"There is no bedtime without Portillo ... "

There is nothing more soul-destroying than watching your loved one suffer and hope against hope, when you know there is no hope. This wonderful person, my darling wife, who would have deserved many more happy years, hoped for a while that the chemotherapy might work, although she was intelligent enough to know that medical science in this field is still in the Stone Age. It took the undeservedly celebrated NHS more than a month to even examine her properly because of the hysteria about COVID-19, when in this fast acting fatal type of cancer every day counts. The steroids she got after each chemotherapy session gave her false and temporary hope - at the early stage we even managed to sit out in the garden and borrow a bit of cheer from the summer sun, or we had our usual Costa Coffee drinks in my car parked near the coffee place. We even sat out in the beautiful park of Hall Place in Bexley on a bench we used to sit on many times in previous years to watch the plants, the birds and the seemingly carefree public around us. We had plans to celebrate the 20th anniversay of our meeting in 2022. But soon, she couldn't even get to the chemotherapy, she couldn't get out of the house, then out of the bed. Increasing doses of morphine just about helped her through the suffering. We watched our favourite or routine television programmes together in bed. Even then she insisted on sharing the cover lest I caught cold. I loved it as she rested her gentle soft hand on my pate while watching the TV. Her bedtime TV consisted of Michael Portillo's railway travels and a quiz show on BBC (Richard Osman's House of Games). We decided that "there is no bedtime without Portillo". The morphine usually subdued her before the end of these programmes, but the pain woke her up at about midnight, when she had to take some more of the painkillers. One of my tasks was to pull the curtain after she had fallen asleep, but left the telly on at a lower volume, because switching it off woke her up. Witnessing and living through this each day, when up till February 2021 seeing her each day was the source of my happiness, was incredible torture - though nothing like her horrible bodily and mental suffering.