Nick Clarke - farewell peg leg

You have to love a man and his family who can greet his return from a radical surgery that took both leg and buttock with the banner "Welcome home peg leg." You though now have to mourn Nick Clarke's passing and the sorrow of it for his wife and children. May his good soul rest in peace and may the Holy Spirit be a close comforter in their loss.

Not being a 'World at One' person for some years - I stopped listening in protest when the powers that Birt lopped it from its proper 40 mins to a bare half an hour and simply never started again - I hadn't caught up with the radio diary Nick bravely kept during his time of illness. I use the word 'bravely' advisedly as, while there is nothing inherently brave about having cancer, despite its common application to anyone who has the disease, to share thoughts and feelings so publicly about something so intimate and personal takes a kind of special courage and commitment.

And it is not so much the decision to share at all, but the choice of sharing with anyone who DOES NOT KNOW BECAUSE THEY HAVEN'T GOT IT. I rarely resort to the rude shouting of capitals, but for this I make an exeception - if you've not had sarcoma you simply cannot come close to knowing what it feels like and how one's life is riven through in every moment and in every way by the damn thing. That is partly why so many people with this wretched thing spend so much time on message boards with others who have it too - these are the only people you can communicate with who truly do understand.

So hats off to peg leg Clarke for sticking to his journalist's last and giving the wider world a glimpse into that strange world of Planet Sarcoma. (You thought Solaris was weird? Not even close!) Thanks too to, at least, the Telegraph for giving the illness its proper title. Mostly it gets subsumed into 'cancer' or sometimes 'rare cancer'. It is actually neither. Cancer is the scuttling crab, but sarcoma is the rip that tears. Same root word from the Greek as 'sarcasm', which is good and handy - one can make sarcastic remarks at one's tumour to the like of "God, so you're still there you little bastard and there was me thinking I'd be waking up and you'd be gone forever." (Not necessarily wise to be caught muttering thus in public lest one gets arrested as a failed care in the community number, but a welcome emotional indulgence all the same.)

God be close to them that mourn tonight.