Characteristic of the leukaemic body is a rapid decline after remission. Remission can be induced by radiotherapy or chemotherapy or simply it can happen, no-one is sure why. No doctor can accurately predict whether the disease will stabilise or for how long. This is true of all cancers. The body dances with itself.

The progeny of the stem cell stop dividing, or the rate radically slows, tumour growth is halted. The patient may no longer be in pain. If remission comes early in the prognosis, before the toxic effects of the treatment have battered the body into a wholly new submission, the patient may feel well. Unfortunately, hair loss, skin discoloration, chronic constipation, fever and neurological disturbances are likely to be the price for a few months more life. Or a few years. That’s the gamble.

Metastasis is the problem. Cancer has a unique property; it can travel from the site of origin to distant tissues. It is usually metastasis which kills the patient and the biology of metastasis is what doctors don’t understand. They are not conditioned to understand it. In doctor-think the body is a series of bits to be isolated and treated as necessary, that the body in its very disease may act as a whole is an upsetting concept. Holistic medicine is for faith healers and crackpots, isn’t it? Never mind. Wheel round the drugs trolley, bomb the battlefield, try radiation right on the tumour. No good? Get out the levers, saws, knives and needles. Spleen the size of a football? Desperate measures for desperate diseases. Especially so since metastasis has often developed before the patient sees a doctor. They don’t like to tell you this but if the cancer is already on the move, treating the obvious problem, lung, breast, skin, gut, blood, will not alter the prognosis.

I went to the cemetery today and walked amongst the catacombs thinking of the dead. On the older graves the familiar skull and crossbones bore on me with uncomfortable gaiety. Why do they look so pleased, those grinning heads robbed of any human touch? That skulls should grin is repellent to us who come with dark flowers and mournful sober faces. This is a mourning ground, a place of silence and regret. For us, overcoats against the rain, the grey sky and the grey tombs together oppress. Here is the end of us all, but let’s not look that way. While our bodies are solid and resist the slicing of the wind, let’s not think of the deep mud or the patient ivy whose roots will find us out.

Six bearers in long coats and white scarves carried the body to the grave. To call it a grave at this stage would be to dignify it. In a garden it might be a trench for a new asparagus bed. Fill it with manure and plant it out. An optimistic hole. But this is not an asparagus bed, it is the last resting place of the deceased.

Observe the coffin. This is full oak not veneer. The handles are solid brass not lacquered steel. The lining of the coffin is raw silk padded with seabed sponge. Raw silk rots so gracefully. It makes an elegant tattering around the corpse. The acrylic linings, cheap and popular, don’t decompose. You may as well be buried in a nylon sock.