Just for the record...

Right, well, that could have gone better. Last week I was waxing lyrical about my gentle chemo regime, how as long as I stuck to the procedure carefully it would wing past without side-effects and let me go about my day. And it did, on day one.

It was just days two to six (of a five-day course, I should add) that I spent flopping about the place, feeling alternately shattered and pukey: I’ve had such a lovely week. It really irritates your stomach, that stuff, when you get to the high doses. I’d hoped to get away with it because I’d had no real side-effects from the previous courses, but this one seems to be at the level which hits me. Ah well. At least I was warned.

It’s important to have all the information at your fingertips, even if there’s not much you can do about the queasy inevitability. Which is why I was delighted to read this week that Edinburgh’s Western General is giving prostate cancer patients CDs of their diagnosis.

Now, the bit where a nice doctor sits you down and tells you that you have cancer - at whatever end - is perhaps one of the worst moments in your life. It’s hard to imagine a happy circumstance for it.

So in many ways this is a surprising CD to want for the collection (although I do have this disturbing mental image of black-clad teens sitting round by candle-light: “Yeah, listen to this one, man… he’s told he’s got myeloma, and he like, totally breaks…” - except it’s on a CD, so they wouldn’t know what to do with it).

But I do wish I had one of mine. These CDs are an excellent idea. It's a shattering moment, and there is no way you can take in all the information you’re being given. When you get that news, adrenaline punches you in the neck, the blood in your head starts to roar, and a voice starts screaming “I’m dying! I’m dying! I’m dying!” very, very loudly. It’s hard to take stuff in with that going on.

I don't think I did badly with mine, but I got the information in stages, from “you’ve probably got a brain tumour” through “yep, that was a brain tumour in there”; so when they got to the post-biopsy “OK, this isn’t good…” I was getting used to it. I snapped into a kind of interview mode, asking a lot of questions, possibly a little aggressively, and got a lot of information. I think I retained most of it.

But I didn’t take notes or anything. I know, I know, some bloody journalist. So all that vital information is just washing about in my (now slightly reduced) grey matter. An accurate record could be very useful indeed.

I wrote quite extensively at the time about the problem of not only assimilating all this information but passing it on, wondering how other people manage (see Results Now In and Breaking The News Without Bending It).

It bothered me that while I have had a long career gathering and breaking the news - or at least scraping it together and damaging it slightly - other people don’t have that experience, and that to dump all that raw steaming information onto them without the chance to put it into context was really rather cruel.

When my news was broken to me, my partner Clare was there with me. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

Even as I was hearing the unwelcome tale for the first time myself, I was aware that Clare wasn't necessarily getting the same story.

We were handed a lot of information on Wednesday morning, but there were two pieces which stood out:

1. People with my condition have lived for just months or more than a decade.

2. The average life expectancy for my condition is around a year.

Just as I was thinking of the first that if a reporter had handed me copy with such a broad statement in it I would have chucked it back at them for clarification – not least to define "more than a decade" – Clare was murmuring, "even ten years isn't enough". And with the second, while I was thinking, "Who's in the spread? Lots of 75-year-olds? People with huge, deep-seated tumours?" she was hearing, "a year".

I should point out that Clare has years of healthcare experience and so is at least as capable of  assimilating this kind of information as I am. She has just reminded me, for instance, that there was a medical student observing throughout - I'd forgotten all about that - but the whole situation was staged so much as if we were being delivered very, very bad news that the two of us focussed on different things, effectively coming out with different stories. 

By the time we’d got home, and certainly by the time we had begun to tell people, we both had it all in context. But if we hadn’t had the facility to do that, a CD of the diagnosis could have been very, very useful.

I know a lot of people wouldn’t want to play it. I understand that. I think it might be helpful if they did, at least once, but I understand why they wouldn’t want to. Equally, I can see others playing it over and over again, looking for loopholes. I think I might have done that. A little creepy, perhaps, but at least you’d have all the information.

If that information is “you have six months to live” that’s not perhaps much help. But with a cancer like mine, which is incurable but controllable at least for a while, knowing the details is vital. Because if you can focus on the positive - that it is controllable, that people have lived with it for more than a decade - then you can keep the negative stuff at bay.

And that’s almost all the battle.

Your poison running through my brains

So yesterday I was back at the Beatson for a quick exsanguination and to pick up my bumper bag of poisons for the next stage of my chemo. I also got to see a picture of the inside of my own head, which beats most people’s holiday snaps.

As usual, there was a fair bit of hanging about as the bloods were tested before word could come back that yes, I could have my next batch of harsh chemicals; but given that they take enough to fuel a small black pudding factory, I suppose that’s only to be expected. All fine, thanks for asking - still red and packed with platelets and white cells and other circulatory stuff in all the right quantities.

So I got the little capsules of venom, and this morning I embarked on phase three of killing the cancer with poison. It’s the second course of adjuvant chemo since the extended initial treatment stopped in February, and I gather the dose is now ramped up to or close to the maximum I’m allowed, which I find quite encouraging on the basis that if a bit has worked so far, then a lot will work better.

Temozolomide, the particular flavour of chemo I’m on, is pretty kind on the side-effects front as long as I’m careful how I take it, and I’ve experienced none so far so I’m fairly unconcerned by that. Cancer patients receiving intravenous chemo often report terrible debilitation and pain and have to endure hours of sitting with bags of chemical foulness dripping into their bloodstream. Christopher Hitchens wrote beautifully about this. Mine is four little pink capsules to be swallowed of a morning before I go about my day, and I’m very pleased about that.

The expected side-effect of my chemo is nausea, but I haven’t yet experienced that thanks to an anti-emetic called ondansetron which seems to work perfectly as long as I stick to the rules: I wake up, take the non-vom, wait for half-an-hour, take the temozolomide, wait for half-an-hour or more, then have my breakfast and my regular Losec and Keppra and dex (oh my). Apparently the temozolomide is jealous of its personal space and really doesn’t like sharing stomach time with anything else, even the ondansetron. But it doesn’t hang around for long, so once I’ve given it half an hour or so it has already charged off through my stomach lining and into my bloodstream, leapt across the brain-blood barrier and is busy kicking the DNA out of any dodgy braincells while I’m tucking into a morning omelette and coffee. So that’s all good, and I only have to do it for five days at a time.

I’m told that now I’m on a higher dose I may also feel some fatigue, but given the other things already causing that, I’m not sure how I’ll tell. The after-effects of the radiotherapy are still causing tiredness at completely unpredictable times and to wildly differing degrees, and I was told yesterday that the steroids I’m on - sexy dexy, the little white pills I’d previously taken as my saviour from a general sense of knackeredness (see The Joy of Dex) - might also now be contributing to it.

Funny things, steroids. Dexamethasone is known for boosting energy, appetite, and even creativity - it’s widely abused by Bangladeshi prostitutes, I have read, because an energetic, chubby and inventive girl is always in demand there - but it seems that after a while it can have the opposite effect, and can cause you to lose muscle strength. According to my consultant, the fact that the four flights of stairs I used to bounce up to my flat are now half-destroying me on at least a daily basis is evidence of this. They are a bit of a killer - I’ve seen them break quite athletic friends, postmen and Mormons, and I have considered buying washing machines purely to see them being delivered - but I’ve been scaling them for the best part of 14 years and could do it without breaking sweat. Not now.

So my dex is being cut back, which is probably not a bad thing. It’s quite addictive and not really very good for you in the long-run with a whole range of disgusting side-effects, most of which I'm glad to say I've avoided. And I have put on a hell of a lot of weight since this whole episode began - close to two-and-a-half stone - which I’d quite like to reverse. With that and the radiation-inspired baldness, my head now looks like a particularly uneducational globe bearing just one oddly-shaped and lightly-napped landmass. And jowls. And an expression of self-disgust and annoyance.

From the inside… well, the results of the scan I had a couple of weeks ago were back from Supa-Snaps, so I got to see the state of play yesterday, but while it’s interesting to see round the backs of your own eyes, it wasn’t that revealing. Compared to the scan from January, which was a month after the surgery and just before the zapping and poisoning started, this one seems to show a slightly bigger dark bit round where the tumour used to be. This is apparently dead brain, killed by the radiation, and is supposed to be there, so while that’s good, that's also about it. The picture was more of a damage report than anything else, and didn’t really give any hints as to the tumour itself, such as whether it has been completely fried or whether it’s trying to grow a new head, which is of course what I would most like to know about. Probably.

Apparently this is normal, though, and this first post-treatment scan just provides a baseline against which future ones can be judged. The next isn’t for another eight weeks or so, but I’m told there will be a much clearer picture then.

Ideally a lump-free one.

Bully for you...

One of the nice things about doing this blog is that I do get some very supportive comments; often from people I don't even know.

'Course, they're not always supportive, but that's fine: if anything, I'm a little surprised I've attracted so little opprobrium so far – I have been pretty glib about a subject about which people are somewhat sensitive, although I suppose that as I do have cancer myself, I also get use of the subject-specific Get Out Of Jail Free Card.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece about post-radiation fatigue, about being tired and being tired of being tired. It wasn't particularly controversial, but it pulled in my first negative comment on the blog's heraldscotland.com version – along the lines that the commenter was himself too busy to be tired, with a subtext of "pull yourself together and stop whining". Fair enough: I'd spoken, someone spoke back, and it was published. Fine by me.

Doing anything in public these days is an interactive process, or should be: if I open my laptop and let my keyboard rattle, I can only expect to get a reaction, and it needn't be a positive one. I'm cool with that, and I don't even get paid for doing this: I do it to amuse, to raise money for the Beatson, and because I'm a great big show-off. In the paid part of my career I've attracted much worse, including abuse, legal threats, and the offer of a kicking from a now quite-famous TV comedian (which I might tell you about one day if I can work out a way of doing so without having to see a lawyer).

Anyway, if you do make your living by being in the public eye, you are absolutely fair game: you use the media, you need to be prepared to be slagged off in the media, and be aware that these days, the media is everywhere and accessible to everyone. That's the Deal.

Or No Deal, as weirdly-coiffed TV buffoon Noel Edmonds seems to think.

Edmonds, you see, has declared himself "incredulous" to find that someone set up a Facebook page called "Somebody please kill Noel Edmonds". Now, this is the man behind Crinkly Bottom, Mr Blobby, and endless TV practical jokes, so we know he has no actual sense of humour but, still, you'd have thought someone in the self-satisfied talent-vacuum's entourage would have taken him aside for a minute and explained that a Facebook page of this nature is really just the online equivalent of screaming at the telly, with a cuddly social dimension thrown in, and not an incitement to murder.

Apparently not. The precious 70s throwback felt he was being cyber-bullied. He considered going to the police, he claimed, but told the Mail On Sunday (privately, I assume?) that he didn't want to ruin some young person's life with a criminal record and decided instead to confront him face to face. So, using just the bare resources available to a multi-millionaire media star, Edmonds hired an online security firm to track some daylight-averse PhD student down to his university, which he then contacted demanding a meeting with this hapless soul in exchange for not going to the cops. The poor sod apparently turned up terrified, with his girlfriend and sister in tow, to humbly grovel his remorse to the beardmeister.

The thing is, we're living in a time when the media and the public are effectively merging. We can all publish, we can all broadcast – social media has made it possible. But there remains a kind of celebrity who thinks he has the right to use this media-public amalgam to pick up all the praise and cash it brings, but can back off with a wounded expression when his two-headed benefactor wants something back.

Take charming, floppy-haired commercial sex enthusiast Hugh Grant. I'm not suggesting for a minute that just because he has used the limelight as much to promote his own ends as he has been forced into it, it was OK that he had his phone hacked by the tabloids. Just that he can't occupy any kind of moral high-ground without skidding off it in a cascade of his own slime. He's done the Deal.

As has the far less obnoxious but still quite self-centredly whiny Radio Five Live presenter Richard Bacon, who got to bring a bit of non-journalism to BBC Three recently in which he spun an hour's telly out of confusing some offensive Facebook material directed at him and his family with the genuine problems of real-life cyber-bullying and RIP trolling.

Bullying is a serious matter which makes thousands of teenagers truly miserable and causes deaths each year; cyber-bullying is that perennial problem on a different platform and is no better or worse for being electronic. RIP trolling is the weird practice of putting abusive messages on tribute pages to the dead, and is simply cruel to the vulnerable. The hurt feelings of an overly-precious radio presenter don't really compare to either.

Which brings me back to Edmonds. Who exactly is the bully, here? The student who posts a joke Facebook page about killing a intensely annoying but ultimately irrelevant public figure, or the very rich man who uses the threat of law and cyber-security companies to track down and terrify that student, force an apology, and then take the tale to the press himself?

I think the online community has already come up with the answer to that. A quick search on Facebook this afternoon reveals that while a page called "Noel Edmonds fan page" has 84 likes, another called "Noel Edmonds is a Twat" has 322.

Actually, it now has 323. I couldn't help myself.

Don't panic!

Pay attention: this is important, and it directly affects you, your family, and your impending Easter holidays.

The union which represents charity collectors is likely to go on strike over the break, so it's vitally important that you all rush out and invest as much as possible in my JustGiving page for the Beatson right now, or the planet will surely slip from orbit and spin into the sun. Which will melt all the Creme Eggs.

Seriously. Get to the bank. Queue up. Take a jerry can.

Then, once you've done that, queue up again to put it all back in since the page only takes electronic donations, and transfer it all here: www.justgiving.com/puregns

Done that? Good. You know it makes sense.

I was considering other methods of giving. There was, for instance, the deluxe package, in which for £250K to the JustGiving page you can join Clare and me for a curry in our flat and have your say in influencing blog policy. But I've withdrawn that one on the grounds that it's corrupt, not to mention quite creepy, and I don't want Peter Cruddas anywhere near the place.

Instead, for the same sum (plus VAT) you can have a very expensive pasty in a paper bag. It has to be a take-away, I'm afraid, but it's guaranteed not to be cold, or to cool down until you're well off the premises and could be reasonably argued to have eaten it while it was hot.

As you can tell, I've been spending far too much time in front of the BBC news channel again. I was off sick last week, you see. Just a cold, thanks for asking, but apparently I'm just as entitled to them as anyone without cancer, so I'm making sure I get my fair share before the country runs out.

And at least my three day phlegm-fest on the couch was educational. I learned two very important things: men who have a lot of money and yet have never had a proper job should not really be allowed to run the country; and people who take their advice despite this are really quite special.

I use the word "special", you understand, in that kind new way we’ve developed because we're not allowed to say "no' right" any more. Possibly they think the government is talking directly and personally to them – that would certainly account for their surprise that they weren't alone when they turned up on the forecourts.

In England, of course, it's to be expected. The UK has a Conservative government - there are allegedly some liberals in the mix too, but I’ve discounted that on lack of evidence - so it’s only natural that they advise conserving things: the level of petrol in your four by four; a garage full of buckets of highly volatile hydrocarbons; the gene pool (by stocking your garage with buckets of highly volatile hydrocarbons).

Thing is, here in Scotland, Conservative advice doesn’t generally go down all that well. And while that is comforting because, for instance, our healthcare remains un-sold-off, while down south David Cameron is showing how much he loves the NHS by wrapping bits of it up to give to his friends, it’s worrying because we had petrol panics here, too.

So who was on the forecourts? Not Tories, because we have fewer of them than we have pandas, and with less chance of growing more. And now they've dispersed, we've no way of finding out. They're out there, around us, and we don't know who they are, like the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It's quite scary.

All I can say is this: Don't panic. Don't show fear, they can smell you. Keep on reading books and papers with long words. Put on Radio Four, it confuses them.

Keep Calm and Carry On.

And leave me some bloody petrol. I want to drive to the Lake District on Friday.

You are feeling very sleepy...

I'm tired. And I'm tired of being tired. It's just so tiring.

It's the old radiation fatigue. It's not going away, and it's becoming a nuisance.

It seems to have been hanging around me like a lead cloud for weeks, like I'm swimming in jelly while wearing an Aran sweater. And the haircut isn't making me any more streamlined.

It will go away, of course. Probably. But I don't know when, and the unpredictability is the worst bit. I can't plan my day.

While I was still being zapped on a regular basis, I knew what to expect. I'd get up feeling fine, start to flag a bit by lunchtime, have a nap and a snack, feel better, start to flag a bit again in the afternoon, then have another nap to restore me for the trip to hospital to top up on sub-atomic weariness for the next day. All well and good; I could work round it.

This, though, is just awkward. Most days I still get up quite energised, but where things go from there is anyone's guess. Most days I have three or four hours clear before it starts to creep up, but on others I'm feeling it before I've even left the house.

It starts in the muscles of the arm, a little like the onset of flu but without the actual ache, and moves quickly into a slight dizziness, a sense of dissociation from my surroundings that means I'm no longer quite able to focus, sometimes accompanied by lethargy that feels like depression. It's a little like being drunk – and if you don't see what's so bad about that, to paraphrase Douglas Adams: ask a glass of water.

None of this is particularly debilitating, and I can push through it quite easily. But doing so comes with the knowledge that there's a debt to be paid later.

Sometimes I can stave off repayment. Eating helps: I think low-carb, high-protein stuff like nuts are most effective, sugary things seem to produce a false high. Coffee may or may not help: that may just be an existing addiction. Drinking lots of water certainly helps.

But, like running up a credit card, it doesn't really go away. Eventually, I need to tackle the bill. And all that really works is sleep. It won't really be cleared until I do that.

Which isn't so bad. Sometimes I need a couple of hours, but mostly half an hour will drag me back to normal; sometimes ten minutes is enough. Problem is, I started back at work last week, and while it's good to be back on project and with a daily purpose again, I can no longer merely retire to my couch. I'm in a place of business, among colleagues, and nodding off against the ergonomically-designed desks isn't a good look in a modern working environment.

So I push through it and rack up the debt, and eventually it hits. Usually in the middle of something I'm trying to concentrate on, occasionally mid-sentence. It's like the cold shock of a bucket of water, but with reverse effect, slamming me into torpor. And at that point I have to go home.

Fortunately, my employer is flexible enough to allow me to do that. I just have to get up, go, and try not to fall asleep standing in the bus queue. But it would be nice to know when it was going to happen. So I could guarantee to be at meetings, for instance.

Take last week. Monday, my first day back for three months, wasn't too bad. I got what I needed to do done, and made it to mid-afternoon before bailing out. Tuesday I was in hospital for most of the day, so no problem – they're completely happy with patients falling asleep, except when they're shoving sharp things into you, which they like you to experience and feed back on. Wednesday, though, was awful: I barely made it past lunchtime, and though I pushed on as far as I could, I went home with the determination that the next day I would be in only for long enough to explain that I'd come back too early, I wasn't ready yet, and would have to get my sick line extended.

On Thursday, of course, I felt fine. Great, in fact; made it through to after 4.30pm before feeling that I should probably call it a day. And that's been the thing since: some days are tremendous – today was fine, thanks, did my first full shift since returning in fact – but others are bloody awful. Yesterday I felt so bad I was in for only a couple of hours.

Some kind of pattern would be nice, but all anyone can really tell me is that this is all perfectly normal.

I'd been told to expect the fatigue, of course. Two weeks, three weeks, six to 12 weeks of it, apparently. It could kick in during treatment, I was told, or weeks later. No one seemed very sure, but I was certainly warned. It varies from person to person, it seems. No-one knows how it will take each individual. Fine. I just wasn't expecting inconsistency with it.

I was definitely feeling it in the last weeks of my treatment, for instance, and felt increasingly better each week as it stopped. You'd expect that to continue, and it appeared to: when I got to Gran Canaria, I felt not at all bad, and I returned refreshed, relaxed and ready for anything.

Except, that is, for the decline which kicked in within about three days of returning to Scottish soil, and really hit just in time for getting back to work. My timing, as always, is impeccable.

Still, things are otherwise going pretty well. I started adjuvant chemo this morning, which is double the dose I was on previously, with no apparent side-effects. My platelet count is apparently normal, so I can continue to drip-feed the Beatson's pet vampire without running out, and my white cells are doing whatever it is they're supposed to. Plus, today was simply beautiful – a perfect, fresh spring morning, pale blue and crisp. And that made me feel fantastic.

Little things, it seems, do mean a lot.

I'm going to bed now.

A piece of mind, for your peace of mind

And… we're back.

The week on Gran Canaria was excellent, thanks for asking; exactly what I needed. I've returned well fed and watered, thoroughly relaxed, and with less sunburn than I left with, which may be some kind of record.

It was a fairly limited holiday insofar as I didn't stray too far from the hotel. We had a daily routine of getting up around 9am, heading out for some brekkie and a wander around the town, popping back to the hotel around 11.30am for a wee nap on the sunloungers when my post-radiation fatigue kicked in, taking a trip out for afternoon lunch and drinkies, popping back for a late-afternoon nap and then heading out for the main eating event in the evening. A gruelling regime, but someone had to do it.

As the week went on, the periods I needed to sleep seemed to reduce and the fun bits in between to extend. Saturday – when we had to check out of the hotel at mid-day, right at the height of my daily exhaustion with a huge gap to fill before the flight at 8pm with no recourse to nap facilities – was hard, and I felt it quite badly. But there were no whistlers in the airport and I managed to sleep for most of the flight, so I got through it. And now I'm back, I definitely feel better for the experience. Not completely without daytime tiredness – it's 12.45pm on Monday as I write this, and I don't think I'm going to get to the end of the piece awake – but feeling much, much more relaxed and ready for whatever comes next. Taking a holiday has undoubtedly added a massive amount to my general well-being.

Which makes it all the more galling that I very nearly didn't go at all. The reason? Travel insurance.

It's not something I've bothered much about before. I travel light and don't take much on holiday I'm not prepared to lose. Clothes are just clothes, and those who have met me will know I'm not an expensive dresser. I do tend to carry a small media centre's worth of electronic kit with me at all times, but it's surprising what your standard household insurance already covers (this is a Top Tip, incidentally – always check that one out). Health cover is the only thing that has ever really concerned me, and as long as I'm staying within the EU I tend to rely on the EHIC (the old E111), that comforting little blue card which gets you the same cover as a national of any EU country you happen to be in. It doesn't cover repatriation and may require the odd up-front payment, but whether you find that acceptable boils down to your attitude to risk, and I think it's more than enough.

Last summer, before my impromptu jerky dance and all the horror that ensued, I went on a short Aegean cruise, and I did take out travel insurance for that, just in case of exotic drinking incidents while in Turkey. It was a simple process: I went onto one of the big online aggregators, shoved in my details, and was drowned in options to cover me for the week for about a fiver. Sorted.

So this time, I did the same. Although the Canaries aren't in the EU – they're largely autonomous of Spain, I suppose like the Channel Islands here – the EHIC still covers you, but I thought that with my current condition the extra security might be nice, just supposing I suddenly felt worse and needed my steroid prescription increased, for instance, or in the very unlikely event I had another seizure and hit something during the ensuing horizontal flamenco. So I went onto the same aggregator, this time clicking the 'existing condition' button, and declared my glioblastoma. And the results were quite different: instead of the hundreds of options presented to my lump-free former self, I was given one – for a sum which was effectively going to double to cost of the holiday, just slightly less than the price of return flights and seven nights in a good hotel for both me and Clare, just to cover me.

At that point I almost gave up. The holiday booking was a last-minute affair, and was only going to get dearer as the date approached, even if the flights didn't disappear entirely, so I didn't have much time to shop around by more traditional means. Looked like I was going to have to just chance it, or forego the holiday.

I gave it a further 24 hours, during which time I spoke to some medical professionals – no names, no pack-drill, but some were pretty senior. I wanted to know specifically what kind of emergency medical treatment I would be likely to need, given my condition. And the answer was that, while no-one would advise me to travel without insurance, well… none. There was more chance of me needing it to cover for being hit by a bus. Which, if you have experienced Spanish traffic, is a risk of sorts, but one I take every time I go there. I booked up that evening.

So, Mr Insurance Company, what's your excuse? Insurance is, as I understand it, all about risk: a kind of gamble in which I pay a small amount of money in exchange for you covering a much higher cost which you have calculated is unlikely enough to not happen to make it worth your while taking the bet. Most of the time you get to trouser the cash, but I get peace of mind in return. That's reasonable enough.

What you're actually doing, though, is merely predatory: you're simply accepting no risk at all, and taking the cash anyway. Either you just ignore the business, happier to take the thousands and thousands of guaranteed fivers from healthy travellers, or you parasitically suck on the fears of sick people, taking very large sums you know simply don't reflect the risk involved.

I wonder how many people with chronic conditions simply remain at home, crouching in the cold instead of grabbing a spot of much-needed rest and relaxation, because they're too frightened to take a chance they don't realise might be very small, and unable to pay these charges.

I saw only one quote. Well, actually, I saw two since I also got one from the same company for travel insurance in the UK: that sent me through the ceiling, since even it was in the low hundreds for cover in territory in which the NHS will provide everything for free. I know that doesn't form even the basis of an investigation - this is a blog, so I'm allowed to rant based on personal experience - but there's a story here. I may come back to it.

In the meantime, Mr Insurer, if you can sleep at night, do try to lose your grip on the rafters and drop on your head.

No chocolate aeroplane required

So Baldy Bain, as it turns out, did go to Spain.

My ingrained post-Presbyterian work ethic - you're off on the sick, you're not supposed to be enjoying yourself - rebelled a little, but after being signed off for a further three weeks for radiation recovery I decided to take my own advice and go on holiday.

So as I write this, Clare and I are sunning ourselves in the gentle low-to-mid 20s of Gran Canaria. It's very nice, thanks.

I usually regard hotels as places to sleep, not really to be revisited between breakfast and midnight, but since I'm weirdly gubbed at odd times of the day and have to break off from whatever I'm doing to go and sleep, Clare insisted on going for a cut above my norm, a hotel with a pool with sunloungers and a room with a balcony. Which was nice of her, I thought, as I paid for it.

Still, it is very pleasant. The journey here, not so much.

We were told at check-in that we were facing nearly four hours of a delay. We were early, too, having for once actually more-or-less taken the advice to check in two hours in advance. This isn't, for me at least, necessarily a problem. For someone who is otherwise fairly easily bored, I'm quite good at dealing with Airport Time, that weird twist in the fourth dimension that only occurs in transport hubs, in which minutes stretch to hours and yet hours truncate to seconds, sometimes simultaneously. I have a stoic mode which allows me to wander through this with a certain sense of calm, as others are twitching and pacing around me.

Except when those others are whistlers.

We went for something to eat, and stretched that out for two courses, drinks and a newspaper. Fortunately, for a Saturday, it was quiet, so we weren't chased out of the table. But I couldn't settle. The waiter, you see, was a whistler. 

So we wandered to the place where our gate would eventually open and settled onto those weirdly hard and flat seats Glasgow Airport has had installed for its passengers' incremental discomfort. There was a whistler there, too. Possibly more than one, or maybe he was just moving about a lot. Perhaps he was a Wandering Whistler, some kind of semi-mystical being doomed for some forgotten Biblical-age slight to wander the earth for eternity, irritating people. I don't know. I couldn't get a fix on him/them. But he/they were there. Just within earshot.

Apparently you can't report men whistling in airports as terror suspects. I personally think that if tweeting a joke about blowing up a tiny airport in the Midlands can get you remanded in custody, then whistling around the departure gates of a hub the size of Glasgow International should be a one-way ticket to Gitmo. But it seems the law is not behind me on this one.

What is it with whistlers? I can only assume they realise they're not entertaining those around them, so there must be another reason for this social aberration. Possibly they think they're sending out a message that says "I'm a cheery, chirpy chap", although, frankly, it just reads as "bastard". More likely, it's just a shrill, repeated, "Look at me! Look at me!" with a desperate subtext of "I don't care if you think I'm an arse, just look at me! LOOK AT ME!"

I don't know. I merely think there's scope for a new type of airport animal, here. In the same way dogs are used to sniff out drugs and explosives, I'm suggesting using something with a few more legs to deal with whistlers. A crack team of funnel-web spiders could, I'm sure, be trained to pick up on the vibrations of the passing whistler and drop onto him from the ceiling. The downside to this is that even with the world's most venomous spider, the minimum time from bite to death is 15 minutes, and the perp might continue to whistle through that period, or at least scream inconsiderately. Which is why you'd need a squad of spiders. The upside is that the airport would also save on fly-spray.

Anyway, ulcerous fuming and sotto voce swearing kept me occupied until the plane arrived, after which the journey itself was uneventful. Basic 757, no obvious chocolate used in its construction. No obvious leg-room, either, but at least we were at the back of the plane, which meant we could slam our seats back with impunity and no screams of outrage from behind. It's a generally a good place to sit; planes rarely reverse into anything.

Thomson's had thoughtfully handed us a couple of £5 vouchers on the announcement of the delay, each of which we found translated pretty much exactly into a gin and tonic on the plane. Four and a half hours, another couple of these, a game of travel Scrabble and a chunk of a novel later, and we were in Gran Canaria.

I like it here. Las Palmas is a nice city with a pleasant old quarter as well as its own beach up-town on the isthmus. The dunes of Maspalomas are a short bus-ride away for the more serious sun-seeker, too, but I'm happy enough in the city. I have to watch the sun, anyway - what with my current follicular deficit and the fact that I must be one of the few winter-holidaying Glasgowegians to take his own sunburn with him (another little side effect of the daily head-zapping), I'm tied to a regime of hats and factor 30.

That, the fatigue, and the stack of medicines on my bedside table keep me reminded that not all is entirely well. But otherwise, I feel more relaxed than I have for perhaps three months, and that's welcome. I think the fatigue is lessening, too, so I'm hoping that by the end of this little break, when I have a final week at home then a return to work, everything will seem pretty much back to normal.

I could do with that.