They told me I had skin cancer on my nose.

No worries they told me.

“We will whip you into the clinic and we will freeze that sucker and carve it off the old Christmas beezer. Of course, there’s always the chance that you wind up with something looking like a gherkin,” they said.

At least that’s what I heard.

What they really said was: “It’s small, non-malignant, have it off in five minutes. It will leave a scar, a little one.” I’m 76-years-old so what’s one more?

And that’s what happened.

But that word, cancer, has the ring of finality about it, it sounds like acid, it hisses.

I have jumped out of airplanes, been shot at once with intent by some lousy marksmen, once was enough. Scared but no panic; it’s the stuff I can’t see that gets me.

Sometime in the mid-1980s I remember hearing about something called........

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