I’ve been asked to dedicate the rally to my friend Pippa’s father, Peter, who died of cancer just a few month’s back. She’s in Australia so unfortunately I didn’t get the text with the news that her father had carked it. Meantime, I see her new photo on Facebook and write to tell her “Your new profile photo makes you look depressed”.
Response : “My Dad died yesterday”.
So this rally goes out to you, Mr. Druce. I’ve asked Pippa to send a photo so that we can have you riding on our dashboard for a final journey, after your final journey. If you’re anything like Pippa (and by the way, well done on growing her – she’s great) you’ll be good company.
I’ll also co-dedicate the rally to Julia Luard, my friend Dave’s mother. Apparently she was very serene when she went, convinced that she was off to a ‘tea party in the sky’. Whenever I went to their farm in Somerset she’d be smiling and was the kindest person you could imagine.
My heart really goes out to both of you OK, enough of the platitudes.
Your parents died.
It will be a bit shit forever.
But you’ll have them forever in amazing bittersweet memories. Get used to crying with a smile on your face because, in those moments, Peter and Julia live on.
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I’m open to sponsorship at www.justgiving.com/tomshelleyrallier.
The media frequently misrepresent science stories. They pick up on an agenda and push it to further their own ends. There’s wifi madness which some cynics try to dismiss in spot on cartoons, but the clearest example of this is The Cancer Scare. Not a day goes by without another so called ‘tragedy’. Another child dead, another mother widowed. The papers grab on every downside of the disease – if you can call it that – because they know it sells papers.
It’s the house price of ailments.
You don’t have to go far to learn that cancer will kill your baby, sister or father. Like the reds under the beds, there’s always another cancer waiting to crawl into a body part like a sneaky Geordie burglar.
Don’t get down when you get diagnosed. Here’s some reasons why it’s not all bad:
1. Fewer bad hair days. It’s hard to imagine but I’ve had a bit of a hair crisis recently. Not something that happens to you after chemo.
2. Gets you out of sticky situations. Let’s say you just tried to Google your friends EMO Goth band ‘New Bile Children’ but had unfortunately misunderstood the name, and searched for it phonetically. Then you asked the office whether they knew where you could find ‘New Bile Children’ on the internet. Before you know it you’re engulfed in a shame cycle that a fast acting bone cancer, faster acting than a mob of pikeys with badly spelt signs, eould answer your paedo prayers.
3. Isn’t remembering birthdays shit? A death in the family replaces a forgettable birthday with a date you really can remember!
4. We’ve never had it so good, how can we enjoy life unless we’ve got another ever present nagging worry? Despite Islamist inconvenientists who occasionally blow up Tube trains there’s generally not much to worry about. Until you’ve survived cancer and they give you the all clear. My Mum was given the all clear. All clear actually means cancer could come back and kill your ass.
5. Many/few people long to have large alien lethal things in their bottom. Anal Cancer could be for you.
6. Savex on messy divorces. 1 in 3 marriages end in divorce. Divorce is a) a sin b) quite unhealthy for children. c) expensive. Imagine how pleased you’d be if you suddenly found your ex-paramour had a tumour inside them. I’m fairly sure you’d no longer go for the quickie split and quite often ‘lose’ documents that delayed the proceedings.
7. Gets rid of the weak. (Actually this isn’t true. It can strike pretty much anyone.)
8. Cancer can be a great ice-breaker. 1 in 3 people will get a cancer so you’re bound to find someone to share a story with. Here’s how you can work it:
Bob : Hi.
Dave : Hello.
*super awkward silence as Dave realises that Bob has no creases in his trousers*
Dave: There’s a lot of that cancer going round.
Bob: Aye.
Embarassment averted.
9. Faster swimming. There’s a reason Duncan Goodhew won so many medals.
10. Parents, ham up a non-fatal cancer to get your teeenagers back in line. It’s a truth commonly known that teenagers take pleasure in torturing their poor parents. If you do get a nice bit of skin cancer, ham it up, and let it knock the wind out of them. Get yourself in bed for weeks, shave your head, make the little buggers say ‘I wish I listened to you more’. Then stage a miraculous recovery, get yourself off washing up for years and the kids will tell you frequently that they love you, a la Rod Stewart.
If you’re not in total agreement with this list the Cancer Research UK are the people trying to save your family from domestic devastation.
Get on the Kill Cancer Death Rally and raise them some money.
The reason that once a year I organise an idiotic road trip was that when I was 10 my mother died of cancer. I was only just 10. My birthday just one day before. Guess what present she gave me for it? The Game of Life. I have only just now, this second, realised the gob-stopping irony of that.
I’ve never opened the box but have, instead, made it into a shrine – no, of course I haven’t done that. Maybe now I’m all growed up I’d try to preserve a deathbed gift in some reasonable state, not then. I played the game a lot. It involved spinning a wheel, and driving round a track in a car, I think. The games I played with my sisters were always I tiny bit weird as I’d left the rules in the Royal Marsden Hospital terminally-ill-of-shitting-cancer ward.
I literally lost the rules to The Game of Life in the hospital where my mother died.
Were irony meters to work like geiger counters, then one near me would be clicking like a loquacious pod of Zulu dolphins. I had never thought of it like that. Wow, I’m going to love acting all mysterious and broken with a line like “I lost the rules to the game of life when my mother died”.
Anyway, back to my mother and my present, because I can see her now on the bed giving it to me. She was so frail her hands could barely move and she couldn’t really talk any more. But she, and it would have been her because my dear Dad is birthday allergic, remembered to get something for me. That I’m related to this amazing woman is a source of confusion to most who know both her and me. I’ve got tears in my eyes thinking about her.
I hope that shows why I want to raise shitloads of money for Cancer Research UK. The best way to do that? Moronic trans-continental rally.
There’s going to be a party. After much toing and froing (and I hope some of you read those words to rhyme with boing) the The Kill Cancer Death Party is sorted out.
Venue : The Leonard Street Gallery
Address : 73A Leonard St, EC2A 4QS (Old St. Tube).
Time : Friday 22nd Sept, 7pm – midnight
Theme : addicted icons, death ralliers and 1980s colour-blind psychiatric outpatients.
We’ll ask for a donation on the door and then money from food and drink at the event will go to Cancer Research UK. I hope a load of you can make it to see off the Kill Cancer Death Ralliers in style.
That means we need some serious Whitney-Houston-strung-out-on-crystal-meth outfits. Or raid the ski-suits from your parent’s cupboards, then combine it with a large hunting knife and pictures of your boss’s front garden. On the Death Rallier front, well, anything goes. Please theme out to the max, and if none of those ideas grab you, just look fabulous.
Before I sign off I’d like to thank all the wonderful folks at the Leonard Street Gallery who are giving us this thing for very little. You’ve been really generous and I hope the night goes with a swang.
Ghost Dog – tagline “Live by the code. Die by the code” – is a funny old movie. When I say funny, I mean a little bit boring. It’s a flick that people who I would let go to the video shop unaccompanied like, and yet I fell asleep in it. Pretentious, action packed with a wicked Wu Tang Clan soundtrack (and whilst we’re on the subject of the Clan, check out Ol Dirty Bastard life story) – it’s my type of film. Hmmm, a puzzler.
The reason I mention it is that during the movie the pigeon fancying wannabe samurai, played by Forrest Whitaker, occasionally reads from the Hagakure, the code of the Samurai, and one bit stuck with me :
“Each day a samurai should contemplate his own death and consider various ways of dying, from being torn apart in the jaws of a wild beast, to falling from thousand foot cliffs, and during some part of the day, the samurai should consider himself dead.”
The reason that stuck is because I think contemplating mortality is good for the soul. However, now we’re so over-protected you can’t even teach kindergarten classes to juggle with flaming hedge strimmers, without the ‘elf and bloody safety busy-bodies breathing their nanny state fumes down your free decent English yeoman neck, I’d advise you get real, and start thinking about cancer.
A good place to start is the cheery sounding Cancer Stats webpage. It’s like YouTube for hypochondriacs. Did you know there are 24 types of cancer, and yet four types, breast, lung, bowel and prostate – account for over half of all new cases? Good to see that cancer, like any good business, roughly follows the 20/80 rule of getting 80% of your business (read deaths) from 20% of your service providers (read cancers).
For your viewing pleasure, here are the 24 types of cancer. And if we’re contemplating our impending dooms, allow me to paraphrase the Wu Tang Clan : 24 ways to die, chose one.
Bladder cancer Bone cancer Bowel cancer Brain and CNS cancer
Breast cancer Cervical cancer Hodgkin’s lymphoma Kidney cancer
Laryngeal cancer Leukaemia Liver cancer Lung cancer
Malignant melanoma Multiple myeloma Non-Hodgkin lymphoma Oesophageal cancer
Oral cancer Ovarian cancer Pancreatic cancer Prostate cancer
Stomach cancer Testicular cancer Thyroid cancer Uterine cancer
Which one do you want least? And really try to imagine it. To my mind they all look totally rubbish. Except, that is, Multiple Myeloma. I just can’t stop saying it to the tune of My Sharona. Whenever I said I had cancer I’d be able to say “I’ve got a Multiple Myeloma, ma-ma-ma-ma-My-yi-yi-yi-yi-eloma”.
Obviously Cancer Research UK are doing all they can to stop anyone having to sing which terminal disease they have to tunes by The Knack. And the Kill Cancer Death Rally is doing all it can to raise money for those bad ass cancer killing research doctors. Go on then, give us some money.
GSOT : I’ll have it with a side order of fries, please
Wouldn’t it be rubbish if you did the Kill Cancer Death Rally, then realised that no one else gave a shit. There you were, in Barcelona, you’d rallied, you’d tried. You’d raised money, and your game. But all around a bloated, complacent, sick world carried on in degeneracy.
Luckily, life isn’t like that. Instead, all around there are good folk who are trying to do their best to raise money to beat cancer. So from now on I’ll highlight some of the people who are doing good as we speak (except we’re not speaking). It might be that someone who can’t make it on the rally will be able to, for example, go on a hill walk like James Wallis. And you can follow his progress here.
Whilst stuck on the hillside James might come across (pun intended) The Breast of Canada Calendar girls. Using their chest puppies as weapons against cancer, these Canuck beauties are walking the walk with their waps waggling in the wind. Those of you set on using your anatomy to raise money could also visit FlipCancerTheBird.Com (link via The Mad Admin – if you feel IT workers are undervalued agree with him here).
However, all these normal people doing charity are more than a little dull when you compare them to Look To The Stars, the blog that records celebrity giving. As I worship celebrity then it would be a dream to appear on that site. Oh, to enjoy basking in the reflected glow. To get on their I’m going to need a celebrity. I’m going to need the Hof. Please, can someone get David Hasselhof on the Kill Cancer Death Rally. In full Night Rider gear.
The Hoffmeister with puppies. Twice.
ps. if you’ve come here after I said I’d popped you on my blogroll, then I’m sorry to disappoint. I’ll link to you soon as I can, but sourcing photos of Hasselhof with puppies takes time and it’s already late.
Back from the Ibiza. Relaxed as you could possibly be after landing at four in the morning and catching cattle class flu. However, that’s no longer a worry as we make the big party! Yes, you heard it right. Not only will there be a Kill Cancer Death Rally, there will now be a Kill Cancer Death Party.
Shit, a death party. Sounds like it should be in a Brasseye sketch. Chris Morris turns to the camera looking serious next to an adolescent boy with an organ on his head and a young girl looking intensely at a ballcock. ”Welcome to a modern day death party. He’s flipping a porpoise in a death lid, whilst she’s waiting for her ball spasm to backflachate.”
You know the sort of thing.
Death lids aside, this party is, in fact, being organised by the wonderful Yunes of Static London (please send me a link to your site) and Alex Sheridan. Alex will be putting the might of Protest Recordings behind it. Or at least some of the might.
It’ll be shake your coconuts time in mid-September and all the money will go to - you’ve guessed it – buying Kalashnikovs for the Lord’s Resistance Army Cancer Research. Whomsoever would like to have an invitation to le knees up send in your proper home address to me. If you have any other friends who’d be interested ask them, get their addresses and we will send them, like, an actual invitation in, like, the post.
Kalashnikov. Cancer.
Dr. Death. Innocence massacred.
(Due to some strange blog malfunction I wasn’t able to get the photos in the right order for this line ‘We’re helping him, kill this. Not buying these, for them’ under the photos. It is rather weirder now.)
Being told that your mother has died sticks in the mind. However, it is not something that I have played back especially often. There are parties and books, movies and feats of outstanding sporting endeavour that I hunt out from my cerebral cortex more regularly – if that is where you store memories.
One of the reasons for that, is because when I was told, I didn’t cry, and I could never understand this. I stood in between my sisters in my Aunt’s sitting room: brown carpet, my grandmother in a blue cardigan, all of us in Barnes.
We’d finished breakfast – you don’t want to unleash tragedies on kiddies with empty stomachs, after another night of oh-my-god-it-won’t-happen-will-it?
“I’m afraid this morning Mummy died”.
Everyone collapses in on each other, as though the air had been sucked out from between us. In a way it had been.
I’m there and I’m wondering “Why the hell am I not crying?”
Why didn’t I cry then when my throat’s choking up now on a train to Bristol, tears poking out of eyes?
Why did I not cry, and I sure as hell didn’t have an ‘I’m the man in the family now, there’s no room for tears’ moment?
Why? Why? Why?
And I think it’s because I just didn’t think Mummy could die. It was impossible. No way. Really it wouldn’t happen. When hearing “Only a miracle can save her now” it just meant that a miracle would fucking happen.
Unfortunately people do die, miracles are painfully unreliable and you can’t raise money for them.
You can, however, raise money for Cancer Research. You can come on the Kill Cancer Death Rally, celebrate life for four days and help make sure that those teary, tragic, enormous, little gatherings happen a lot less.
I try my hardest to conjour up the right level of sadness, pity, fun and fear to make sure that as many folks as possible join the KCDR. I attempt to communicate quite how much I want to raise money for Cancer Research UK. I call, mail and cajole to generate electricity about this kick-ass rally.
So I wonder whether this blog is the right forum for this gag but…….
Q: Why are cancer sufferers so good at skateboarding?
A: ‘Cos they’re so fuckin’ sick, dude.
Shall I tell you who else is good at skateboarding: Rodney Mullens.
Though he would be less good if he got cancer. So get giving.
I’ve mentioned before (here and here) why I’m doing this but, in case you’re new to the blog (and to you I say “Welcome! Have a crumpet.”), I’ll tell you again. When I was 11 my Mum died of cancer. It first came as breast cancer. This had the impertinence to come back a second time, but she rocked so much she beat it again.
Then she was given the all clear. And then she died. Drag.
You see cancer is a tricky little bitch, it makes like a gritty north-eastern football team in a relegation dogfight, and never knows when it’s beat. It came back, manifested itself in her liver and then chilled on out through her spine and her blood.
The problem is, not only does cancer suck, but the ‘medicine’ they use to treat it is rubbish. Chemotherapy is, essentially, as much poison as your body can handle without dying. Now, not only did my beautiful mother have cancer but all her hair fell out as she slowly died.
Which is where the sexy doctors at Cancer Research UK come in. They spend all their waking lives trying to kill cancer. In April 2003 they found out more about how cancer spreads (Link). The little evil bastard puts all it’s building materials at the part of the tumour moving forward, so that it spreads faster. What a shit.
But knowledge is power and these guys are learning how to Kill Cancer. Please come on the Kill Cancer Death Rally and raise lots of cash for these wonderful guys. Go to www.justgiving.com, follow the instructions and you can start raising money now.
All Just Giving sites will be linked to from this blog so send them in the moment you get them. Mine is here, please give generously.
