone.

Mentally, since starting R-ICE chemotherapy, I’ve been more introverted and lethargic. I don’t feel up to going anywhere or doing anything and life is passing me by. I only go out to go to the hospital or for food and I have taken to cancelling hospital appointments when I don’t well which seems to be most of the time.

I live in a shared house with two other guys and since one of my housemates moved out and a new one has moved in, we have decided to switch to a cheaper broadband provider. This isn’t as easy as you would imagine so we’ve been without an internet connection for weeks now. This, combined with me general apathy to going out, has made it hard to go online and to blog.

My ex-housemate bought a flat practically next door and gave me the password to his broadband wi-fi and if I set up in the furthest corner of our parking space in front of the house, I can just leach his internet connection. I’ve even set up a chair in the right spot. When it’s not too sunny I can just make out my laptop screen and see what I’m doing.

Two of my best friends are called Ben (and there’s another too!). One Ben I know from university. He and the girl he met at teacher training college travel the world together as teachers. Having been to Australia and New Zealand, they now teach in Hong Kong. They returned to the UK recently to get married and I was too unwell to go to either the stag night or the wedding itself, despite promising to go even if I had to crawl there. It’s a long crawl from London to the outskirts of Bath.

My other Ben is my snowboarding buddy and he has met and fell for Ros, my boss from my days working on the Radio 1 website. I missed his stag night too. I felt it was just too dangerous to go drinking the day after chemotherapy when I had no body defences and getting any infection can be fatal. I just couldn’t miss his wedding too and since he was getting married in North London, just a few stops away by tube, I knew this was do-able.

I bought a new semi-tailored suit in New York about 18 months ago when we won two Webby Awards for the website I produced for Radio 1 and I was dispatched to NY to award ceremony with DJ Ras Kwame. I say semi-tailored because the suit was off the rack but it was designer and the sleeves and legs were still unfinished so that they could be tailored to fit you.

At the Webbys the rule is that your acceptance speech must be limited to 5 words and Ras went up to collect the awards. His speech was spontaneous and inspired… he has long dreads tied up in a knot above his head which is very striking, and as he was onstage and saw himself on the giant TV screen behind, he glanced up and said … ‘look at my hair man!’ It was one of the best received speeches of the night.

Anyway… I tried my suit on for the first time about 3 weeks ago and I had lost so much weight through my illness that I looked like a kid trying on his dad’s clothes. Since I have only managed to work 5 days in 8 months, buying a new one was a no go. Luckily by the time the wedding arrived I had put on enough weight to make the suit passable and only my interminable limp and new shiny bald head gave the game away my illness.

Of course things are never easy for me and I twisted my ankle badly while going out to buy a wedding card the same morning so I could barely walk, but it was worth going to the wedding, if only to see a man cry. Ben is very sentimental and Ros, being from the same part as Yorkshire as me, is very practical in some ways as hard as nails. It was a given that if anyone got tearful it would be Ben first.

Ros came down the aisle to the theme from The Spy Who Loved Me (‘Nobody Does It Better’) which always reminds me of when my dad died 25 years ago. My mum took me and my brothers and sister to Skegness to try get over my dad’s death that summer and The Spy Who Loved Me was showing at the cinema. It was my first Bond movie on the big screen and is still my favourite.

Now I have two unforgettable memories attached to that song and two attached to that suit. Like I have said before, there are no co-incidences.