I’ve had a really emotional day today. It’s been hugely busy (I was in my office at 8am so I could get a proposal out and then I had to dash out to spend the rest of the day interviewing doctors in their offices about how they treat a particular illness).

One of my calls was to a really nice doctor in a practice in Stanmore, a suburb of North West London and very much a part of my old stamping ground. So much old ‘stuff’ was bobbling around in my mind as I was driving those streets that were half familiar and half forgotten yet they all invoked memories of my past.

A couple of weeks ago, an old friend who I’d mentioned in my diary months back contacted me out of the blue. He told me that he’d come across my gallery by an alert from an old pal of his who needed to get in touch with him so had ‘Googled’ his name. As his name is pretty unusual (Clint Anglo) this friend of his thought it’d be a certainty that any reference to the name would be him. He was surprised to find two mentions of the name, one on Clint’s footie team’s website and the other on my pbase. What’s more, the chap in question was the person who INVENTED the term ‘sproutbag’ for fishnets. Clint was mortified that his 47 years of life had only warranted two mentions……but it did alert him to my pbase and he left a message in my guest book a couple of weeks ago. It was a brilliant surprise. I actually went past the shop today where the name ‘sproutbag’ was invented by two boys of sixteen, idling away the time on their Saturday job…..BUT, it’s not there any more! (Ah well, there goes another memory.)

I also drove through Harrow where I passed the end of the road where my ex (who also found my pbase some months back and has commented once or twice on my pics) lived way back when we were young and in love.

This photo is of a pub where I worked as a barmaid for a couple of years four nights a week, the Swan in Ruislip High Street. I did it while I was saving to buy my first flat in 1981/2. I worked there and in a record shop on Saturdays, lived off the money from my two part-time jobs and saved every penny of the salary from my full-time job to pay my deposit. I worked really hard during that time but the reward I got was my freedom and independence. I have never looked back on that as anything other than a great decision. The sacrifice of having no spare time for eighteen months has been paid back many times over in the pleasure of home ownership.

One night, right on the spot that you see in the photograph, one of our regular customers was stabbed in the neck and bled to death. He had ‘mouthed off’ to a stranger who’d waited for him outside and stabbed him. I have always been thankful that on that particular night, I had swapped my shift with a friend (Angie) and colleague so I could go to a gig. I worked the following night instead. My friend was the poor soul who tried to stem the bleeding while the ambulance was on its way. I doubt if that terrible event has ever left her psyche. I have always wondered whether I could have done as well in her shoes but I thank my lucky stars I will never know.

Later, after interviewing that doctor, while I was on my way to my next appointment and sitting in traffic on the North Circular (this used to be our road to hell before the M25 was built), I heard a play on Radio 4 that touched me to the core.

It was called ‘Cross my heart and hope to fly’. These afternoon plays are one of the things I cherish most about Radio 4, along with the short stories, because they make me use my imagination. They are almost always written by people I’ve never heard of so I get exposed to writing by people I’d not come across in normal circumstances.

This play chilled me in the sense that the horror of cancer is once again terrorising people I love and this play is about two women with breast cancer. My Uncle’s wife (and all agree this lovely lady is the best thing that’s ever happened to him) is recovering from surgery to remove ‘an orange sized tumor’ from her ovary. My dear friend Sarah and her husband are living with their best friend’s breast cancer too. ‘Ging’ is also recovering from surgery.

The play starts with a middle-aged woman, clearly bitter about her husband leaving her and also bitter about her mastectomy getting into a fight with a man who has parked his ‘white van’ in such a way that she finds it difficult to extricate her car from its space. She loses her temper and blurts out that she had cancer and is inhibited in her movements. He asks her to visit another young woman who has also got breast cancer to try to help the younger woman out. The play is about the complexities of the relationships that are formed from this chance event and how we see ourselves and one another. It has been beautifully written and the observations seemed so ‘spot-on’ to me. I loved it.

There were two parts in the play (no that’s not true – the whole thing moved me to tears) that were hugely moving. The first was when the (lesbian) lover of the young woman was confessing to herself that she didn’t love her partner and only stayed with her because of her illness. She couldn’t bring herself to leave so she decided that she would learn to love her. It worked and both women then got the emotional fulfilment from the relationship that every human being deserves.

The second was a love scene where the older woman with breast cancer slept with the man she eventually married for the first time. The author of the play used a beautiful phrase ‘she felt he’d loved her right to the very edge of tenderness’. It struck me as a bit out of place really at the time. My experience is that one’s first night with a lover is actually about lust and passion rather than tenderness – that beautiful emotion comes later if you are REALLY lucky. But the phrase wouldn’t go from my mind. I have been analysing why it should have struck a chord so much with me and I think it was partly the eloquence of the whole scene – the description of her new lover kissing her mastectomy scar was beautiful, painful, poignant in a way that is only found in very good fiction. But I think maybe too it was to do with the way that people who face the prospect of untimely death respond differently to situations. Maybe they realise that it’s the tenderness that is the key to love and happiness much more than the rest of us do.

I know I’ve drivelled on tonight but I really had to say this stuff.

My parting shot is a small quote from General Public’s wonderful single, Tenderness

‘seems like without tenderness there’s something missing’