Hello Hurricane

I’m going to say it. I want to talk round the subject, just list qualifications and all the things that make it okay, fine, normal.

My mum’s got cancer.

This isn’t something that happens to me. This is something that happens to other people.

I used to make a lot of jokes; “people only like Eva Cassidy because she died of cancer. Oh no, you can’t be nasty about her – she died of cancer!” I’m surprised no one ever hit me. I didn’t think that was offensive; in fact, I still don’t. I also think I may be a bit of an idiot. But whatever, I don’t think I’ll make jokes like that anymore. I just don’t feel like it.

Talking of feelings, this is definitely an interesting subject with me. When I was about 17, I made a little chart like this:

(it was about that pretty, too)

I blu-tacked it on my ‘mint julep’ woodchip wall. I don’t know what you put on your wall when you were 17. Okay, I had a couple of surfing posters too (I have never been surfing). I guess what I was doing was trying to understand my feelings.

My sister Katy doesn’t have a problem identifying her feelings. She feels something, she cries (she is amazing). I did a musical in Youth Theatre called Seize the Day. Every rehearsal, we took turns to share what we would do if we could ‘seize the day’. I said, ‘If I could seize the day, I would manage to cry again.’

You know what? Like most of the dreams I never thought would come true... it came true. We went to see It’s a wonderful life at the indie cinema down by the marina, and I did it. When George came back to his family to give himself up to the police, and the whole neighbourhood poured in... it took me 7 years, but I did it.

However, just because I’ve loosened up a bit doesn’t mean I get it. I got mum’s text and went back to my office. I sat down and looked at my work. I decided to get that piece of cake I’d been thinking about all through my meeting. I felt tired. ‘Maybe I’ll go eat this in the prayer room.’ Looking at everyone carrying on, thinking ‘they don’t know.’ Do I tell them? I get into the prayer room. I leave the light off. I sit and pick up my fork. Even more tired. Put down the cake. Drop off the chair, knees, stomach, face, like that monk in that film about Martin Luther. I feel the floor hold me, at each point, every point on my body. ‘This is how I hold you, Tim. This is how I’m holding Mum.’ The floor stretches away down here, rivulets in the green carpet. ‘But when you stand up, you’ll see its not really so far.’

In a way, I’m still on the floor there. I’m still wandering round thinking, ‘they don’t know’. I’m still eating my Victoria sponge, listening to Jon Foreman sing, ‘Hello Hurricane, you’re not enough, you can’t silence my love.’ I don’t know what I feel, but I feel something.

[a few qualifications:
- It’s the slow-growing kind
- It’s as small as they could catch it
- It’s not come into contact with main body cells, so shouldn’t transmit round the body
- They’re cutting it off in the next few weeks, and the operation has an 80% chance of success (not sure if that’s encouraging or not)
- Mum seems to be more at peace than she’s been for a couple of years. Jesus is doing something wonderful here.]

A story we need to hear

The snow was powdered fresh this morning when I crunched off for milk. I thanked God for mornings. There's a chance I won't mire today in the same mistakes.

Kind people keep asking me if I'm struggling with culture shock. I'm not. I'm struggling with culture. Like a rerun, I lay in bed last night clicking through photos of more than one girl, arriving at the usual resolution I don't want any of them but unable to want anything else either. You know the reason I didn't whine on about this from Uganda? Because it wasn't an issue. I fancied African women alright, but I never obsessed about them. I thank God for that - what a relief - but I curse the aggregate of media, fashion and arts that does this to us. Ben Okri says cultures are shaped by the stories they tell themselves. Can you think of a single happy ending that doesn't hang on a couple getting together?

And how did I manage to lose 2 hours getting a photo on this blog page, when Blogger's simple setter-upper promises you can do it in 5 minutes? I was talking to Ed about a little firework of a book called 'the Screwtape Letters' and trying to explain how it was still spot on even though it was written 70 years ago about specific situations in daily life... and I realised all the main things in life are exactly the same- it's just now we spend hardly any time thinking about or doing them because we're so occupied with our 'labour-saving devices'. I read somewhere (I think in Michael Crichton's time travel book, 'Timeline') that the amount of time the average household spends on housework hasn't changed since 1900 - when they did their laundry with a washboard and a mangle. We've just invented more things to fix, bought more things to clean. Scary. If life is made up of time, and we're wasting it; we're killing ourselves.

After battling riots, robbery and white water rafting, it feels a bit ridiculous taking up the pen against my laptop and facebook; but if I'm right, these things can be just as deadly. I believe comfort kills just as surely as poverty, so fighting it will make just as great a story. And a story we need to hear.