Some 10 days ago, Di and I visited her sister Liz at her home in Northamptonshire. On this occasion we took the opportunity while in a county renowned for its attractive villages to explore the church at Brixworth. My 'Betjeman's Best British Churches' had already informed me that Brixworth is 'one of the most important buildings in England', so I was looking forward to seeing it.
The experience was one of great interest but also more than a little disconcerting because the church was so different to anything I had seen before. I like churches. I often take the trouble to enter them when travelling and have done so ever since my first forays as a child, on bike and in car, into the Norfolk countryside; a county that boasts its own share of impressive, ecclesiastical architecture.
I thought I had a reasonable grasp of church architectural styles and the way they help you decode the narrative of a building's history and heritage. But Brixworth's Saxon origins, its use of Roman materials and liturgical traditions, overturned a lot of these notions and left me struggling to understand how my story now needed amending.
I walked through and around the building and picked up a leaflet full of information that required more time than I had at my disposal for we were hungry, the day was cold and the siren song of the village pub meal, increasingly attractive. I bought a couple of booklets in the church and wrenched my velcro-desire to understand away from the place.
A few days later we were back at the Cancer Centre at QEH to get feedback on my latest (end of the second three cycles) CT scan. We had a story in our heads before we met the oncologist as to what course this meeting would take. The first scan had shown shrinkage of the tumours and in some cases rendered them too small to be detectable. With the continuing commitment to monitoring the nutritional quality of my diet, our 'silver bullet', this second-period scan would show further shrinkage. We had begun to allow ourselves to think about asking whether it would be possible to come off the drugs for a period of time or at least reduce the dosage and thereby the tiresome and sometimes painful side effects.
It didn't work out like that.
The radiologist's report indicated general stability with some minor growth in a couple of nodules. Our oncologist insisted that, I needn't worry, that there was no question at this stage of my being taken off the current drug because of a decline in its efficacy. We were reassured that this was the usual pattern, that the first scan would show shrinkage and the second stability, that the growth may be explained by the scan taking a section through a wider part of the nodules, that most patients only remain on my drug for a year, that there were other drugs available, that there was nothing that need cause undue concern.
This was like the Chairman of the Football Club Board giving reassurances that the manager's job was safe. We had no idea that the team's results could be viewed as poor.
After leaving the consulting room we struggled to make sense of what had been said. To put it simply; we were in shock. The narrative we had in mind had been overturned and we probed at our recall of the consultant's words again and again in an attempt to decode them.
I have read and re-read the booklets on Brixworth church; its story and the way it exemplifies the Saxon style of Romanitas, replicating the Christian architecture of the mother church in Rome. I have inched towards a new understanding of a long history.
Something of the same process has happened in coming to terms with the news about the CT scan. It just takes time to get things into perspective, a new perspective.
