Peace.

Peace

It's turned cold in London. The chill kind of cold, where the dampness seeps through your clothes, your scarf and gloves into your bones. The cold that you can't shake off without a fire, and where your feet feel permanently chilled.

It's dark as well. Dark when I wake up and dark when I leave work. The sun tries to break through clouds but it is rare, and even rarer seen. Winter has hit us and the snooze button on my alarm clock is in much greater use than before.

My next PET scan is tomorrow and winter may be hitting my body too. I get the results in two weeks time and I have to say, that ostrich head of mine is hitting the earth's core at the moment. There is a strange ambivalence in my attitude to cancer at the moment. On the one hand, I need to mention it, need to name the darkness in my thoughts, and at the same time, I need to move on, to trivialise it by mentioning it between current affairs and the weather.

I will never forget my headmaster who taught general studies in preparation for University Entrance. He taught me about Wittgenstein: about how language defines our thoughts for us, that if we do not name a thing, we don't recognise it. That is why the Eskimos have 50 words for snow whereas we only have about three, because we don't recognise the different degrees of snow. Well, in a reverse way, my attitude to cancer is the same. Because I can talk about it in an ordinary way, because I can name it, trivialise it, it strips the monster of its power, it declaws the tiger, it puts out the flaming dragon.

And that brings peace.

Minerva