For Continuance

Once you’ve been diagnosed with cancer, it’s for keeps even if it doesn’t kill you.

Today, I have a CT scan at the Toronto hospital where they cut me open in 2020 for rectal cancer. Then the hospital, the city and Canada were in lockdown from a Covid pandemic that shuttered the world. I remember the angry, desperate whispers of the hospital’s cleaning staff who were terrified because management and their union had not provided them with sufficient PPE. One paper mask for an eight-hour shift.

Years later, it’s water under the bridge. The mood has shifted, at the hospital and in society. The panic, the we’re-in-it-all-together spirit from 2020, has been displaced by inflation, housing costs and a persistent message from government and the wealthy that migrants stole our thunder.

At first, after my cancer operation, I had these scans every three months, then every six months, and now yearly. The last one, in May 2025, found lesions on my liver, too small for the radiologist to determine whether they were markings from a double gin and tonic from a long-ago summer or something more pernicious.

The days before and after my scheduled CT always make me lose my footing in the tall weeds of anxiety and intrusive thoughts. There’s a non-specific sense of doubt that occupies all the space between my waking and sleeping.

Although they unsettle me, I don’t begrudge these scans. I suspect being dead for want of a test would be even more unnerving.

It’s not what I am arriving for that is the rub. It’s the journey itself. It breaks the routine and the environment I am now accustomed to.

Since the cost of living crisis, I no longer travel further than I can walk, but there is much to see in a 10km stroll. The world’s beauty and beastliness can be found a continent away or on your front doorstep.

Being on the train to Toronto invites a sense of both adventure and dread, as my journey isn’t for pleasure but for continuance.

It’s a forty-five minute walk to the train station and, as my train leaves after the morning rush hour, the homeless of my city are just stirring from a night of vigilant twilight sleep. I don’t know their names, but I recognise them and their personalities: the shy, the bold, the meek and the bad. Some look as old as me, others as though they only just graduated high school.

It’s the same in Toronto, only more of them. Yet at Union Station there won’t be any homeless milling about as in previous times. The local government pushed them out of tourist hubs during the World Cup so visitors can think Canada’s cities are affordable and caring.

When my scan is done, I will walk from the hospital, which sits in a leafy, high-income enclave, into the real city, where people earn an average wage but must pay way above that just to make do.

There I will find a park and eat a cheese sandwich with cold bacon that I brought from home.

And as I do, I will think of The Jewel in the Crown, in which Sarah Layton offers her father, recently returned from a German prisoner-of-war camp, a cold bacon sandwich, which he eats with a silent pleasure that defies the inhumanity he so recently endured.

Support This Work

Thanks for reading, and I am so grateful for everyone’s support in keeping my dad’s legacy alive and, for that matter, keeping me housed.

I try very hard to earn your support because I know how tight things are for everyone during these days when neoliberalism has made us all pinch pennies as if it were the 1930s.

At this moment I am in Toronto tomorrow for a CT scan and a visit with my oncologist to check for cancer recurrence or spread. Last year, scans revealed lesions on my liver that doctors want to investigate further this year. But, I think this will turn out to be much a do about nothing. My main concern will be to find out whether the disease in my lungs has worsened or stayed the same.

It’s a lot of waiting and watching, wondering whether the other shoe will drop or not. The trip always throws my already tight budget out of whack.

If you can leave a tip or take out a paid subscription, it is greatly appreciated. Subscriptions are £3.50 or $5 per month, or £30 or $50 per year. There is also a 20% discount on annual subscriptions.

The Green & Pleasant Land is ready for a publisher and will serve as a prequel to Love Among the Ruins, which is already in print. If you would like a beta copy, please send me a direct message.

I hope to finish editing the third volume, Life on the Never, Never, which explores post-war Britain during the late 1940s and early 1950s as the Welfare State was being constructed, by the end of the summer.