Memories

This week we recruited a new writer. Alastair Upham is an accomplished editor with Future Publishing’s London offices. I had a chat with him and he said that guys like us work on these magazines, writing articles and everything, but that can only satisfy to a certain extent. He wants to make a difference by joining the Memories project which is great. Alastair’s lost his aunt to cancer, and his mother also had it but is doing OK now. We welcome him on board and send him our thanks.

Alastair is going to be working with Wendy Nichols, who survived cervical cancer a while ago. Meanwhile, this evening I’m hoping to talk to my friend Tom Preston over in Canada about the project. He’s an old friend of mine from school, and when we were 18 he found out he had leukemia. Next thing you know he’s in hospital, on chemo, has lost about 30 pounds and has no hair. That was years ago and he’s OK now, the proud father of triplets! Can you imagine? More on the project soon…

Though we haven’t posted anything yet this month, work continues in the background. On Monday, I received copy in from Kay Inglis, whose mother Barbara was taken abruptly by cancer of the oesophagus last year. Kay has written a wonderfully honest and touching story about what her mother meant to her. We don’t want to give away too many details about the piece as we hope everyone will want to buy a copy of the book, however when I sent it to one of the other writers as an example of the work we’re doing he replied: “OK, so now I’m sat in the office with tears in my eyes. That is beautiful.”

That’s what we all think, so I want to thank Kay for her sterling work. The book is getting better as it gets bigger.

In addition, we’ve got a new volunteer who is going to talk to us about their experience of cancer for Memories. Wendy Nichols had cervical cancer and managed to beat the disease. One of our writers is going to speak to her, and I’d like to thank Wendy for taking part.

Cheers also to the people who’ve posted kind comments here on the site. Creatives have started expressing an interest in illustrating some of the stories we’re working on, and we’ll have an update on that soon.