On the Way to the Wedding

We have travelled from Leeds to Barrow, a distance of exactly a hundred miles, to collect the cake for Emily and Gareth’s wedding. It has been made by one of my cousins here: she’s a professional cake-maker.

It was a stunningly beautiful journey with a cloudless blue sky. We travelled through the Yorkshire Dales and then along the Coast Road and it was all fantastic: unbelievable, breathtaking. I have seen the sea round here in many different states but I’ve never seen it flat calm and such a bright blue.

I have taken some photos which I hope will show something of how amazing it looked, but at the moment I’m typing this in a Barrow hotel where the wifi is broken and the GPRS signal is very sloooooooooow so I’m not going to attempt anything as ambitious as photographs.

We went to visit another of my cousins, the one who has terminal cancer. His is very thin, because he simply can’t eat.

He has had two courses of chemotherapy.

“I’m supposed to have eight,” he said calmly, “but I won’t get that far. I’m wasting away faster than the chemotherapy can fight the tumour.”

“Oh, you shouldn’t look at it like that,” said his mother.

“Well, you can say that I shouldn’t,” said my cousin mildly, “but it’s the truth.”

And it is the truth.

I am so glad I saw him. Tomorrow, we travel to Tenby – three hundred miles, so I may not be able to post tomorrow. If I don’t, I certainly will on Friday.