Thursday 27 November 2014

an eighteenth new story...'biting into limes'

Miles opened the bedroom door with a jolt, then with the deliberate actions of a drunk attempted to close it behind him quietly. And then he stumbled over Judy’s shoes, arranged neatly by the bed, cracked his head on the bedroom wall. Judy closed her eyes. Miles cursed in a harsh whisper. And when Judy broke, rolled over, turned on the bedside lamp, Miles was on bended knee trying to rearrange her collection of heels. He looked up, blinking, like a big racoon caught red-handed stealing whatever it is racoons steal or try to steal. ‘Alright?’ he said dumbly.

In the end neither of them could sleep and Miles suggested they watch a video.  ‘How’s your head?’ asked Judy, touching the throbbing lump erupting from Miles’ scalp of matted hair, dried blood? ‘Gnnn’, said Miles in stoic code.  ‘What do you want to watch?’

Judy didn’t know, didn’t care, never did – films were Miles’ thing, documentary films, man-eating bears, serial-killers, climbing accidents on Mount Everest; Judy would watch the first five minutes, doze off on his chest. Although Miles always offered her a selection and when she said ‘you choose’, he often chose Into Thin Air. ‘Frostbite can be deadly’, he would tell her, Judy half in a blanket of sleep, ‘Snow blindness too’.

‘What did you see out there?’ she had asked once shortly after Miles’ return. Picked a bad moment: noisy city basement bar, among people they knew, several drinks down. Miles had simply wandered off to the gents, saying nothing. When he returned he bought shots for everyone – breathe out, lick salt, down tequila, bite lime. Then they went home. Next morning Judy cuddled up to him said, ‘that was a generous thing you did last night’. Miles looked non-plussed. ‘The shots … for everyone’, Judy said. ‘Oh’, said Miles, ‘it's nothing, the military pension …the military sort you out alright’.

A police siren came and went somewhere outside. ‘I was a bad kid at school you know’, said Miles, reaching around the back of the television set to check if the VCR was plugged in. Judy was propped up on one arm watching his back.  Miles was a big, strong man, running to fat, the drink, the not working – ‘only one true friend in the world’. And Judy.

The light on the VCR showed.  ‘It’s on’, Judy said. Miles came from the other side of the television set, gut hanging out from underneath his grey T-shirt. ‘It’s on’, he repeated, pausing for a few seconds as if something hadn’t properly registered, or was registering. All fours he looked up at Judy again. ‘Don’t go to sleep this time’, he said, 20th Century Fox appearing on the screen behind him, searchlights left, right.

‘It’s late’, Judy said, yawning.

And then, taking her hand from her mouth, ‘so, we’re starting at the beginning?’ 

Tuesday 25 November 2014

a thirty eighth new poem...'tour de fraud'

PC Pemberton caught
Bradley Wiggins red-
Handed doing wheelies
On a Boris Bike outside
The Lord Mayor’s office in
London. Then and there
Pemberton gave Wiggins a
Seventy-five pound
Fine and asked him to
Sign each bank note, before
Going home and framing the petty
Crime above his mantelpiece.
Pemberton’s wife wasn’t so
Chuffed. She hated the
Tour de France.  It had ruined
Their summer holidays
For nearly fifteen years, especially
Her husband’s insistence that
They try and keep up with
The peleton at every stage, and
Now there was a constant reminder
Above the television set – yet
She said nothing about corruption,
Pemberton hadn’t spent
The money she supposed.  He could
Give it back to the commissioner
At any time ...
Oh! But he
Couldn’t stop going on about it,
And during their last dinner
Party he interrupted main
Course to take guests into the
Living room and show them
Bradley Wiggins’ signature
On all eight of the notes.
Wiggins had paid with
Seven tens, one five.
‘Why an Olympic champion
Had cash on him I’ll
Never know’, said Pemberton,
Although in truth there were plenty of
Things in life that remained
A mystery to PC Pemberton,
Including his
Wife’s Osgood-Schlatter’s,
Most French vocabulary, and
The fact Wiggins’ bank notes
Were robbed from the mealy
Purse of a single parent
Mother with disabled child after
Wiggins - gone wild - had mistakenly
Pawned his gold medals, then
Defaulted on the loan.

Thursday 20 November 2014

a seventeenth new story ... 'all the best lines'

‘I love you and I want to trust you’, Julie to her husband Giles.  They were lying in bed after a boozy night at the school play – performed by the children, with the teachers (naturally) the stars of the show … all the best lines. Ha!

‘Do you love me?’, mumbled Giles in reply. ‘Yes’ said Julie. And Giles turned over on his side, was fast asleep within minutes, snoring, farting. And Julie tried not to think about their sharing a bed together, sleeping, eating habits, married life, outcomes – decided instead to focus on income. Giles is richer than my wildest dreams thought Julie, nevertheless she stayed awake until morning.

It was three or four weeks later that Julie began to sense Giles might be having an affair.  ‘Darling, I am snowed …’, he would say, calling from the office, ‘I’ll be home late’.  ‘Again?’, Julie would ask. ‘Yes, again!’, Giles would counter irritably.  Julie would then prepare dinner for their five year old, put her to bed, sit in the living room and drink. And in these moments of personal solace she reiterated to herself that she loved Giles and wanted to trust him, yet if he was having an affair, then she was in a chain, waiting for her husband to recover his moral imperative (?) in his own sweet time. As if waiting on a fucking house purchase. But what space would be left to move into if Giles decided his own sweet time was now with someone else? If he was having an affair.

So Julie made a plan, choosing to ignore the hard truth that plans can fall through, so often they do. ‘I’ve bought us tickets to the ballet’, she announced after four gin and tonics when Giles staggered in late from work as ever. ‘And I’ve arranged a baby-sitter’.

Is it me or is he walking funny these days? thought Julie bitterly to herself, though trying to smile, if to Giles it might have looked like she was about to have her wisdom teeth pulled out with rusty pliers. ‘Ohh’, said Giles. And there followed a lot of hmmphing, umming, arraagghing … Open wide! Julie went to sleep wishing she was somewhere, anywhere else … even the back-street dentist.

In the end Giles generously agreed to accompany his wife to the ballet – he told his new partner it was out of pity, sympathy, guilt on ‘a Catholic scale’, not love. And he insisted to his wife on a baby-sitter.  ‘I know someone new, someone more affordable’, he told Julie. ‘How much?’, asked Julie. ‘Free, so long as we provide a bottle of good wine’. ‘Fine by me’, said Julie. My wife is a drunk and a nag Giles had also told his partner … and the way she smiles at me these days!

The ballet was a modern dance interpretation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.  Julie found herself wishing Giles had legs like a Roman praetor, Giles found himself remembering with almost unbearable prescience the ballet’s famous Act III.

When they returned home Giles’ new partner had taken the child and, as agreed, a suitcase full of Giles’ clothes. It was left to Giles to decide whether to play the role of Brutus or Judas. Being a weak and cowardly man he went for Judas.

As Giles kissed his wife for the last time, Julie drove a corkscrew through his jugular. ‘BLEED FOR THE SAKE OF JUSTICE!!’, she screamed over Giles’ twitching body.  And then she ran out of the house into the dead, black night.  

Thursday 13 November 2014

a sixteenth new story...'double beds'

So this is it. Bag on her lap, Una gazed from the back window of the airport saloon taxi, jaded and simultaneously irked by the urban degradation, environmental catastrophe, visual noise like two saucepans banged together.  People actually live here!  Dehumanised – minds, souls dislocated from bodies.  Animals? But not like animals. Animals have a natural sense of being, of moving.

The taxi driver asked gruffly through the plexiglass if she would like the radio on.  Una said ‘no’, but he didn’t hear her, put it on anyway. Springsteen singing Born to Run - but from what, who? Ourselves?

A meat truck passed by, heading in the opposite direction and then shortly after a refrigerated lorry. Una imagined cow carcuses strung on hooks, row upon row, the same way you would hang fur coats, mink, Christmas decorations. What was Christmas without a good side of beef anyhow? On her lapel Una wore, had worn for yonks, a badge that read: ‘Cows are not for Christmas Dinner’. She had to concede though, in general, she liked America, or the notion of it – DIY meat culture aside. And she did once admit to having a crush on Bill Clinton.  Bill who? Her boyfriend had said.

Una was on her way to stay with her sister in Chicago.  Her sister had moved out there years previously with her husband. ‘We’ll be back within a few months’, they had both said, and Una had felt a horrible jar in her stomach.  ‘What’s the matter’, her sister asked, ‘oh nothing’, Una replied, went to the bathroom of her Chelsea flat, was sick. Man and womankind commiserated with all the doe-eyed boys who stumbled out into the world with high-fluted notions only for them to be left crushed and deserted, but what about the girls? The girls who weren’t allowed high-fluted notions in the first place! Half the time.

‘I just want to be with someone nice’, she had said at college to friends, and she had got someone nice, and she had felt smothered, as if she was being buttered and fattened up for the oven. Then she had thought she liked the thrill of the chase, but the two boys she had chased were smarter, or rather more heartless than her and treated her like a rag doll, Jessie from fucking Toy Story but without cowboy boots and hat … except perhaps at hen-dos – Una had been on far too many of late.

Una remembered her sister’s hen. They had gone deluxe camping – glamping? - in the woods somewhere near London. She had really tried to be happy for her sister, and join in the general uproar but something in her told her that this would never be for her, oh, and then he got down on one knee … the Spanish steps …

She turned her attention back to the radio - there was an advert for beds, double beds, and then a news article about Hilary.  

Tuesday 11 November 2014

a thirty seventh new poem...'emotional tourettes'

Shit. Fuck. Shit. Shit. Piss. Fuck. Hell. Hell. Aaagh. Aaagh. Fuck. Shit. Pain. Shit.  Pain. Shit. Fuck. Shit. Fuck. Shitting Fuck. Aaagh. Hell. Horror. Hell. Aaagh. Aaagh. Jeeeeeeesuusss!
Crap. Shit. Crap. Shit. Voice of Calm. Voice of Reason. Fuck. Hell. Hell to Fuck.
I Will Eat Myself. Ich Will!
Ill. Ill. Shit. Piss. Fuck. Hell. Aaaaaaaghh. Fuck. Shit. The Pain. Paaaiiin.
Shit. Fuck. Shit. Fuck. Shitting Fuck. Hell to Fuck. Hell. Horror. Hell. Why O Why O Fucking Why!
Deep Breaths! 
Go ... and ... get ... some ... of ... God's ... good ... air.

Sunday 9 November 2014

Three Half Lives

It was at mass, attended by only ten lingering faithful, that Gabe had his first post-meltdown meltdown. In the depths of the sermon he’d flung his arms aloft. The priest was initially filled with righteous pleasure as he saw his holy words inspire his congregation to religious ecstasy, forgetting, as many preachers do, the weird contradiction of losing control and speaking in tongues or some such temporal madness inside a religious building and the usual self-control demanded over, for instance, one’s zip-fly and one’s covetous desires. The joy was brief and quickly curdled as Gabe stood and yelled, ‘I’ve had enough of this platitudinous bullshit!’ (a difficult word to deliver at volume – it was only possible due to his rehearsing it in his head many times before doing it) and stormed from the church, leaving the door banging in the brisk north-westerly and the candle flames lurching.
This was four days after the meltdown. Unlikely individual events piled up in a tottering probability pyramid, a bad-luck confluence of failed pumps, ignited graphite rods and explosions in the core. A demon plume, Satan’s beacon for casual cosmic observers, his piss-stain marking his latest hell on Earth, laden with heavy particles of unthinking DNA-shredding capabilities. The unusual wind took the smoke over Gabriel’s town; had the prevailing breeze been a-blowing, it would have taken it the near-opposite direction: another reason for hapless Gabriel to curse his luck.
Thirty workers were killed on the day by explosions and steam jets through the fissures in the ruptured pipes. The authorities poured water from the skies over the reactor, and in desperation brought in the earth-movers to cover and attempt to seal the man-made cave of unholy menace. This just churned up the radioactive atoms and doomed the soil for half a million years. Whenever Gabriel thought of the radioactive waste being spilled and scattered, he pictured that woefully misleading drawing of the atom, with the little circles looping around the cluster of other circles, that symbolised the Progress of the Nuclear Industry, with each part live and fizzing, glowing by turns toxic green and blinding white. In truth, one such isotope could remain harmless for a billion years, or could blast you with radioactive particles in the next instant: it was more unpredictable than the next move of the good lord, and the latter was feeling especially random to Gabe by this time. Sick with the sheer mindlessness of it, Gabriel first sought solace at the Church of the Holy Mother. The priest said the usual stuff about knowing, or rather not, the mind of God. It had relaxed Gabriel somewhat, but unsurprisingly he felt helpless and hopeless. The town was being evacuated. Infantry trucks loaded comrades, one suitcase or shopping trolley apiece, and took them to the emergency refugee centres on the edge of the capital – gymnasia and church halls and so on. Gabriel, along with a few others, decided not to leave.
At the hour of the meltdown, he had been with a group at the church on the hill over the town, the Holy Mother that is. Had they been inside worshipping, the thick stone walls would have reduced their dose of radiation by absorbing some of it, and they may have got away with no more than a significantly increased risk of cancer. Instead, Gabe, the priest and a selection of other volunteers were outside on ladders, cleaning the impressive stained glass window at the head of the nave. Each received around three Sieverts of radiation according to the suited emergency response agent who spoke to the group – about the same as eating 30 million bananas, as it goes – enough to be fatal, usually within a few weeks. Some reasoned they should get out, so the exposure couldn’t go up much more, but for those like Gabriel, a disturbed despondency set in and they thought ‘what the hell’. Gabriel had a history of heading for the dead ends, in his career as a press photographer and in his love life, which was peppered with jilts and slow-burning disappointments.
So he stayed in the mostly abandoned town, to become a desolate orphan of the state, a refugee unusual since the world moved below him while he stayed still.
Gabe hid from the soldiers drafted in to help with the evacuation: he hadn’t clue whether they could force him to leave, but he didn’t want to risk it. With the lights off he lay down on the sofa below the window so they wouldn’t see him. Once the sound of engines and shouting had dissipated, Gabriel walked around. It was thrilling, to feel like the only human on Earth. He noticed, walking through town, that all the shops were unlocked and the stock still on show. He felt an illicit pinch of joy when he took a newspaper from a rack. The front page was about the prime minister’s successful visit with the American president in Washington. Gabriel went and put it back. He stepped into the main square, up to the stone cross memorial, then spun around in front of it with his arms spread wide. He shouted, ‘Meltdowwwwwn!’ at the top of his voice, then hastened for home with his collar turned up as he saw a figure down one of the streets off the square. Even in the madness of the situation, embarrassment – or its avoidance – was always the most pressing feeling.
Others had stayed too, a few of them: the priest, of course – the madness of martyrdom had afflicted him, the noble urge to protect his flock: protect their souls, as their bodies were long beyond protection now. In a way, his calling had become a more pure pursuit, for the asceticism and rejection of requirements of the flesh required by close reading of Saint Paul were made good. Too little, too damn late, said another stubborn stayer, of the priest’s new motivation. Gabriel met her over the telephone initially; he called the number on every lurid card pinned up in the phone booth – she was the only one who answered him. Cleo was a prostitute, yes, or ‘sex worker’, as her social worker had insisted on saying (before she split town), as though they were on the level. Gabriel found out the going rate and said fine. He went to her place, having asked if that was the usual thing. When he walked in, he gave her an awkward one-arm hug, from which she shrugged quickly away. The money was to be paid up front. She was Gabriel’s first prostitute, as he put it. He said: ‘You are my first prostitute,’ in that curious way in which one avoids even a euphemism for sex, to which she retorted: ‘When you first went to the dentist, did you say “You were my first dentist”? Or how about the first time you were served a beer? What did you say to the barman?’
Gabe, flummoxed, over-apologised, as he tended to do. She wasn’t too offended, though, she was used to the causal disparagement of her job choice, even by those who paid for her body, and welcomed his return business. At their third meeting, Gabriel asked Cleo why she had stayed in the condemned town. They were eating withered grapes from a bowl at her small Formica-topped table.
‘I don’t believe in radiation,’ she said.
For the second time in her company, Gabriel was nonplussed.
‘What do you mean? Radiation, well radiation is everywhere, you can’t choose not to believe in it.’
‘You can’t see it, feel it, smell it or taste it,’ said Cleo with finality.
‘That doesn’t mean it isn’t real!’ The finality was lost on Gabe. ‘They still know it’s there. Scientists measure it, measure it with those…’ Gabriel hesitated. He had no idea how they knew it was there. He changed tack.
‘You can’t see or smell or anything things like… democracy. Still real.’ Gabe chose the generic example of an abstract noun, other than love, which would have been a bit much. His brain felt sluggish, fighting uphill.
‘No one’s claiming that democracy will kill me.’
Gabriel heard this uncompromising barrier, and realised that he was really attracted to this woman. He avoided whispering, “Whether you believe in it or not, it’ll still kill you.” His last word problem was a common stumbling block in Gabe’s relationship building. It sat uneasily with his constant apologising and eagerness to please – when it came up, it was a moment where his urge to be right, and to be seen as being right, trumped his urge to be liked. This time, though, with a huge act of willpower, he stopped, became accepting, and gave Cleo a kiss. It was a magic moment for him. This was on the evening after he marched out of mass. There was a niggling sense that his moral downfall was completed by the short walk from church to boudoir, but Gabe felt gorgeously liberated. He was so drunk on the feeling that life was being lived, for that evening he forgot his death was imminent. He was the mess it up, somewhat, but not until a few days later.
In the meantime, Gabriel took some photographs, for the first time since the meltdown. He turned the lens to deserted streets, the loitering plume of smoke that crept through the mound of earth, abandoned cars and an empty roundabout. In truth, it was as obvious as one could get with photos of a deserted, irradiated town, but the papers in the capital were keen for dramatic images of the tragic town. Gabe organised a portrait of every remaining townsperson (except the priest, who he was still avoiding), which won a double page spread in the national paper’s Saturday magazine. He shot them in black-and-white, to give the feeling that he was preserving something already lost.
Cleo was typically ambivalent about Gabe’s pictures. Bored-looking, she sifted through his prints and described them as nice. They aren’t nice, he exclaimed. ‘They’re supposed to speak of desolation! Of… of a town being screwed by a giant faceless, unaccountable company, and the desperate persistence of the remaining few!’
‘Oh, sure, I see,’ she said.
This time, the need to be right was leading.
‘Do you? The paper said they were iconic!’
‘I’ve never been that into photography.’
Gabe was frustrated. He let it show by changing the subject.
‘How long have you been a… prostitute?’
Cleo just looked at him. ‘Don’t start,’ she said.
But after the slight regarding his photos, Gabe felt she owed him. What, he wasn't sure. To be offended too?
‘Well, why did you get into it?’ He could feel the pointless, insulting, patronising shape of the conversation coming into focus, but he couldn’t stop himself.
Cleo sighed. ‘I like being a whore.’
‘Well, good for you, but surely you’d rather do something else? You’re a smart girl, you didn’t need to…’ Gabe managed to stop himself saying ‘sell your body’, but later, when he reviewed the whole talk over and over in his mind, he’d berate himself for the words ‘smart girl’ – who did he think he was?
Cleo gazed at him, not angry, more resigned to the idea that he was like so many men she’d encountered. They fell into two camps: those who had sex with her and saw it as she did, a business relationship. They didn’t insult her, barely spoke to her, and certainly thought of her as beneath them. Worse were those like Gabriel, really, as he turned out. Some men believed she needed saving, looking after, a good man to take care of her. So she was used to this conversation; it made her feel endlessly tired. Cleo was past frustration with this attitude, and besides, she still quite liked Gabe – plus, who else would pay her now? The town was basically forsaken. Not that she particularly needed the money now – you could help yourself to food at the abandoned supermarket. No one except those on radiation sickness’ death row would touch the stuff so it was a free for all. One morning Cleo was in there, collecting the last of the fresh fruit – rot was setting in, appropriately – and she saw a man collecting half a shelf’s worth of tins of sponge pudding. He just shrugged and smiled glumly when he saw she’d noticed him, and headed out with his trolley once he was done.
There was no ‘pulling together’, Blitz spirit, or any romantic sense of an embattled community bravely facing their end together. This may have been partly to do with the radiation sickness itself, which tended to bring feelings of overwhelming lassitude along with the nausea, headaches and bloody shits. So people kept to themselves; there was comfort in that familiarity, anyway. Gabe and Cleo were descending into sickness at about the same rate. Sometimes in her little flat they were queued to throw up in the toilet. The plughole in the shower was becoming clogged with hair: black – hers; faded brown – his. Although each was as pathetically ill as the other, they weren’t much more than strangers to one another, so the implacable feeling of faint disgust at someone else’s fading body – an ancient instinct of self-preservation – set in.
Cleo died first, with her eyes only half closed.
She died one morning, during the lie-in she said she needed. Gabe went in with a cup of green tea, and she was even paler than before, still. He sat pensively on the edge of the bed and sipped the tea. His lined hands shook slightly. He felt weakened by it, and panicked. How the hell did he know what to do with a body? He said to Cleo’s body: ‘Now you’re a corpse. Another dead prostitute.’ His own humour shocked and troubled him. He went to see if the priest was in.
The priest was named Father Simon. He was ambling around the graveyard when Gabriel got up to the church; drawing a tasteless joke about being the walking dead from Gabe.
‘I’m sorry about my outburst last week,’ Gabriel said. ‘I was very upset.’
‘You need not apologise to me,’ said the Father. ‘Have you prayed about it?’
‘Yes,’ Gabriel lied. ‘Will you hear my confession?’
‘My role is to serve.’
The pair went to the booth. Gabriel had always felt more relaxed with the grille between them. In meetings with editors, he’d always hated it when they came from behind their desk to sit opposite him on the big easy chairs they all had.
‘Father forgive me, for I have sinned.’
Gabriel couldn’t get any further, however, due to his sudden and intense need to vomit. He spewed until bile and blood came up, and sat on the linoleum floor by the toilet for a while, panting.
In the booth, the priests head was resting on the grille. Gabe got up and pulled back the black heavy curtain. Father Simon was lifeless, his right hand loosely grasping his rosary. Gabriel stepped back and pulled the curtain back across. He went to the altar and got down on bended knee. He didn’t know what to say, so he just said the Lord’s Prayer. It didn’t feel enough, so he said it again. He stood, genuflected, and walked out of the church.
In the graveyard, Gabriel looked at names and dates on the tombstones. He selected one Margarita del Pilar, who had died 120 years ago; she sounded exotic and fey. Gabe lay down on the grave, with his head by the headstone, and waited. Eyes closed, he imagined he could hear the church organ playing. For the first time since the accident, he felt calm. When the nuclear power station had first been built, Gabe had read a book about nuclear power. Now he recalled one passage from it:
“While the half-life tells us exactly how many radioactive atoms will remain after any given time, it is impossible to know in advance which particular atoms will remain.”

Like life, Gabriel thought. Death: predictable. Who and when? Now you’re asking.

Thursday 6 November 2014

a sixth new reflection...'the continuing armstrong delusion'

‘We wouldn’t be sitting here, if I hadn’t gone back’.

Lance Armstrong to Oprah Winfrey – Oprah had asked why-o-why Armstrong decided to return to cycling and compete the Tour de France in 2009, only to be exposed by erstwhile team mate and (fellow) drugs convict Floyd Landis, when Landis was dumbly refused by Armstrong a place on Armstrong’s ’09 team after having served a two year ban for taking illegal amounts of testosterone.

And shamefully, the subtext underlying (no pun intended) Armstrong’s answer to Oprah runs something like ‘I might otherwise have gotten away with the biggest sports-related fraud in history’. ‘And I would never have owned up to it’.

It took me eighteen months to catch up on the Lance Armstrong story – and all because of a book published this summer by his former masseuse to which we will return; one and a half years to read into the real story, and not the devious and far-too-good-to-be-true version of his life and cycling career that existed before January 2013 – although I did not fail, perhaps could not have failed to be aware of it. Rumours that Armstrong had been living a lie, and shilling a whole lot of rubes for serious money along the way is old news, and was always suggested in certain sections of the media, simultaneously hotly and heavily contested (to the weight and cost of umpteen legal actions) by Armstrong himself.

To hear Armstrong finally admit to taking various band substances in the opening ‘yes’ and ‘no’ section of his interview with Oprah, came neither as a surprise, or, something entirely expected.  However, what could perhaps have been expected was how, in spite of everything, Armstrong, in spite of himself, and also because of himself, still came across as largely unrepentant and patently untrustworthy during much of his supposed ‘confession’. He, in fact, reminded me strongly of former PM Tony Blair when he lied repeatedly, or at least told half-truths, on national television over Iraq and WMDs.  Same steel in their eyes.  Same conscious self-delusion.

Also during the Oprah ‘confession’, Armstrong lamented how he lost a whopping $75 million in one day after sponsors (whom he had conned out of millions over the years) dropped him in lighting quick succession.  Yet, it wasn’t (and isn’t to this day) enough to make you feel sorry one iota for Armstrong, cancer survivor or otherwise.  The money wasn’t rightfully his in the first place.

But whether money was a significant motivating factor behind Armstrong’s competition cheating is surely debatable given the man’s absolute and unrelenting desire to win, and to appear a champion at all (and sometimes disastrous) costs.  Some of these costs were made of flesh and bones: former friends and colleagues including Landis, Tyler Hamilton and Frankie Andreu, Andreu’s wife, Betsy, and masseuse Emma O’Reilly.

O’Reilly, ten years after giving journalist David Walsh a major exclusive interview at the height of Armstrong’s fame that suggested Armstrong was taking performance enhancing drugs (to which Armstrong replied by calling her a whore with a drink problem), has now published her new take on proceedings entitled: The Race to the Truth. And in deeply ironic fashion the foreword is by none other than ... Lance Armstrong.

The two seem to have made up of late which is all well and good, but read the tone of Armstrong’s preamble and once again it is the usual aggressive self-serving spin as performed on Oprah and countless occasions since.  O’Reilly is different from ‘others’ (I wonder who?!) because she has found it in herself to forgive now-humble-ole'-Lance, who, after all, as he said on Oprah, and says again in TRttT, was only one of many drugs cheats in cycling in the nineties and noughties.

Armstrong against all odds remains popular.  He has 3.5 million followers on Twitter.  I can only imagine they are still with him because of the power surviving something as deadly as cancer holds in people’s minds.

I would never ever wish death on Lance Armstrong (let alone any living creature), and he has a new chance at life now, a chance to rehabilitate, start anew and attempt where possible to reconcile the past. However, if Oprah, his foreword to O’Reilly’s book, and all the Blairite rhetoric in the intervening months, not to mention his Twitter blurb (‘Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously’) are anything to go by, the latter will prove near-impossible for him.