the brilliantly leaping gazelle

The news that Wayne has got cancer saddens me.

Not for him, but because questions that should be rightly asked about health inequalities, especially those surrounding early cancer diagnosis, access to effective treatment and ongoing post survival rehabilitation have been largely ignored by the media. A glorious exception to this obsequious forelock tugging is an excellent piece in spiked by Joanna Williams. Much easier to focus on his two sons, Not Yet Wayne and On The Wane, whose every action is minutely dissected and discussed so as to help deflect attention from where it should be.

You know, instead of detailing the plight of some of the other 1000 people who were diagnosed with cancer on the same day he was. Those who by accident of birth will not get the same medical care he will. ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’ As true today as it always has been.

It also saddens me that Waynes long standing devotion to homeopathy seems to have deserted him, and that this too hasn’t been remarked upon in the media saddens me. What better way to highlight its efficacy, to use his celebrity status to advance a cause he notionally passionately believes in and prove that homeopathy isn’t a load of old bollocks. But instead of staunchly sticking to his voguish affectations he, like countless others before him, jettison’s them when confronted with a potentially fatal condition and instead puts his trust in proper science, not pseudo-scince and expensive quackery. You know, the kind of science that actually works.

I always thought he was a hypocrite, its just nice to have it confirmed.

But what fills me with the most amount of joy about all of this – and yes, I find joy in this, I’m not going to do a Tony Blair after Thatcher died – has to be the awkward silences and unspoken recriminations and pent up rage directed at Ash by Wayne. He knew he was in love with her when he got married, continued his relationship with Ash and since the divorce from his wife and her subsequent death, has been tireless to rehabilitate the publics opinion of her. Again, it saddens me that the media haven’t drawn attention to the fact that whilst he isn’t a smoker, she is, and that his casual interpretation of his marriage vows are now coming back to haunt him.

Good.

It also saddens me that no-one has made the blindingly obvious observation – blindingly obvious to me anyway – that as the monarchy itself is a cancer on our society, that the cancer now has cancer.