So, it begins.

I am not a journalist, a known writer, a famous person, a pundit with an axe to grind or some middling celebrity with a penchant for self-promotion. So, you have reason to ask me why you should read my newsletter over someone else's newsletter on Substack. Technically, I am nobody. I have done no great things. Although, I have rubbed shoulders with great people and witnessed interesting events on my many travels to off beaten paths around the world. In a way, I am like an anonymous character in a Somerset Maugham short story as I am a 58-year-old man who because of cancer and economic insecurity might be coming to the end of his road. So, I feel compelled to talk about everything I've experienced.

But, I have one unique selling point like, people in marketing say. You see, I am the guy who helped make Harry Leslie Smith the "World's Oldest Rebel." I was his son, and when my brother Peter died tragically at 50 in 2009, the grief was too great for my dad and me. It almost destroyed us, and it came damn close to killing my father. So, to save my father's life and also redeem myself, I repurposed my dad. But after my brother's death, I encouraged and nurtured my dad. I coaxed him to let me help him put down on paper his early life's experiences growing up poor in the Great Depression before public healthcare and the Welfare State to warn our 21st-century society to not make his past our future. In eight years, five books were written, and one Harry's Last Stand became a best seller. My father became a Twitter sensation who had over 200k followers. He was a regular contributor to the Guardian and in constant demand for interviews on the BBC, CBC, and CNN. He created a podcast and visited refugee camps in Europe. We were always on the go. In his 90s, my dad, with me as his companion, continually travelled across Britain, Canada and Europe, to speak out against austerity, economic inequality, the politics of hate and the growing refugee crisis. All of those things my dad did, he did even though we weren't from the entitled class. We weren't people of influence with vast financial resources as our safety net. Instead, we did it on a wing and a prayer. But he's dead now. He passed three years ago in November 2018, at the age of 95.

As I was my dad's best friend, caregiver and coconspirator in his Harry's Last Stand Project, I've tried to keep his memory alive and continue his mission since his passing. I do it because I loved him and, I believe he left behind an important legacy that has to be preserved. Also, I gave so much of myself over those ten years to ensure my dad lived a happy and purposeful existence that I want to see his mission completed. I surrendered so much of myself to Harry's Last Stand that my health is now irrevocably altered and my lifespan shortened because of my efforts to keep my dad alive and content. It's the fate of caregivers everywhere to imperil their health as they tend to the needs of a loved one.

I knew things weren't physically right with me when my dad was alive. But I pushed on through my discomfort to tend to his needs. And after my dad died, I just ascribed my malaise and premonitions of my death as grief. But I became seriously unwell during the British General Election in 2019 when I was on the hustings in Yorkshire. Still, I thought it would pass. But it didn't and, in January 2020, I was diagnosed with rectal cancer. From that moment, my life unspooled like a thimble of thread coming loose while being rolled down a set of stairs. Between meetings with my oncologist and other cancer specialists, I'd google for information about the average life expectancy for people with this type of cancer. And, it wasn't good because it seemed no one got more than a handful of years before cancer returned like a persistent assassin to finish the job. I was afraid of premature death. But I was also terrified. I worried that if I survived cancer, my quality of life was going to be compromised by the treatments I required to rid me of my malignant tumour. So, it was a time of great anxiety for me that was exacerbated because Covid enveloped our world. The pandemic made death ubiquitous and, it lurked in everyone's consciousness like an unpaid creditor on the doorstep.

The world was in lockdown when I began radiation treatments to kill errant cancer cells trying to hitch a ride on my lymph nodes from intestines to parts further in my body and I began to wonder if Covid would get me before cancer. At the end of March 2020, I had surgery to remove a malignancy that desired to kill me. Several days after my operation, one of my doctors told me, "you must come to terms with your new normal because cancer and the surgery will have altered you." Little did I know then how limiting that new normal would prove to be. At the time, I did not care because I was alive and that seemed a good thing.

Since my surgery, I've buggered on and fought to survive during a time of pandemic and the social isolation it created. Like a soldier in the trenches, I found comfort and solace where I could. However, during these barely endurable past eighteen months, I was able to complete my book "I Stood With Harry." It's about my dad and me as well as my battle against cancer during a time of Covid. I have still to find a publisher for it. But it is still early days, and I am a fighter.

So, I am confident if I have your support, it will find a publisher and readers.

So to answer the question about why Substack? Honestly, I don't have many options left. And, I need to bring in money to keep myself from going homeless. I can assure the notion of becoming homeless at 58 with rectal cancer isn't inviting. I have no illusions that I could survive on the open road like some modern day Jack Kerouac on the open road. I am more like Ratso Rizzo crying out, “I am falling apart here,” at the back of bus.

I think you will find my essays are knowledgeable and insightful about politics in Britain, Canada and even the USA. My essays will always be about more than politics because they reach through autobiographical revelations to find common ground with you. During my life, I have experienced much on the periodic chart of fortune. I don't think your encounter with me will bore you. Sometimes you may agree with me, and other times, I may piss you off. But know everything I write comes from a place of sincerity. So, until my ship comes in, I beg your indulgence to join my newsletter and contribute a few pennies a month if you can to keep the wolf from my door. Cheers, John