Anyone who knows me well will be aware that I am an Atheist,

but this has not always been the case.  These days I try to understand life through the lens of science, but at one point in my life I was such a devout believer that I seriously considered becoming a priest and dedicating my life to God.

I suppose that my journey into Christianity began as a small boy.  We were not a very religious family but I know that my Mum has always had her faith.  Apart from weddings & funerals, I don’t recall my Dad ever going to church but my sisters and I were sent to Sunday school to learn about God & Jesus.

When we moved to the village of Countesthorpe in 1969 I went to what was then called ‘Linden Junior’, a Church of England school, which meant that religion was very much part of the teaching. Each day we would all sit cross legged on the floor of the main hall and listen to bible readings and we would sing hymns with slightly dodgy lyrics about spreading our seeds and purple headed mountains, although the ‘double entendre’ was lost on me back then!

Religious studies suffered the same fate as every other subject, a complete lack of interest on my part.

One memorable parents evening (well memorable for my Mum & Dad!), my parents had to listen to my exasperated teacher announce “the problem is that Stuart is bone idle, just bone idle” and she was correct….oops! 

Eventually I moved up to Countesthorpe’s newly built ‘Leysland High School’ (very recently demolished after a tragically short life for a school in my opinion) and religious studies became optional and I of course immediately opted out.

As a lad who had just turned into a teenager, my interests switched firmly to the opposite sex!  I was never really one of the ‘cool kids’ so I employed laughter to try and attract girls, becoming the class clown, performing my Alvin Stardust impersonations on the desks (you may have to Google him) and pretending that I had a group of performing flea’s in a matchbox…..hey, it worked, don’t knock it!

A few years passed with no religion in my life apart from my Dad’s regular use of the word ‘Christ’ whenever he was trying to do a job around the house or car and it wasn’t going to plan, so basically, every time he did a job. I’m sure by this point in my story it will come as no surprise that what lead me back to the church was…..yup, chasing girls.

My great friend Andy announced that his Dad was involved in setting up a village youth club.

It sounded awesome; games, parties and girls! The catch? You had to go to church. A small price to pay in my mind.  So I started to meet Andy and head to church for the 10:00am family service.  This meant that I could also now go to the youth club each week to find my next ex-girlfriend.

As an aside, can I take the opportunity to apologise to all of the girls who had the misfortune to be my girlfriend at this point in my life.  The biggest ‘cop out’ line that lads use is “ it’s not you, it’s me” but I can assure you that it really was me, you were all sweet, kind and pretty and I was a typically selfish, hormone fuelled teenager…well, ‘git’, to be frank!

Eventually, after a few months of going to church, not only was I becoming increasingly involved in the church community but I was finding myself drawn to the teachings of Jesus.  I have never believed that the bible was the literal word of God as most of the events depicted and written about in the bible supposedly happened decades before. Rather I saw them as allegorical, a way of passing on the message of Christianity in an easy-to-understand way at a period in history where most of the world’s population was illiterate.

Regardless, these stories and the way our Vicar used them had a profound impact on me and I wanted to know more.  The opportunity to be confirmed came along and I really enjoyed the classes that lead up to my confirmation.  The first time that I took Holy Communion was very moving.

Around this time, I started to become increasingly involved with working backstage at ‘The Little Theatre’ in Leicester in part due to passing my driving test.

Through a combination of my church activities and the theatre, I was asked if I would be one of two ‘Follow Spot’ operators on a production of ‘Joseph and His Amazing Technicolour Dream Coat’ which was to be performed inside Leicester Cathedral. When I arrived for the technical rehearsal, there were two very high scaffold towers built for the ‘Follow Spots’ and when on the platform on the top of the towers you could touch the Cathedral roof, they were very high towers! Talk about getting closer to God!

Mounted on each tower platform was an enormous ‘Super Trouper’ follow spot (yes like in the Abba song) which had been hired for the show. For most of the show everything was fine but when the pharaoh character does his ‘Elvis’ style rock song, we were asked to wave the Follow Spots around like search lights.  You will have to take my word for it when I tell you that a ‘Super Trouper’ creates a lot of swaying on a scaffold tower if you are dumb enough to wave it violently around and I really felt like I had a guardian angel to stop it all crashing down.  Oh yes, I also got myself my next ex-girlfriend whilst working on Joseph.

My time was now split between the theatre and church (I maybe should have allocated a little time for my ‘O’ level revision too) so I was a busy boy.  I loved Countesthorpe St Andrews which at that time still had its traditional pews, a lovely classic interior and Anglo-Saxon exterior. Our Vicar was a lovely chap called Brian Davies and he had an aptitude for engaging with young people and making the church relevant. I still remember the warm, comforting and happy feeling that I always experienced when in that church. It had an amazing community and some of the special events like Easter and Midnight Mass at Christmas were just fantastic. The feeling of belonging was very powerful and I genuinely felt that God would dominate my life.

A Negative Revelation.

In the late 1970’s a series of famines in Africa began to make the news, culminating a few years later with ‘Live Aid’.  I watched with increasing sadness at the images of starving people, their spirits broken, cradling dead babies, they looked confused and frightened, trying to make sense of the horror.  Aid agencies struggled to feed these people, whilst the leaders of these countries continued to live in luxury with the wealth stolen from their population.

Being a Christian, I of course prayed for these people, prayed for them to get help and be saved, but as weeks turned into months my prayers turned into questions.  Why was God letting these innocent men, women and children suffer?  Why was he allowing their greedy leaders to continue to thrive off of the misery of others?

I asked questions but got no answers.

Then one Sunday I was kneeling to pray but I couldn’t bring myself to close my eyes.  I didn’t pray and worst of all I felt spiritually dead inside.  The church suddenly felt alien and the words of our Vicar felt hollow.  I fought these feelings for a while but eventually I knew that my faith was gone.

I explained how I felt to my parents who were saddened but understanding and I switched my attention completely to the theatre and dropped out of church life entirely.  I discovered later that our Vicar had come to see my parents to see if I could be brought back into the church family but eventually my Mum and Dad were able to convince him that my decision was final.

Like my father, apart from weddings (including my own) funerals and christenings, I didn’t return to church and I certainly didn’t pray.

Whilst I found frustration in the concept of an all-powerful god that would take no action to help people, I found comfort in the randomness of a science-based universe in which perfectly good people could be subjected to perfectly awful things for no greater reason than ‘shit happens’, and that life was cruel or kind completely at random.

Facing mortality

I’ve come to realise that many people who find themselves in the same position as me, where you are faced with your mortality, either find God for the first time or return to their faith.  This has not happened to me; I have put my faith and trust in medical science to get me through this.

It might then come as a surprise that unlike many of my fellow atheists, I do not get annoyed when people tell me that they are praying for me. If someone who genuinely believes in God, cares about me enough to ask god to look after me and keep me safe, I see that as an act of love and deep friendship, and I get a lot of strength from this.

And what of Jesus?

So, if I no longer believe in God, have I turned my back completely on Jesus? Well, no actually.  I no longer believe he was the son of God as portrayed in the bible, but I do believe that he existed, or at least that he is based on a real person. I think he was a man who grew up to believe that it was his duty, his calling, to fight for social justice for the poor and powerless. Like many who have done the same in the centuries since, he fought so hard and with such passion that he became a threat to the wealthy and powerful and paid with his life.  He was silenced but became an inspiration to others to continue that fight. He died on that cross, not for our sins, but for justice, kindness and love and in this regard, his teachings are as relevant today as they ever were, if not more so.

Without faith, how do you face death?

If I don’t believe in God and an afterlife or heaven, how do I look at the prospect of death?

I believe in the scientific explanation that all of the matter that exists in the universe was created in the ‘Big Bang’ and since matter can only be transformed and not destroyed, we and everything around us are made from matter created in that event.

The physical matter that is me existed before I did as a self-aware entity.  I was unaware of anything before it all became me and when I die, I will go back to where I was before, unaware.  I may cease to exist as a single entity but all of the matter that I am made from will carry on, changed but still around.

If I am correct then when I pass on, I will drift off into the long sleep of oblivion.

But what if I am wrong?

If I am wrong then when I die, I will be re-united with all of my family and friends that went before me and I will be happy because I will know that someday, I will see the friends and family that I have left behind, and that’s not a bad way to lose an argument, is it?

Not bad at all!

Stu x

The Brain Tumour charity has been a great help to me since my diagnosis. They have a podcast which is always of interest to people with tumours and their families and also have the ‘Brian App’ ( yep that is spelt correctly, it is ‘Brian’) which offers advice and the ability to track your symptoms, appointments and treatments.

My Brainstem Playlist.

Since my diagnosis I have found myself looking at life differently including reflecting on my past life. Music has always been important to me so I decided to put together a playlist that includes songs that I love, songs that remind me of places and times in my life, and tracks that I have discovered more recently that help me to keep positive. I hope it’s something that you might enjoy too and always play in ‘Shuffle’ mode.

I always prided myself on my navigation abilities.

I started my sales career well before the arrival of satellite navigation and so belong to the generation of sales people who carried a spectacular map collection in the boot of the car.  Any self-respecting rep’s set of maps included a gaggle of ordinance survey maps, A to Z Town maps and most importantly for ‘Road Warriors’, a ‘Little Chef’ map of the UK.

In the late 80’s, one of my sales managers loved ‘Little Chef’ restaurants so much that he issued all of his sales team with a copy of the map and he wouldn’t even bother to tell you what town you were meeting in for a day out together, he would just say “Meet you at number 208”.  No day out was the same unless it started with a ‘Little Chef’ Olympic feast breakfast and enough free refill coffee to keep you awake for a week.  Such a shame they are all gone now, mostly replaced by Greggs, McDonalds and KFC.

My equivalent of satnav back then was a list of sequential directions written in my own little shorthand on a notepad which was clipped to a suction mount holder stuck to my windscreen, and this served me well for many years.  Eventually though, I started to notice that I kept getting lost.  I couldn’t understand it, and it rapidly got worse.

The cause finally became evident in a moment of ‘butt-cheek clenching’ terror!

I was hurrying to an appointment just outside of Hemel Hempstead, in fact it was my first visit to Hemel. I came thrashing down a dual carriage way when at the last minute I saw this strange road sign which was a large circle with six smaller circles around it.  However, I saw it so late that by the time I worked out that it was a huge roundabout, I was seconds from ploughing through the middle of it, which would likely have resulted in collapsed front wheels and a large skid-mark in the centre of the roundabout along with my underpants!

As I came to a halt (and watched a cloud of my tyre smoke drift past) I looked around completely confused by this monster of a roundabout and why I had not seen the sign until the last moment.

I must have circled the entire thing four times before finding the road that I needed, and arrived at the customers late and stressed, but at least I realised that the reason for my navigation problems was my eyesight.  I was almost passing signs before I could read them!

I decided to get my sight checked and so booked myself an eye test. At the opticians I went through all of the usual checks, and with the test done, the optician sat and considered his notes for a moment before announcing with a chuckle “Well Mr Hannah, when corrected, you have great eyesight, but you wouldn’t get me in a car with you without glasses”,

I duly parted with a stack of cash and drove very carefully until my glasses were ready to collect.

The day of collection finally arrived and the optician fitted my new glasses and held up a mirror for me to inspect them.  This proved to be a bit disappointing as I had hoped to see a kind of Michael Cain sophistication reflected in the mirror but my reflection looked exactly like Scott Adams’ cartoon character ‘Dilbert’.

Anyway, because of that, I left the opticians with the glasses still in their case in my pocket.  I was wandering through Argos in Leicester (using it as a short cut to the car park) when I decided to put them on.  Big mistake, the world snapped into such sharp focus that I actually lost my balance and started staggering around.

I found the level of visual detail overwhelming, a new clarity of vision.

Same glasses, a new perspective

I experienced another moment of clarity of vision the morning after my diagnosis.

As shocking as the news had been, I actually slept really well the night after the doctor’s call. I woke before my wife, so made myself a coffee and sat, looking out of our holiday home patio doors at our deck and the woodland around us.

Everything seemed different, with colours more intense and I felt like I could see more detail than the day before. Looking back, I can only think that subconsciously I was not sure how much longer I would see these things.

I’m normally quite a noisy person, liking music over silence but this morning, I just sat and listened to the soundtrack of the world around me.  The wind was blowing the trees around and was accompanied by the gentle rumble of traffic on the nearby A1. As the mornings were getting darker, I could still see the lights of traffic on the A59, queuing to join it.

Normal people, having a normal morning.  Some would no doubt be grumbling about the traffic, others singing along to the radio and at least one rear view mirror being used to fix makeup!  A normal day, will I ever have one again?

What I realise now is that I am taking in the sights and sounds around me in more depth, almost gorging on these sensory experiences as if trying suddenly to get a greater appreciation of the special nature of ordinary things. As we have travelled around Yorkshire since the diagnosis, I find myself trying to take in every view with as much detail as possible, however the beautiful countryside and the classic architecture of Harrogate just add to my sudden sense of impermanence.

Most of the buildings and all of the countryside existed before me and will be around long after I have gone.

I find that even the most mundane of things can trigger a moment of melancholy at how the ordinary events of the world will carry on without me.  So now I see everything in a new and special way, ‘Life in HD’ you could say.

After a diagnosis like mine, the clutter and trivia of life is cleared away and you are left with only clarity & truth.

Stu x

The Brain Tumour charity has been a great help to me since my diagnosis. They have a podcast which is always of interest to people with tumours and their families and also have the ‘Brian App’ ( yep that is spelt correctly, it is ‘Brian’) which offers advice and the ability to track your symptoms, appointments and treatments.

My Brainstem Playlist.

Since my diagnosis I have found myself looking at life differently including reflecting on my past life. Music has always been important to me so I decided to put together a playlist that includes songs that I love, songs that remind me of places and times in my life, and tracks that I have discovered more recently that help me to keep positive. I hope it’s something that you might enjoy too and always play it in ‘Shuffle’ mode.

Christmas Past

Everyone’s memories of Christmas day when they were young differ and of course it is difficult to know if time has altered your memories of the actual events.  I can however clearly remember how from around 1970, our Christmas day settled into a rigid routine. Honestly, for most of my life, our Christmas day was like the movie ‘Groundhog day’, it just repeated every year.

My sisters and I would of course wake early on Christmas morning and be buzzing with excitement but we had to learn self-control as all we were allowed to do when we got up was to sort our presents into our respective piles until our Dad had finished what he referred to as ‘his ablutions’ and gotten dressed. Christmas for us could only really start when he finally wandered down, by which point we were bouncing off of the walls!

Once we were told we could start, there followed a frenzy of unwrapping, with piles of torn wrapping paper, thrown everywhere, accompanied by lots of excited “thank you”.  Back in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s Mum and Dad didn’t earn a great deal, but they would always try to get us what we wanted, even if it meant them going without, something that I only came to realise in recent years and as hard as my dad could be to live with, I know that he loved us and I am grateful for what I had.

It has become a habit for people to say “oh kids have more fun with the packaging than the toy”, well maybe that is true of some kids but I can tell you that this is not the case when you have just unwrapped a 10” toy Thunderbird 2!

Once the chaos of present unwrapping had subsided Dad would head off to collect our Nan while Mum would begin cooking the Christmas dinner.  She never told us at the time but I’m pretty sure this wasn’t the highlight of her day. Dad would arrive home with his Mum and settle her in front of our TV, which is where she would stay for the whole day apart from when eating dinner.

Then would begin the ‘Sherry Ritual’.  This was the annual argument over what she wanted to drink and went as follows:

Dad: “Mum, would you like a sherry?”

Nan: “Yes please”

Dad: “We have Gin and Tonic as well”

Nan: “Oh well, that would be nice too”

Dad: “So which DO you want”?

Nan: “Either”

Dad: “Oh for Gods sake make up your mind”

Nan: “Sherry”

It always ended with Sherry but still this ritual took place every time!

As soon as Nan was finally settled with her bloody Sherry, Dad would take this as his cue to head off to the Railway Pub in Countesthorpe (conveniently about 200 feet from our first home in the village) to join his mates, all of whom had left at home their long-suffering wives, stuck with unwelcome relatives, uncooked Turkeys and unhelpful children.

Dad would eventually arrive home, shall we say ‘Relaxed out of his face’ for his Christmas dinner.  This had to be served at 14:15 as the pub closed at 14:00 and even Christmas dinner was not allowed to cut into ‘pub time’.  I can’t honestly remember how many pints of beer dad would get through on Christmas day, but you could definitely describe him as ‘mellow’ when he got back.  This usually ensured that the dinner would go smoothly, apart from the year that he managed to knock a full glass of red wine over my Christmas dinner and we had to salvage one for me by everyone else donating parts of theirs.

Full of beer and Turkey, Dad would retire to his favourite chair and be asleep by the time that the opening credits of the Christmas day ‘Bond’ movie ended. As I am writing about the time before VCR’s and DVD’s it was years before I was able to watch a James Bond movie without the accompaniment of a constant and deafeningly loud ‘pig snort’!

By the time dad woke, thirsty and hungry again, it was time for Mum (who had to remain sober until one of us kids learnt to drive) to take my Nan home.  When Mum was back, we would settle down to watch whatever Christmas Special the BBC had on offer (usually Morcombe and Wise) and this was the most time that our family would ever usually spend together and this is probably only because the pub was closed so Dad had to stay at home.

And there you have it, year after year the same, yet I still have good memories of Christmas; kids can filter out the memories that they didn’t like, I guess.

Christmas Present.

The first of these gifts is a gently worsening fatigue in my right arm and leg.  I have been using my running as my way of keeping my fitness up for my surgery, but even though I managed to run 5K parkruns on both Christmas morning and New Year’s Day morning, I am finding the effort required is definitely increasing.

I am also starting to lose sensation in other places now, most noticeably on the back of my head and on the fingertips of my left hand which are significant changes.  The tips of my fingers on the left hand feel as if they are frostbitten and my feet and hands on both sides of my body are colder than the rest of me.

Developing these new symptoms has finally triggered a sense of anxiety in me, which is really annoying as I have managed to be completely calm and upbeat until now.  Lying in bed at night, trying to clear your mind for sleep, they become more noticeable and my thoughts end up focussed on the evident fact that my illness is both progressive and progressing.  Somehow up until now I have been able to avoid facing that fact.

The sensitivity issue has however provided me with one of the funniest moments of recent months that I am sure I will chuckle about for a long time.

I was discussing with my wife, Andrea, the fact that I have almost completely lost feeling in another (rather important) part of my anatomy and I referred to it as ‘my old chap’. A few days later and my wife and I are sitting with one of the two Neurosurgeons that will carry out my operation and after discussing my various symptoms, he summarised and then asked me if I had any other symptoms that we had not yet talked about.

Me: “No I don’t think so”

Andrea: “What about your ‘Old Chap’?

Consultant: Blank Expression

Me: Err

Andrea: Gently turning red in the face!

At this point, under the pressure of the moment my mind blanked on the word ‘Genitals’ and I raced through a list of ultimately worse alternatives including; ‘Man Parts, Wedding Tackle, Meat and Two Veg and The Last Turkey in the Shop’ before finally blurting out “Down Below”!

Consultant: “Hmm OK”? Writes something down.  Please let it be true that this senior Neurosurgeon wrote down ‘Old Chap’?

Christmas Future

I’m really hoping to get my operation date for Marty very soon after I write this, for an operation in January 2022, that is something that will help with my anxiety.  Once my second operation of the year to get Gary out is done (well as much of him as possible) I am desperately hoping to be well enough to spend Christmas 2022 in New Zealand and finally meet our twin Grandchildren.

I have to face the fact that although surgery and treatment can reduce both Marty and Gary, it can never completely get rid of them, so we will be spending every Christmas that I have left with them in the background and if I live long enough, Gary will get me in the end. However, if I can manage 15 to 20 more years, then I will have done well and if Gary is not due to get me in that timescale, then as a man, it’s quite probable that something else will take me out anyway based on the law of averages, so I’m not going to worry too much about ‘Prognosis and Timescales’ so long as when Pathology takes a look at Gary, he turns out to be benign as expected.

I hope you all had a great Christmas and wish a happy new year for you in 2022, and if you are one of the tumour gang, may all your test results be good news!

Stu x

The Brain Tumour charity has been a great help to me since my diagnosis. They have a podcast which is always of interest to people with tumours and their families and also have the ‘Brian App’ ( yep that is spelt correctly, it is ‘Brian’) which offers advice and the ability to track your symptoms, appointments and treatments.

If you can spare even a couple of quid, it would make a big difference to the charity and the people like me that they support.

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My Brainstem Playlist.

Since my diagnosis I have found myself looking at life differently including reflecting on my past life. Music has always been important to me so I decided to put together a playlist that includes songs that I love, songs that remind me of places and times in my life, and tracks that I have discovered more recently that help me to keep positive. I hope it’s something that you might enjoy too.