Keep calm and carry on.

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed a small design amendment to Alright Tit. Yep, that one up there – the new, pink addition to the banner. Lovely, innit? Lovely and necessary, I think. Because, let’s be honest, while ‘the frustrating, life-altering, sheer bloody pain-in-the-arse inconvenience of getting breast cancer at 28’ is correct in that it’s the reason this blog came about in the first place, it’s also a bit outdated now, since I’m no longer 28 (sniff!) and no longer have breast cancer (huzzah!). And so the ‘…and blogging beyond The Bullshit at 30’ line, I’m sure you’ll agree, is a much-needed clarification. Good. Glad we got that sorted.

Back in the Bullshit days, I had naively assumed that I’d bring this blog to an end at this point, exactly a year after my diagnosis, all finished and done with and tied up neatly in a bow, as though I were checking breast cancer off some imaginary to-do list. But actually, when it came to it, calling a halt to blogging on 17 June 2009 would have felt like walking out of the match after 45 minutes. It’d have left you with half a story. And a one-all draw at that, without even the beauty of an injury-time fightback and a flick through the programme over a half-time Bovril.

See, as much as I want to move past The Bullshit, there are numerous reasons to keep blogging about it. Chiefly, because it helps me make sense of it all. And since I’ve stopped seeing Mr Marbles, Alright Tit has been my therapy (albeit without the uncomfortable silences). Plus, blogging has become my drug of choice (which kinda makes you my dealers, you stinking heathens), and when I haven’t done it for a week or so, along come the same kind of withdrawal symptoms that I used to get when I hadn’t been to the hospital for a few days.

Then, of course, there’s the fact that, what with  The C-Word soon to be released in all good book shops [*cheesy thumbs-up*], I can’t exactly stop talking about the very thing I’m trying to promote. (Yeah – sorry, publishers, but I’ve decided that I’m now going to blog about Sgt Pepper instead, so if anyone has any questions about the book, can they please be cat-related. Ta.) And finally because, like it or not, breast cancer just can’t be boxed off into a neat little year. Though I’m no longer required to have chemotherapy or radiotherapy, my treatment continues in the form of daily hormone therapy – and will do for at least another four years.

The nice thing now, though, is that there’s more to talk about than the altogether shittier stuff of having surgery, losing my hair, feeling like crap and upsetting my family. There’s the life beyond The Bullshit: the beauty of normality, the not-so-regular visits with my favourite doctors, the excitement of the book (only £5.99, too… talk about a steal – you can’t even get a chippy tea for that) and the increasingly baffling reality of being menopausal at 30. Thus if I’m going to stick to my self-imposed brief of being honest about this whole shebang, I reckon it would be dishonest to give anyone the impression that my experience of The Bullshit is over. And so doing as I’d planned when I wrote my first post, and rolling the closing credits on Alright Tit last year – or even now – would have left something of a loose end; the cancer-blogging equivalent of a gold-filled getaway coach balancing precariously on the edge of a cliff. And you thought I was only supposed to blog the bloody breast off…

Hm, on second thought, perhaps I’ll get my coat after all.