All you have is now

  Dear Ant Isn’t it strange, how quickly you notice your passing from one world into the next? One minute … More

Walking into the light

  We walked into the brunt light, towards the hospital. The air was dry, February-cold. Traffic was going about its … More

When did I get this?

One year go I celebrated with friends the publication of Love for Now, my journal-memoir of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of … More

By the way, you live

Dear Anthony I’m writing to let you know what you already know in your bones, as you put it much … More

On not being grateful for cancer

  An old friend of mine wrote to me the other day, out of the blue, to tell me about … More

Remission anniversary seven

Today is the seventh anniversary of the day I was told I was officially in remission from cancer. The popular … More

An interview: Putting Words to Cancer

Thank you to Julia McGuinness for posting this interview with me on her Creative Connections blog. In it I discuss … More

Lifesaving Poems: Jane Kenyon’s ‘Let Evening Come’

Let Evening Come Let the light of late afternoon shine through chinks in the barn, moving up the bales as … More

Chemo reading

I wrote here recently about losing my ambition as a writer. In case readers are in any doubt, the stuff … More

The art of Jörn Cann

This is Jörn Cann. He was my ward doctor at the haematology unit where I was treated for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma … More

Why it’s called Love for Now

Love for Now did not begin with an idea but an illness. As I have written elsewhere, there wasn’t a plan. I … More

Losing my ambition

Towards the end of my treatment for cancer in 2006 I had one of the most profound conversations of my … More

Review of Love for Now and Riddance

  Tomorrow the Church Times publishes a combined review of my memoir of cancer Love for Now and Riddance, my … More

Lifesaving Poems: Billy Collins’s ‘Morning’

  In February, 1999 I was sitting in a car park with Naomi Jaffa when she asked me what I … More

The ‘rollercoaster ride’ of cancer: an Interview with James Landale

It was great to hear the BBC’s Deputy Political Editor James Landale’s interview about his experience of treatment for cancer … More