Aged 57 years, I attended a teachers’ retirement seminar with an organisation that prepares teachers for retirement. Along with an acquaintance, and a group of knackered old teachers, I prepared to enter the next phase of my life and was unprepared to hear that if we were to retire at age 60, statistically, we all had roughly five and a half years to live and if we retired at 65, we had two and a half years to live. The same white-haired man told us to prepare financially for the short term, by buying new white goods; for the medium term by planning financially and for the long term by factoring in the costs of health care. I couldn’t see the point of investing any lump sums or replacing white goods if we were all likely to die within a few years. Spend your lump sum, having a good time, I thought. I was always waiting for something to go wrong.

A friend, Ian, (four years my senior and never a love interest, was a South East Londoner like me) got the opportunity to give up teaching at 52 years of age. He loved Leeds, learning and Geology. He lived in Outwood where he’d moved to take care of his elderly mum some years before. Aged 58 and recently retired, I’d meet him for a glass of wine at a wine bar, near the Corn Exchange; lunch at the Lebanese restaurant, near the wine bar, and a tour round the (private) Leeds Library to which he belonged. He’d like to guide me to some hidden gem of a place that he’d discovered and was keen to share, wherever we were. We both longed for London; wished we’d never left and we’d fallen into teaching as though falling into some sticky spider’s web from which we were unable to extricate ourselves. Teaching was not our métier. London was lost to us and Leeds was not Bradford. We associated Bradford with mistakes, with obstacles to returning to London and with school. Neither of us wanted to remember school. It didn’t much matter whether it was Leeds or Bradford, though, since we both sounded like Londoners. We moaned, laughed and missed the city of our birth. We compensated by visiting (he showed me Cynthia Payne’s house: a red brick terraced house that looked nothing like I’d imagined a house of ill-repute to look), talking, dreaming of a youth lost and longing, knowing that these unrealistic ramblings were never going to morph into our reality. Diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2018, his ashes are spread on Streatham Common, SE London and, this year, I joined the Leeds Library. It has a resident ghost, I’m told. It’s not Ian.

In May 2021, I was still staying with an 89 year old friend and ex-colleague of ours, with whom I’d stayed since the imposition of lockdown. One Thursday in late April, I attended a vaccination centre in Skipton for my second Covid vaccination. Over the weekend that week I felt a pain in my left breast as I turned over in bed. I poked about in my flesh and found a painful lump the size of a pea, deep inside the left side of my left breast. Anxious, I reread the leaflet, accompanying the Pfizer jab that I’d elected to have administered. The story I told myself was that this could be an inflamed lymph node: a reaction to the jab. That weekend, I could have easily ignored my intuition to call my GP on Monday morning to get the offending lump examined. By Monday afternoon I was seen by a young, female GP who examined me on both sides and, as a precaution, referred me to a specialist. I was seen within a week. The doctor who examined me didn’t think there was anything wrong, either. I had a mammogram, then a scan. A student doctor present, asked about the colours on the screen. I knew there was something wrong when the colour red was mentioned then followed by a hurried biopsy, on the right side, NOT the left, then an interview with the doctor who’d examined me. He repeated the following words six times: “I have to warn you that this doesn’t look at all good”. My eyes gave away my shock. Why else did he repeat those words so often? I had, however, realised that I might never have gone to the doctor had I failed to follow my intuition. “You don’t know how easy it would have been for me to have neglected to have gone to see my GP,” I replied through my mask. I had always got myself into trouble when I’d failed to pay attention to my intuition. “God works in mysterious ways,’ he said. Confirmation of a dangerous form of breast cancer came a week later and then treatment. Chemotherapy at Airedale Hospital; a radioactive injection to determine the location of the sentinel lymph node at Bradford Royal Infirmary; a lumpectomy to remove the debris and surrounding area at Airedale; and, finally, St James’ Hospital (Bexley Wing), where I underwent the radiotherapy phase of treatment for a month; Ibandronic Acid 50mg, daily for three years.

My daughter, Ruth, lives in Lincoln. She gave birth to my grandson, Flynn, just before we went into lockdown. Ian died. So did my friends Tamara (cancer) and Irene (Parkinson’s). Ruth and I are starting a new phase of life and we’re meeting up, periodically, in Leeds, when time allows. We hug outside WH Smith’s at the station; revisit the Leeds Library, the wine bar and the Lebanese. It’s a place where we feel connection, cultural stimuli and where we can sample city life. London isn’t Leeds and Leeds is more than good enough at this end of time, as Ian would say.