Many Happy Returns

Today is the third birthday of my little mate who's mentioned in the 'Bastard Cancer' post.

There are loads of Facebook messages already and they're growing by the minute.

It occurred to me while posting my own greeting that every single word of a commonly used birthday phrase has a very special meaning for him at this time and has never been more appropriate, nor more sincerely meant by so many well-wishers.

MANY HAPPY RETURNS, THOMAS.

Bastard cancer!

A little boy of my acquaintance upon whose birth certificate the ink is barely dry and who introduced the phrase "done and custard" to my vocabulary, has been diagnosed with a type of cancer that apparently only attacks children.

The bastard thing only attacks children. How un-fucking-fathomly evil is that?

If it came for me – pushing 60, morbidly obese, diabetic, osteo-arthritic, can’t remember what I had for breakfast*, thinks exercise is for people whose brains don’t work – I could tell it to come and have a go if it thought it was ‘ard enough. An outward display of defiance while secretly shitting meself.

But the little lad who it did manage to summon up the courage to have a go at must spend his third birthday undergoing chemotherapy, while still managing to smile for visitors and trying to wind his mummy up.

Makes you vary between angrily asking “what kinda god …?” during the daylight hours and praying at night to the same god that he be made well. Cognitive dissonance they call it. Bloody appalling I call it.

*My GP assures me it's not Alzheimer’s. But this is the same woman who still believes me when I tell her I’m definitely gonna diet.

Dissertation dross

Just before the Christmas break there was a meeting to discuss the university’s requirements for the dissertations that Masters students will complete over the summer of 2011.

The permitted length for these dissertations is 15,000 words. We were told that dissertations that exceeded the word limit by less than ten per cent would not be penalised, but any excess of ten per cent or over would incur a penalty.

Without so much as a deprecatory smile or a hint of irony, a distinguished professor informed a roomful of post-graduate students at a Russell Group university of the importance of ONE FUCKING WORD. Dissertations up to and including 16,499 words – no problem; dare to write just one word more, 16,500 words, and the full wrath of university displeasure would descend upon us. In the name of equality, of course.

I’m clever. I start sentences with 'and'. And I use long words. Epistemological, exculpatory, shit like that. I never use ‘rapprochement’, though. That’s because Malcolm Tucker from ‘The Thick Of It’ says it doesn’t make me sound clever, it makes me sound like a cunt, and I’m not arguing with Malc. Plus I don’t know what it means. I digress.

The word count in Microsoft Word doesn’t actually count words. It counts spaces. So ‘a’ counts as one word and so does ‘anti-disestablishmentarianism’. That means that my 16,499 words will contain way more characters than some of the other dissertations. Where’s the equality in that?