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Into town today to talk to my oncologist, Dr Sharma, but not for any scary new oncological reason, but because he is a guest on my upcoming new podcast Can I Have My Ball Back? I was going to get a chance to get some answers to the questions left hanging in the book Can I Have My Ball Back? Like can I have my ball back? Also how long do you have to wait to have unprotected sex after chemo? Have I lost my fertility as a result? Did it matter than they measured my height wrong before chemo? And did Dr Sharma really recognise me when he first met me, or had he just been told who I was and was pretending?
You will have to buy the audiobook (or maybe just listen to the podcast) to find out!
Dr Shama was a lot of fun and answered all my questions - including if it is depressing to be an oncologist and the 30 minutes whizzed by. My ball based podcast should be a lot of fun. Aiming to get it out in October (though we missed out on doing the stand up part due to that burst tyre on the 11th, but I am sure we can reschedule).
It was kind of fun to walk through London on a Friday afternoon, passing places from my past and remembering things that seemed recent, but largely weren’t. I passed a fast food restaurant called
Egg Land and could think of nothing more unappetising on a warm afternoon, but even though there was every possible restaurant chain and some amazing independent places within 2 minutes walking distance, there were people in there, presumably eating eggs. In Egg Land. There’s a market for everything.
Egg Land may have great food. But it has a bad name.
By coincidence the two things I had planned for this day were within metres of each other. No, not Egg Land and Life-sized Monopoly, but the recording studio and Fitzrovia Chapel where I was going to Janina Ramirez’s book launch for Femina. I had heard of Fitzrovia, but wasn’t exactly sure where it was or if it was just from an old novel and I am still not sure. Fitzrovia Chapel doesn’t seem real. It look fairly basic from the outside, but inside it’s a stunning tiny church, coated in gold, with stained glass windows and amazing tessellation. I couldn’t work out how old the building was, until a dedication near the door in Roman numerals gave me a clue, but I had to do quite a lot of working out. I think that the place was a hospital in 1745 and became a chapel in the late 1800s and the names of various benefactors and staff were emblazoned around the reception.
It was fun to be having a night out, though the echoey and full chapel was the worst place for my rubbish old ears, so I could mainly only hear the background noise and not what the person next to me was saying. Janina is rightly excited about her new book, but she’s pretty excited about everything. I don’t think I’ve met someone more enthusiastic than her. She’s ace.
Plus her book has a picture of a fanny on the cover, making it the sexiest academic book since The Female Eunuch though the Naked Ape could have won it too, if it didn’t have a kids bum on the cover. The 70s was a very different time. “Worth the price for the cover alone” Richard Herring. Let’s see if that’s on the front of the second edition.
