“I WAS thinking why did I do all this? I had no intention. You’re not thinking about writing a book when you think you’re going to die.”

Sylvia Patterson, music journalist, daughter of Perth, breast cancer survivor, is sitting in her “kitchen of joy” in London telling me about why she decided to write a book about the last few years of her life. A book about the fear, the pain, the humiliation and, yes, the odd moments of happiness that marked out her life as someone being treated for cancer. 

Happiness might be the last thing you would expect from Same Old Girl, Patterson’s account of her diagnosis of a life-threatening illness late in 2019 and the subsequent treatment she received, including chemo and surgery. And then there was the subsequent diagnosis of neutropenic sepsis (a condition she’d never heard of before). And I haven’t even mentioned a certain global pandemic.

But reading Same Old Girl is to be reminded that there can still be laughter in the dark. It shouldn’t be a surprise. Patterson is one of the great comic writers of the last quarter century, whether writing for Smash Hits or The Observer. Her previous book I’m Not With the Band was a delight and, despite everything, Same Old Girl has similar qualities, albeit that it is more concerned with mammograms and mortality than Kylie Minogue and Madonna. (Both get a mention, though.)

The Herald: Sylvia with Pulp's Jarvis CockerSylvia with Pulp's Jarvis Cocker (Image: free)

But back to the question we came in on. Why write it at all? It’s because, Patterson hopes, it might help others who are going through the same thing.

“Once I was told I was treatable I thought, ‘OK, I’ve got to go into this thing called ‘the process’ and I don’t know what that means. And I thought how can I be at this age having watched people actually much younger than me - my friends, my peers, my colleagues - die from this disease, not knowing what it means. Why is it in the dark? Why is it in a shadowy corner over there? That’s really weird. So I suppose I was beginning to think I wish I had known more. Because it’s the not knowing that kills you.”

Having spent more time than I ever wanted on oncology wards when my late wife Jean was going through treatment for the same disease, I can vouch for the authenticity of Patterson’s account, but Same Old Girl is not just a hospital memoir. It’s also about how life changes with age and about how we change as people. It’s about friendship and “implant envy” and teenage diaries and Patterson’s love of snooker.

And, in passing, it’s about the changing nature of the music industry (and the music media). It starts at a Gerry Cinnamon gig in Aberdeen and ends more or less at a memorial party in Perth’s Civil Service Club that becomes a huge communal singalong. (If you’re not grinning when you read about it, well, frankly, there’s no hope for you.)

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But from the moment she notices that there is something wrong with her right nipple on page two, Patterson never shies away from the reality of what she subsequently goes through, no matter how painful or embarrassing. Even “bathroom humiliations”, she reminds me. There is a sequence in the book in which she doesn’t make it to the toilet in time “because all your basic functions are out the window.” 

And yet Patterson found humour in the situation. “It had never happened to me before in my life and I was sitting there with my hastily washed pyjama bottoms limply over the edge of the visitor’s seat and the nurse is coming to bring me some proper jammies. And my buddy Lisa who had lost her husband of 44 to pancreatic cancer, she pinged me. My buddies ping me all the time. And I thought, ‘Right, that was so bad this morning that I’m going to sit here and do everything in my power to make my pal laugh because she’s been through the worst and she’s asking me how I’m doing. So I’m not going to give her any misery story. Boo hoo here I am incarcerated.’

“I spelled it out with the deliberate intention of just making my pal laugh. And she pinged back ‘Oh God, how awful. I hope you don’t mind but I just LOLed, I really LOLed.’ 

“And I thought, ‘Do you know what? If I ever write about any of this there’s a fair chance I could actually make this quite funny.’ And I think that’s quite a Scottish way to be.”

There’s a joy in seeing the pleasure Patterson takes in telling me this story from her kitchen - the one she treated herself to after she had come through her treatment. Here is Patterson the storyteller, not Patterson the patient. 

To be fair, though, her time being a patient doesn’t sound like much fun. “You don’t realise how much you use your tongue when you are speaking until it is absolutely obliterated with ulcerated sores,” she tells me at one point. “You’ve just got to shut yourself completely down. I just have to sit here and wait for this to stop. As the doctor said I was particularly vulnerable to that, which could well have been because of the years of smoking the fags. Who knows?”
We take normality for granted, I suggest. And sometimes we need to be reminded that dull, everyday normality is perfectly fine.

“It’s absolutely true. The mundane everyday. To just see my friends and have a laugh and possibly a glass of wine. And being able to walk more than 200 yards because I’ve eaten so little. It’s a big cliche, but the massive things are the little things.”

Work was a distraction during all of this. She even ghost wrote the memoir of Tyler James, a lifelong friend to Amy Winehouse.

“It was something to consume my time other than thinking, ‘Can I have anything decent to eat today?’” she admits. 

“It was a massive distraction from all that miserable stuff because there wasn’t any other work to do unfortunately. I’m a music journalist and the last music magazine that I worked for was Q and that folded because of Covid in the summer of 2020. It didn’t last long into Covid. The whole music industry shut down so therefore I would have had absolutely no work whatsoever because there was nothing happening in my industry. Tyler was similarly incarcerated in a different way in a barn in Ireland.  

“I couldn't go out of the house because it was dangerous out there. I was an ‘NHS vulnerable’. But I was able to do that work by walking up and down the balcony and then stepping in the kitchen transcribing and trying to get this together.”

The industry she has reported on since the 1980s is not the same as it was. “I think it has been true to say for a long time that music isn’t at the centre of youth culture anymore. I know quite a lot of young people. They love their music, but the music is not necessarily of their time. Some of them are Beatles people, some of them are really obsessed with the eighties. I see a new trend now in some of my acquaintances' children. Their teenagers are rediscovering the nineties and dressing like Justine out of Elastica.

“It’s never been the case for youth culture before that you can be anything from any decade in history. It was definitely the internet that changed absolutely everything.

“And that’s OK, I think. It’s just completely different and the young are far more interested in streaming TikTok videos. People are more interested in becoming an influencer than a pop star. And no wonder because there ain't no money in the pop game anyway.”

We talk about another breast cancer survivor, Kylie, someone I suggest who has been through the fire and come through the other side determined to bring joy. 

“It took a long time for her to accept herself in many ways,” Patterson, who has interviewed her on more than one occasion, suggests. “She didn’t know who she was for a long time. For her to be so real these days and it’s all glitter and glory, but she will talk about the dark times. She could have died.”

How has this experience changed her, I ask Patterson? When she was in remission, I say, my late wife became an even more concentrated version of herself.

“I think there is absolute truth in that. You become more conscious of everything and everything that matters to you. Even yesterday … It was a beautiful day here and I was out in the park and it was the blossomiest of all blossomy spring days and I was standing under the blossomy trees. ‘Boo hoo, it is so beautiful.’ I’m taking many pictures trying to get the perfect view. Just being a massive hippy. 

“I know that I am. And sometimes it can be a great failing in life. I’ve been told I’m not cynical enough. I can be too much of a romantic, but I don’t care.

“I think the only thing that will save the world is if we all were a bit more of a massive hippy. I totally believe the world would be a significantly better place than it is today. 

“So, yeah, I think you become more aware of, ‘Don’t f*** up the good stuff, cherish your friends and your family. Make time.’ Time is the most important thing, time is the most precious thing, is it not? So do not waste it. 

“But I also don’t feel in as much of a hurry. What was I in such a massive hurry for? To do what exactly? 

“So, I think you’re more conscious of what you are doing with this commodity called time. It’s running out for all of us.”
It is. But there are worse ways of spending it than in the company of Patterson, on the page or in person. 

It’s spring. The trees are coming into leaf. Life is blossoming. Begin afresh.

 

Same Old Girl by Sylvia Patterson is published by Fleet, priced £20. Available now.




 

Pic credit Suki Handa