And When Did You Last See Your Father by Blake Morrison

Author:Blake Morrison [Morrison, Blake]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847081612
Publisher: Granta Books
Published: 2009-07-02T04:00:00+00:00

Tuesday 10 December

Piece in the newspaper about the prevention of bowel cancer. Colonic irrigation therapist Katherine Monbiot says: ‘Unless you’re having three bowel movements a day, you’re retaining stuff in there which becomes very toxic. Some people have forty pounds of impacted faeces in their colons, getting thicker, like tyre rubber.’

I talk on the phone to Angela Carter, who has lung cancer. She’s very open about it: friends want to know how she is, so she tells them, even if the news is bad. I ask her if she wants to review a new book by Raymond Carver, and she laughs, and begins to denounce Carver for the quietism and defeatedness of his characters, their dignified acceptance of the way things are. I realize later she is also talking about his quiet dignity when he died of lung cancer at fifty, and how she, the same age, intends to be different—perhaps even to rage and behave badly. I tell her about my father and add, not wanting to whine: ‘Well, he’s seventy-five.’

‘My father died at ninety,’ she says, ‘and in some ways that was much worse than if he’d died at sixty.’

She agrees to take on, instead of Carver, a history of anarchism. (Later—about a month later—she rings from hospital: ‘I’m going to have to cry off anarchism. They’ve just tipped me the black spot.’)

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