You think I ain’t worth a dollar but I feel like a millionaire
Talking shop, anti-PR machine, what's luck, levitation in Wales
May 2025.
The hospital have kindly arranged for me to spend time with a psychologist. Anything that takes you outside of yourself, away from conversations with friends or attempts to discuss illness and recovery with teenage children is a good thing. This is a good thing.
The psychologist listens and I talk. I’m not sure how sessions work when you’re not a brain surgery patient (I’ve never previously had one) but the psychologist is ever-patient and attentive and quietly curious about which direction the inside of my head is currently sprawling in. After a few meetings, she tells me that in all the years she’s worked with cancer patients, she’s never met one that’s had to make the same decision about surgery that I had to. And she’s never met anyone who has had awake surgery (I’d be lying if I said those details from her didn’t put a slight spring in my step as I left).
Digressing from the illness itself, I find myself talking about the writing I’ve put up since the operation.
“I want to let people know that I’m doing ok and that - thank God - not all bad health stories are written reflectively after someone’s passed. I want to try to show that the processes the NHS offer are hugely positive, even if they might scuff the patient’s edges up as they’re happening. But each time I post, I’ve found replying to the responses hard. They are universally beautiful and hugely helpful… but seeing them all there together on the page is absolutely overwhelming.”
The psychologist reassures me that this is a very common side effect found when dealing a difficult situation after brain surgery. The posts allow me to document whatever’s going on in my head whilst also raising a hand to say, ‘I’m doing ok’. Getting the information out acts as a purge. It’s not hugely surprising that one doesn’t want to revisit them once they’re online and part of the public domain.
Afterwards my mind drifts and I’m thinking of all the musicians I’ve worked with over the years who have vowed to not read reviews or features, no matter how much begging one does to just get them to look this once. ‘Honestly, five stars is quite a bit better than one star, trust me.’ Did those artists stop caring or did it all become too much? Did the words flow with too much hallucinogenic sunshine, or were there just too many pitch black clouds circling the borders of an NME review?
One chap I’m lucky enough to work with always messages to say thanks when significant reviews run, but admits he can’t look at them. His manager has given him the magazine and the score but to him they’re still best avoided for the same reasons his younger self settled on all those years ago. Whatever the operation has done to my brain, it’s made me - a PR man throughout my entire adult life - turn against PRing my self. I’ve developed some kind of social media scopophobia.
Slow applause.
Well done Robin. Only took 30-odd years rattling around in the showbiz game for cover stories, Guardian reviews and one-line gossip column mentions but you finally got there. Well done.*
A funny thing, but I’ve started to feel a little more lucky recently.
Success or failure brought about by chance rather than actions, goes the dictionary definition. How deep you’re in is the way I look at at it. How your glass compares to everyone else’s.
Life changing diagnosis, decisions decisions, eight-hour operation before months and months of recovery treatments. Glass just under a quarter full of some yellowy liquid that could be piss, accompanying smile of holder weary with strong hint of pleading desperation.
Reading about peers deaths, of medical treatments that didn’t go the way one would want, or worse. Reading the furrow lines on other people’s faces in the waiting room while waiting for radiotherapy treatment. Hours spent with the psychologist talking through the corners of it all. That glass is now brimming, overfilled with glistening, pure elixir. That glass holds a glorious rolling ocean that’s ready to pour out of a sun soaked oasis right there in the heart of the desert.
The first happened. The second statement feels closer to my story now. Lucky me.
I didn’t envisage things going this way. Recently I’ve come to believe that life makes its own path and we just tick along it, whether we want to or not. Luck is when it isn’t absolutely pissing while walking that path.
I’ve thought about luck a lot recently after seeing Facebook posts that sadly reflect other people’s bad weather journeys. The bleakness of Facebook was one of the inspirations for starting this off in the first place. Whenever I looked through the Meta glass after diagnosis, the place seemed laser-sighted in trying to convince the reader (me) that the world is bleak, oppressive and dark. My story felt like a tiny bit of proof that it isn’t always that way even if the screen tells you it is.
After receiving the initial diagnosis, I needed to find a way to process what was happening in my head. Although I am not what one would call a natural writer (a different conversation for another day), I decided to map the whole story out in words. The torrent of speech and memory that was firing around my head - threatened by any future surgery - got typed into an expanding document on my laptop. Initially, there were 4000 words that detailed the period leading up the operation. Words that then sat untouched for months afterwards until the wife pretty much told me to do something with them or delete them. Use it or lose it, boyo. As always, she was right.
Over the last few weeks I might not have sounded so lucky in my writing (a point reiterated last week on a family visit to my Dad’s - ‘can’t you just cheer up?’). There was the everyday grimness of chemotherapy (a subject everyone knows about that somehow remains something of mystery, probably for very good reasons). And all that looped indecision about a date. And, of course, the operation itself. A crack in the skull, a fleeting glimpse of God in the power of it all and then half a packet of steel staples banged into the side of the head, to be removed by nurse at the GPs a few weeks later. Together, those stories merge together and become my very own horrible Facebook post, a miserable sod moaning about life and all of those flat, grey realities that seem to curdle out in between. Batteries blinking in the red, chronically in need of half an hour jacked into the power supply. Congratulations - you’ve done the thing you were trying to avoid.
So this post is to say that I know there’s light in the distance and I’ll to get there even if I’m on my knees crawling through dose six of chemotherapy (due on New Year’s Eve - very strong future excuse in place for going to bed early and missing the Hootenanny). And this last weekend, luck kindly grabbed me and the family by the hand and led us to Green Man Festival just outside beautiful Crickhowell (massive, massive thanks to Ben and Carl here). Over three days we watched an incredible array of musicians, comedians and writers in intoxicating sunshine. And it felt like time travel. Life used to have those moments almost weekly back the ’90s as we charged around the country to catch bands we worked with in any field, anywhere (Phoenix Festival, on airfield somewhere near Stratford-upon-Avon? Yeah alright then, why not). Now? For so many reasons, there’s a lot less of it going on.
Green Man is proof that a great festival combines all of those things I mentioned - you can add art, food, randomness, adventure too - in a brilliant symbiosis where everything flowed into one. Music seemed to channel the natural environment whether it was CMAT singing the Welsh National Anthem or Underworld playing a set that made an audience of all ages levitate at the wildness of their sound. Everything else melted in and out of the sounds from the stages. 28 degree heat and a bliss-view of the Black Mountains may well have helped too.
At this point in the recovery process (four weeks past the last chemo dose, awaiting the next with grim trepidation), it felt like the definition of luck to be there. That sun soaked oasis. Right there in mid-Wales. Perfection. Just make sure to stop at the dosa stall that’s there above the main stage if the queue’s not too deep.
Today, the glass is brimming.
*This piece was written before I started writing these Scatterbrained posts and came after I’d posted on Facebook between operation and chemotherapy. Each time I posted to social media, the response from friends was like a glowing burst of stars before my eyes - so beautiful and utterly vast, it became impossible to deal with. But Scatterbrained has become a way of dealing with it - of confronting the issue face on, with all of its grimness and humour rolled into one text (hopefully). And it’s made talking to people about all of this pleasurable, if that’s possible. So a huge thanks to everyone reading and reacting, and a massive massive round of applause for the psychologist, who remains amazing. Her advice has helped all of this hugely. And thanks to it, I am no longer afraid of PR. Honest.