If I had a penny for every time I lay in bed and stared up at the ceiling and agonised about how I got the bloody tumour in the first place I’d have about 63p, or some figure like that.
But seriously, over the coming months I had plenty of opportunity to go over every possible scenario and factor that led to my predicament. I got it down to four possible causes.
The first and most obvious was the ‘demon’ cell phone. At risk of being sued, my girlfriend at the time and I bought two Motorola digital flip phones after I started my psychology degree at UCLAN. This was around 1992/93, and we were still in the ‘cross-over’ from analogue. Digital phones were cumbersome things with huge batteries compared to today’s arty miniatures. I’m no cellular communications wizard but I reason that this is largely due to the positioning and number of phone masts, in addition to battery technology. To explain, these days there’s a phone mast at the top of every church, block of flats, and any building with some real height.
I narrowed the third possible cause to blow to the head. By it’s very nature the astrocytoma is a deep-rooted bastard that may have been there for many years. How long? Nobody knows. Its not like you can cut it in half and count the rings, or take a sample and have it carbon dated. I lost track of the number of falls and bumps I had at school whilst playing boisterous childhood games such as British bulldogs (probably now called UK Labradors), and block 123. I’m not going to explain these, suffice to say they were gladiatorial.
But seriously, over the coming months I had plenty of opportunity to go over every possible scenario and factor that led to my predicament. I got it down to four possible causes.
The first and most obvious was the ‘demon’ cell phone. At risk of being sued, my girlfriend at the time and I bought two Motorola digital flip phones after I started my psychology degree at UCLAN. This was around 1992/93, and we were still in the ‘cross-over’ from analogue. Digital phones were cumbersome things with huge batteries compared to today’s arty miniatures. I’m no cellular communications wizard but I reason that this is largely due to the positioning and number of phone masts, in addition to battery technology. To explain, these days there’s a phone mast at the top of every church, block of flats, and any building with some real height.
Back in 1992 you would be lucky if you found a couple of masts in a town the size of Preston, Lancashire. As a result, a cell phone had to generate a lot of power to ‘throw’ that signal out, and ‘pull’ it back in. These days they don’t need as much power as there’s probably a mast in your back garden. As a result, super slim ‘sex toys’, that everybody fawns over, which have, together with the arrival of the MP3 player, pushed robbery statistics through the roof, (well you can take the boy out of the police [temporarily], but you can’t take the police out of the boy). So there I am scribbling away at my coursework in my tiny room in the university halls of residence. Meanwhile 45 miles away is a lonely insecure ex-to-be twiddling her talons, er… I mean thumbs, convinced I’m high on speedballs pole dancing with nubile young student vampire babes at the local student union bar come ‘Titty Twister’. As a result, she kept me pinned to the phone every night talking crap. I do remember though, at the end of every lengthy exchange the right side of my face and head being warm to the touch. The extended antenna ending exactly where the tumour began. I should have kept those conversations to a minimum but the aggravation would have been unbearable. Oh for foresight.
Secondly, I left school when Margaret Thatcher had her steely grip on the country. At one stage there were 3.5 million people unemployed. A job was like gold dust. At the time my CV wasn’t exactly brimming over with qualifications and experience, so I took the first thing I could find, a job with one of the largest dry cleaning chains in the UK. Wasn’t long before I was fully trained as a machine operator and Hoffman presser and acting as relief across Merseyside. However, some of the working practices of the managers, and the aging machinery, left a lot to be desired. Indeed, many a time I saw, and smelled, damp clothes being extracted and sent up for pressing in order to keep up with the burgeoning workload. Unfortunately, research has since shown the solvent used, Perchloroethylene, to be carcinogenic.
Secondly, I left school when Margaret Thatcher had her steely grip on the country. At one stage there were 3.5 million people unemployed. A job was like gold dust. At the time my CV wasn’t exactly brimming over with qualifications and experience, so I took the first thing I could find, a job with one of the largest dry cleaning chains in the UK. Wasn’t long before I was fully trained as a machine operator and Hoffman presser and acting as relief across Merseyside. However, some of the working practices of the managers, and the aging machinery, left a lot to be desired. Indeed, many a time I saw, and smelled, damp clothes being extracted and sent up for pressing in order to keep up with the burgeoning workload. Unfortunately, research has since shown the solvent used, Perchloroethylene, to be carcinogenic.
I narrowed the third possible cause to blow to the head. By it’s very nature the astrocytoma is a deep-rooted bastard that may have been there for many years. How long? Nobody knows. Its not like you can cut it in half and count the rings, or take a sample and have it carbon dated. I lost track of the number of falls and bumps I had at school whilst playing boisterous childhood games such as British bulldogs (probably now called UK Labradors), and block 123. I’m not going to explain these, suffice to say they were gladiatorial.But all that was 30 or so years ago. What had happened recently? Well there was an altercation with an empty tea urn belonging to Her Majesty in the back of a Bedford 4 tonner, also belonging to HRH, when I was wearing a certain green uniform.
However, there was no unconsciousness, concussion, lump, blood, nothing. I had come off my motorbike a few times, but I never landed on my helmeted head. And I had been punched a couple of times, but no cartoon ‘tweety birds’ circling my skull. Besides that, zilch!
Finally, it may be my own bad luck. Perhaps people sometimes get these things in a vacuum with no obvious causes. Maybe non-conformist cells ‘wake-up’ one day and decide, “Fuck it, I’ going to grow different from now on!”
One thing is for certain though, given a long enough time line the survival rate for everybody drops to zero!
One thing is for certain though, given a long enough time line the survival rate for everybody drops to zero!
Oh yeah, did I mention on a bad day I've got one 
of these every 45 seconds? Can't be good for your health.
of these every 45 seconds? Can't be good for your health.
And on a final note, its also crossed my mind that one, maybe more, disgruntled ex-girlfriends may have got their hands on one of these. No not the 747, the bloody doll. Creepy.
3 comments:
I've got two of those phones, boxed and in a cupboard upstairs. I can also remember a warm feeling after long phone calls home, I had one with me while on my kilick's course at Sultan back in '91-'92.
Where was the army style phot taken?
It would be nice if we could measure the radiation output of both phones then divide by two to get an average. Deadly things.
The photo? No idea, could be RCT depot: Grantham in Lincolnshire. Ah, I remember Grantham, drunken nights out fighting the locals, a certain large chested girl who worked in the chippy...
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