Aramaic for Beginners

Day 112

General status update

Fatigue/weakness: epic – getting rather fed up with this now. Much worse than previous cycles, maybe because I had the infection last week. The infection has gone, but my body just doesn’t seem to be recovering yet. It’d better get a move on, because we’ve got blood tests on Wednesday, and my neutrophils need to be back, all present and correct, or FEC6 will be delayed.. Can’t help feeling that being so ridiculously weak is NOT A GOOD SIGN.

Anxiety level/insane euphoria (+/- 1-10,000): the insane euphoria seems but a dim and distant memory at this stage of the chemo cycle. Very, very anxious about my wretched neutrophils which I imagine, in serried ranks, looking like little white Smurfs - weak and feeble little white Smurfs, in fact some of them seem to be lying down., which can't be good. GET UP!!

Nausea Demon: Still away with the Benedictine monks at worth Abbey – have just texted to ask if he could make himself useful for once and slip in a quick prayer on behalf of my neutrophils. Maybe light a couple of candles, too, that’s always good. Or a rocket.

Despair Demon: I’m going to take him down to the river to watch the Boat Race with us – maybe that’ll cheer him up.

Chemo Muse: she doesn’t quite see the point of the Boat Race, or competitve sport in general, for that matter,. preferring simply to kill her opponents, on the whole. However, after I explain to her that the event involves sixteen quite exceptionally fit young men in tight lycra, she agrees to accompany us, after all. I just hope she doesn’t start flicking her snaky locks in the Oxford crew’s direction, because we want a nice straight win with no distractions, this year. She can do what she likes with the Cambridge crew, obvs.

Chemo Brian: the only competitive sport he’s interested in is smoke-ring blowing, so he’s staying home on the sofa with his new obsession, a boxed set of Series 1 of Game of Thrones, which seems QUITE RUDE for American tv where everyone, bizarrely, keeps their bras on in bed (viz: Sex and the City, Buffy the Vampire slayer). R has explained to me, however, that there is one almost secret American tv channel where quite a lot of rudeness goes on, so that would account for True Blood, as well.

State of mind: It’s Easter!! There are daffodils and tulips, and I have received a lovely Easter egg with honeycomb crisp chocolates, and we have special wildly OTT Easter cupcakes t (see below). And it’s also Boat Race Day! And Oxford are going to win! ALL IS WELL.

Hair: not talkng to me now, after I gave it a telling-off yesterday. Fine, see if I care.

MamaFo: she rang yesterday, and I asked her what she would like for her 82^nd birthday, which is this week. Her answer: the new David Bowie album.

HAPPY EASTER!

I love Easter, and everything about it: the whole sense of rebirth and renewal and regeneration at this time of year, the daffodils and tulips and crocuses and trees covered in blossom, the Cadbury’s creme eggs and Malteaster Bunnies and all the rest of the mad chocolatiness, and the completely daft way in which Easter, this major religious event and public holiday involving not one, but two, Bank Holidays in the UK, is a moveable feast, the date of which each year is arbitrarily determined by the phases of the moon.

As far as I am concerned there is nothing not to like about Easter, which made it particularly unfortunate that when I moved abroad in 2006, it was to a country where they don’t have Easter.

Not at all.

Not even a tiny bit.

It didn’t really occur to me at first that in Turkey, a 98% Muslim country, there would be no Easter, because I'd never lived anywhere before where Easter wasn't; I moved to Ankara, to teach at Bilkent University, in the January, and in the general melee of culture shock over the next couple of months it took a while to realise that there was a Big Black Hole where Easter ought to be coming along.

In the UK the shops start filling up with Easter confectionery immediately after the Christmas, which is of course ridiculous, but you try getting to March alone in a foreign country and suddenly realising that there is not a single chocolate egg to be had, for love nor money, anywhere nearer than Bulgaria.

No crème eggs, no chocolate Easter bunnies, NO EASTER, and they’re a bit short on daffodils in Turkey as well, to be honest. I got people to send stuff over, but it wasn’t the same – there was just no sense of impending Easteriness, and all the general joy that goes with that. The nearest Turkish equivalent, which long pre-dates Islam, is the festival of Hıdırellez, in early May, when Turks takes to the woods en masse for picnics and jumping over bonfires to mark the beginning of spring, but there is no chocolate involved, no fluffy yellow chicks, not a rabbit to be seen. A bit of a burnt barbecued beef sausage and a scorched arse from jumping over a bonfire don’t even come close..

It was hard, very hard.

By the third year, getting desperate,  I  arranged a trip to a remote part of south-eastern Turkey so that my time there would coincide with the Syriac Orthodox Easter: around the city of Mardin, close to the Syrian border, are the remnants of the 2,000 year old Syriac Orthodox community (the Syriac Orthodox Church was founded by St Peter himself in Antioch, now the Turkish city of Antakya), most of whom have now emigrated due to a long history of harrassment by the Turkish authorities - whilst Christians are not, in theory, actively persecuted in Turkey, since the expulsion of the orthodox Greeks, Armenians and other minorities  in the 1920s, they have certainly not been encouraged - but some of whom cling on, with a handful of churches and monasteries, where all the services are still conducted in Aramaic. I’m not particularly religious, but I was brought up in the Church of England, and Easter services are part of my cultural DNA; there was a profound sense of relief and familiarity sitting in that old stone church in Mardin for the rites of the Syriac Orthodox Easter, even though the entire thing was in Aramaic, and I couldn’t understand a single word. Words weren’t necessary.

Now that I’m back in the UK I have re-embraced Easter with great enthusiasm, and this year more so than ever, as it marks not only the end of the winter, but also the end of my sentence in the chemical prison of chemo. Today is Easter Sunday, symbolic of rebirth and renewal; on Thursday the administration of the final dose of chemo, FEC6, will mark my liberation from the trials of the chemo ward and, after a couple of weeks’ more unpleasantness, the beginning of my physical recovery, another kind of a rebirth.

Just four more days until the chemo finish line.

Four more days.

Happy Easter, everyone!

Yes, you weren't imagining it: this cupcake actually has a WHOLE creme egg on top of it. This little piece 

of Easter genius comes courtesy of the Upsy Daisy Bakery in Hammersmith