I will admit to not having done a great deal of work of
late. It's really difficult to fit it all in around the operations,
recuperations, appointments – ahem - trips to coffee shops, trips online… so
was delighted to receive my copies of the January / February edition of Chase
Magazine and see that I could still occasionally manage to put a few words on
paper.
I'm talking about Dear Thing by Julie Cohen and Crossing The
Line by Christian Plowman in this edition.
I only write about books which have
blown me away and which I desperately want other people to read. And these two
are no exception. The subject matter, surrogacy, is what drove me to Cohen's
novel but once in, I found it was as much a story of unrequited love as making
babies - an unexpected extra dimension which was joyously painful to read.
The second, Crossing The Line, is an auto-biographical view
of life as an undercover detective. It's a theme which wouldn't normally jump
out at me but once it had become clear that I'd read the entire first chapter
in Waterstones, I felt compelled to buy it. Plowman's story is certainly gripping,
powerful and, I admit, quite entertaining (even if I did feel a little
voyeuristic in my fascination of the dirty underworld Plowman frequented) but
it was also overtly sad and it was the human cost to Plowman which really had
me fascinated.
Please click here to pop over to Chase to read more (pages 50/51).
How's my new companion, cancer today? Well, I'm one step closer to booting the gate-crasher from the party. Last week I had my second official operation (third if you count the unexpected extra one to clear up the burst artery) and I'm back and fighting and just hoping we can finally get on with chemotherapy soon. It's funny the world you enter when you find out you have cancer, when you start wishing things like chemotherapy upon yourself. But the sooner we crack on with it, the sooner we can start talking about cancer in the past tense. Next post I'll tell you about the wig buying trip with my children. If you ask me nicely, I may even include photos.
