How you make a writer

I have been asked how I came to be a writer. Can I call myself a writer? Counting this blog I have written about 2500 articles, books, scripts, chapters, abstracts and scientific reports including over 700 that other people have published; so yes I can call myself a writer.

I began by writing poetry. I had a good grounding at school in Latin and English grammar, but I never studied English literature until I was 17 and had free time in the sixth form. I had always been a good reader, though, and as a child had rapidly read through the schoolday adventures of Frank Richards, the military adventures of Captain W E Johns, the detective and horror stories of Peter Cheyney and Dennis Wheatley and the lawyer and doctor stories of Henry Cecil and Richard Gordon. I remember being asked by my headmaster at the age of 13 which authors I read. When I volunteered H E Bates (of the Larkin stories) he had never heard of them. He claimed to be one of 6 Englishmen who had read the whole of Cervantes in Spanish.

At seventeen I was heavily into the science fiction of Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, James Blish, Theodore Sturgeon, Alfred Bester and Frederick Pohl. Later in my life I discovered Tolkien and his lineage: Robert Jordan and Stephen Donaldson. Meanwhile Graham Greene, John LeCarre and Raymond Chandler had captivated me.

When I started writing poetry, my biggest influences were John Donne, Wilfred Owen and Gerrard Manley Hopkins.

After I was married I virtually stopped writing poetry until after I retired. Medicine is a demanding mistress. Someone told me that if I wanted to become an expert on something I should write a book about it. So I did. I wrote the first book about Plasmapheresis. I also wrote a funny article for the Christmas BMJ called Mononucleosis and the Miniskirt about a girl with glandular fever, cold hemaglutinnins and a miniskirt who got a rash on the outside of her thighs on a cold night. This gave me an appetite for writing for a Freebie doctors' journal called World Medicine. I wrote about medical politics and about funny things that happened to me on the lecture circuit. To be honest it was an easy way to make money. I could dash off 500 words in about half an hour and make £100. When World Medicine closed (Jewish businesses refused to advertise in it after someone wrote a pro-Palestinian article) I started selling my wares to other journals, but my research fellow Ghulam Mufti (now Professor at Kings) persuaded me that no-one would ever take me seriously unless I stopped the frippery. Thereafter my writing apprenticeship served me well for writing serious articles.

However buried in one of my CLL articles in B J Haem. is a joke that I as editor would have put the blue pencil through. It would probably be excluded for bad taste in these PC days.

It goes like this. In Bournemouth there is no male excess of CLL patients. Why? Like elephants seeking their burial ground, the old ladies come to die, but whereas elephants have prodigious memories, the old ladies become senile and forget what they have come for.

Three visitors

This morning we had three visitors to our front lawn, the very same lawn that played host to the green woodpecker a few weeks ago. Three Mallards came visiting. The female duck in her dowdy brown and white tweeds simply squatted on the hoar-covered grass while her attendant drakes stood guard duty around her. They marched in step around her like guards in full dress uniform. Their heads covered in bottle green sheen contrasting with their yellow bills, their thin white dog collars separating these green helmets from the russet breastplates. The main body of their uniforms was a pleasant grey – the light grey of a fine-tailored suit – but a black back stripe separated left from right, like the black cross on the back of the donkey that carried our Lord into Jerusalem.

If you have ever been to Athens and seen the National Guard on parade outside the Presidential Palace you will know what I mean when I liken their gait to a formal parade march. No-one would use this walk as a means of transportation. It is a formal march, without the menace of German or Russian goose-steps. Each step is performance that takes months of coaching. The movement is emphasized by the orange webbed galoshes that each of them wears. As they turn you notice that they both have black curly tail feathers, just two or three, protruding at the rear of no possible use, as if to demonstrate that this whole performance is just that. It is just for show.

The dowdy little princess that they are protecting takes no notice. She has her own thoughts and as if she has had enough of sitting on the cold grass. She gets up and waddles off mid performance. They continue their marching, slipping their heads forward in a jerk that precedes every step, even though I am now the only witness, then suddenly both fly off in a rush and flurry like jets launched from an aircraft carrier.

In thirty years of watching that lawn I have never seen Mallards (nor woodpeckers) before. Is it because I have never really watched before, too busy, too distracted? Or is this some special way the Lord is blessing me? Encouraging me that He is really there?

Whatever, I am certainly feeling better. The cramps are largely gone and are no longer so painful. I have put on another couple of pounds and am eating pretty normally.

Chemotherapy should begin this week or next. Things are moving.

Waiting for surgery

A Green Woodpecker nodded and nibbled on our front lawn yesterday. For twenty minutes, not twenty feet from our front window, it strutted like a soldier on parade, its vermillion headpiece contrasting with its two-tone green uniform as it stiffly picked off insects that had been drawn above ground by the slightly warmer weather.

It was enough to attract us into the garden for the first clear up of the year. Two days ago we had woken up to blizzards with snow settling on the cars and drive, but Saturday was just about Spring. Now was the time to deadhead the hydrangeas, to cut back last year’s growth from the Sedum and to pull down the dead ivy from our cherry tree.

We gave the lawn a first cut, but first we had to buy a new lawnmower. We needed to be able to start it with an easy pull, and our old Mountfield was a terrible starter that needed strong stomach muscles as you yanked on the draw string. And I won’t be able to do that for a while.

On Tuesday, I go into hospital for abdominal surgery. This has been hanging over me since last September. At that time a CT scan found an enlarged lymph node in my right iliac fossa. Despite many investigations no explanation for it was found. I had hoped that it would just go away, but a recent CT scan shows it to be still there, and the only way of finding out what it means is to cut it out.

The radiologist suspects carcinoid, a rare slow growing tumor that typically secretes serotonin, but all the tests that I had for that were negative. Colonoscopy showed no cancer of the cecum and the biopsies were negative. So we really don’t know what we are going to find. I guess the explanation with the best outcome
is that there has been an old appendix abscess, but there are also more worrying possibilities. It could be a non-secretory carcinoid, or one that secreted another neuroendocrine hormone, like parathormone (I have a slightly raised blood calcium, but so do thousands of other normal people). Or it could be something more distressing.

In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare says, “Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once.” Hemingway had a variation on this in ‘A Farewell to Arms’ “the brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he's intelligent. He simply doesn't mention them.” Whichever is true, waiting for an operation is a challenge. The more you know, the more you imagine the worse.

Nevertheless, I face the future with equanimity. The sermon this morning was on 1 Peter 1:8: “Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy,” The worst that could happen is that I will see my Savior sooner. Were that to be the case, it would be very sad for those who love me, but for me, better by far.

Ivy League

West College, Princeton.



I am always hungry for silly little anecdotes, especially ones about the derivation of words, and I was told one yesterday by a colleague. Where does "Ivy league" come from? I had always assumed it described the ivy covered buildings of the New England colleges, but no, I was told that it referred to a football (not proper football but that strange American version of Rugby where you wear body armor and are allowed to pass the ball forwards) league started by Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia. The league of four was known by the Roman numerals IV (hence Ivy).

Sounds nice, but probably not true. The term "ivy colleges" was coined by the New York Tribune sports journalist, Stanley Woodward thus "A proportion of our eastern ivy colleges are meeting little fellows another Saturday before plunging into the strife and the turmoil. ” October 14, 1933, describing the football season and the first use of "Ivy League was in the Christian Science Monitor two years later.

The eight Ivy League Colleges are Harvard, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, Browns and Dartmouth.