It's no secret that I was treated for two kinds of malignant cancer in 2024 and 2025.
Along with surgery and radiotherapy, one of the treatments was a course of Zoladex implants in which I have had a subcutaneous implant of a drug called goserelin every three months for the last two years. This drug has a number of unpleasant side-effects. One of these is something akin to depression. The way I have experienced it is that I just feel sad,and struggle to care about anything. This is obviously not an ideal situation. It happens randomly but probably, overall, for about half of the time. Obviously this has been enormously difficult for my family as well as myself.
Today, in the grip of the third day of the most recent bout of this, I cycled to work early this morning and then, having failed to achieve anything very useful by about 11 o'clock, I went up to Victoria Square to the Farmers Market where I though I might watch the cricket for a while. The cricket is usually on when the farmers market is on, at least it has been recently.
Well not today.
So I sat on the grass next to my bicycle and ate my Cornish Pastie and wondered why I have to feel so miserable when in fact I'm so lucky. I survived the cancer and the future is looking good.
As I looked out across the lack of cricket on the green my thoughts wandered and followed a path, as they often do these days through the general state of the world. Things don't seem to be very good in the world at the moment, and I guess it would be easy enough to feel a little bit glum just about that. Added to that I've been a little dismayed recently by some of the things I've seen on television, both in the news and in various fictitious series. It seems that there are a lot of bad people around who will happily do things between not very nice and unspeakably evil. They're in positions of power, they're in ordinary jobs, they could be sitting next to you for all you know. And that's the thing I find a bit disheartening; there's so much bad going on and a lot of the time you don't who's up to what.
I had business dealings with a man a couple of years ago and I heard through the grapevine recently that he's left his job and been had up for various sexual misdemeanours to do with an underage girl. I was gobsmacked when I found that out. He just didn't seem the type.
But who is the type?
What does the type look like?
How does the type behave?
Where does the type live?
I guess the answer is but they're among us. And it's sad to say that most of them are men. It's easy to see that most of the problems in the world are directly attributable to men and their lust for power and control. And some of the stuff one hears about men's treatment of women is frankly abhorrent. And we don't know where they are, unless of course you happen to know one.
Christopher Hitchens said a few years ago now (he died in 2012) that the world didn't have many problems that couldn't be solved by the 'empowerment of women'. I think he had a point.
Would it be controversial of me to say that from an evolutionary evolutionary point of view, and from the point of view of existing inside my own head where no one can get to me and nobody has to see what I'm thinking, I can understand some of the things that men get up to?
Impulses can be primal. The difference between good people and bad people though is that the good ones know how to behave and know what's good, and what's reasonable, and have no wish to visit fear or violence or even just unpleasantness or exert control for the sake of it over any other person let alone one which they profess to love. My wife often catches me pretending not to look at a pretty woman on the street, and she will sometimes almost swoon at some handsome man whether in person or on screen. That's it though, we're not about to rush off and have an affair. At least not yet.
- You see there's the other thing; even perfectly normal, reasonable people often have an almost inevitable tendency to bugger up their own lives by doing silly things such as having affairs. It hasn't happened to me yet and as far as I know it hasn't happened to my wife, but because we're human we couldn't say with 100% certainty that it won't.
Anyway I have finished my pastie now and it's time to go back to the office and see if I can achieve something useful.
That was just a quick round up of (some of) my thoughts while I couldn't watch the cricket.