Bring on the Colander Girls

Like Groucho Marx I tend to be rather ambivalent about joining clubs, but last November — in fact, exactly 48 hours before Deborah Hutton, author of this brilliant book subtitled ‘75 Practical Ideas for Family and Friends from Cancer’s Frontline’ — I unexpectedly found myself a member of what Hutton calls the last club in the world anyone would ever choose to join: ‘The Cancer Club. The only club in the world I can think of that is both rigorously exclusive and has no waiting list.’

But hold your horses, don’t flip to another review; this isn’t going to be a ‘Me and My Cancer’ piece. (I remember a ghastly girl exclaiming when Bob Champion won the Grand National on Aldaniti, ‘Oh, no! Now we’re going to be bored to death just because he had cancer.’) Although, astonishingly, it was published in this magazine ten years ago next month, my late Telegraph colleague Martyn Harris’s superb article ‘This is not the time to die’ really said it all. Indeed, quite rightly, Hutton quotes liberally from it. Here are a couple of my favourite extracts:

One decision I made early on was to ignore all the ‘positive attitude’ merchants who suddenly started targeting me by letter and telephone. ‘You must think positive,’ they told me, as if it was some great secret only they were privy to — as if, without their important insight, I would be smearing myself with ashes and rolling in the dunghill.

the implication which lies beneath complementary approaches that a disease is always your own fault. You ate the wrong food, lived the wrong lifestyle or thought the wrong kind of thoughts.