We left home at 7 am Sunday morning in thick snow. After ten miles, I was tempted to turn back as we had my eight-month-old granddaughter Éloise with us in the car. But we were right to press on, as very soon the snow turned into rain and the roads cleared. We arrived at the Royal Marsden Sutton well in time for our ten o’clock bus to the Royal Marsden Chelsea, giving us a starting time for the walk of around 11.45. I packed Éloise into our borrowed BabyBjorn, and my wife Claudia readied the pram for sleeping times en route (Éloise is rising eight months old). Then the rains began. And followed us through the entire march (with occasional breaks).

We had a splendid time - damp but happy. Éloise behaved superbly well, and spent about a third of the walk in her pram and the rest strapped to my chest either looking out, or when she was very tired, snuggled in. By the end of the march I was definitely starting to feel something in my left foot (the BabyBjorn and an 8 kilogram baby does cause one to walk slightly differently from normal). When we eventually arrived home I found a blister on the sole of my left foot the size of an oatcake. Hey ho. Cue two days of hobbling around the house.

But it was all so well worth it. It was wonderful to see all the walkers in their panoply of rain gear, team gear and assorted signage. Everybody was walking for somebody. And it’s that that the made the day so special. As someone who has been followed by the Royal Marsden for upwards of twenty years now, I’m very proud indeed of the loyalty engendered by my hospital. A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to be shown around the new Oak Centre for Children and Young People, and also the new Centre for Molecular Pathology - all largely paid for by charitable donation. These are both marvellous accomplishments, and all credit must go to the team at the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity, who have done so much to make the Royal Marsden the internationally renowned centre of excellence it is today.

Well, we’re off on the 14 mile Royal Marsden Cancer Charity Walk tomorrow. The only thing I wasn’t expecting is that we are now taking my eight month old granddaughter, Éloise, with us! Could be interesting. And guess what? When I picked her up from her mother’s I forgot to bring her Baby Bjorn. Life is a challenge, isn’t it? So it’s pram and carrying. For fourteen miles. Aaargghhhh.

When we first started collecting for the walk I chose a reasonably low target of £600, fearful that we would never make it. In the event people have been incredibly generous, and we’ve raised more than £1400 so far.  Should anyone want to donate to a wonderful charity (90% of all cancer nurses working in British hospitals are trained by the RM), here is our Just Giving page. Thank you.

http://www.justgiving.com/The-Priester-Reading-Family

I have an eight and a half month old Maine Coon kitten called Beachy Hodge, who already tips the scale at upwards of fifteen pounds and stretches four foot from nose to tip of tail. Beachy is the Mexican for cat or pussy (sic), and Hodge was the name of Dr Samuel Johnson’s cat, immortalised in the following passage from Boswell’s Life.

‘Nor would it be just, under this head, to omit the fondness which he showed for animals which he had taken under his protection. I never shall forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat: for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature. I am, unluckily, one of those who have an antipathy to a cat, so that I am uneasy when in the room with one; and I own, I frequently suffered a good deal from the presence of this same Hodge. I recollect him one day scrambling up Dr. Johnson’s breast, apparently with much satisfaction, while my friend smiling and half-whistling, rubbed down his back, and pulled him by the tail; and when I observed he was a fine cat, saying, ‘Why yes, Sir, but I have had cats whom I liked better than this;’ and then as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance, adding, ‘but he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.’

Later, Boswell tells of another episode:

‘This reminds me of the ludicrous account which he gave Mr Langton, of the despicable state of a young Gentleman of good family. ‘Sir, when I heard of him last, he was running about town shooting cats.’ And then in a sort of kindly reverie, he bethought himself of his own favourite cat, and said, ‘But Hodge shan’t be shot; no, no, Hodge shall not be shot.’

My own Hodge is clearly the equal of Dr Johnson’s paragon, but an unfortunate thing happened to him the other day. We possess two cat flaps, situated at either end of the house. I have upgraded one to the ’small dog/large cat’ variety - I have yet to upgrade the other from that used by my late feline companion, and Hodge’s predecessor, Beachy Bede (named, of course, after the Venerable Bede). It remains resolutely XL, rather than the clearly needed XXXL.

Well, on this occasion, Hodge was coming in from the back garden using the, shall we call it, smaller, cat flap. He was in a hurry, as, still a tom, he tends to get chased away by the local neutered queens, who have unfond memories of a certain ginger tom (now sadly deceased) who used to try it on with them before their fall from maternal possibility. Hodge, though still a kitten in all but size, clearly hits their top note.

Well, he was hurrying to such an extent (okay, let’s call it ‘bolting’) that he threw open the cat flap and launched himself through it like a submariner through an escape hatch. But, as with Gerard Hoffnung’s unfortunate bricklayer, gravity got the better of the cat flap, and before the full four foot length of Hodge’s overcarriage could safely pass though it, the trap shut, locking Hodge’s tail in what clearly appeared to him to be the jaws of an angry queen. The first my wife and I knew of it was the most dreadful caterwauling, that sounded, for all the world, like a cat fighting itself (and having considerable success in so doing). We ran to the scene to find Hodge curled on his back, his tail firmly locked in the jaws of the cat flap, and beating at himself with his paws. The problem was compounded by the fact that he was so incensed that something had bitten his tail and was continuing to hold it in a vice of steel that he wouldn’t let us near him, but kept on howling and twisting like a ball of Texas tumbleweed in a snowstorm. After being scratched a couple of times, I was quietly musing on taking a swing at Hodge’s tail with my machete when my wife - always good in a crisis - hammered the flap open with one of my thumbsticks. Hodge launched himself across the room, still imagining that he was being pursued by the local MILF. We caught up with him in the kitchen near his, yes, well, water feature (the equivalent of a Maine Coon’s security blanket). Readers, you will be pleased to know that Hodge’s world class tail was still intact after the incident, and that he seemed little the worse for wear (although undoubtedly emotionally scarred and forever afterwards jut a little chary of invisible feline females with large teeth).

End of tale.

PS: There is an excellent statue to Dr Johnson’s Hodge (with oyster) outside his master’s house at 17 Gough Square, London. Our Hodge will one day have his own statue too, probably involving a cat flap.

This morning, I heard that the wife of a great friend had just died. When I phoned my wife at work to tell her, she told me an uncanny thing. This morning, driving to work, at exactly the time our friend had died, she had received a very strong image of her in her head - she had felt troubled about her, and anxious, and decided that she would talk to me about it later this evening when she got back home, and that we would ask after her and see how she was doing. So what I am saying - and what I have said many times before - is this. That there are more things on this earth that we don’t understand, than what we do. And that this is as it should be.

A few days ago I was speaking to another friend who sometimes talks to the dead. He said he had been praying for me, and one of his voices had spoken to him, very clearly, using the words: ‘We know him here.’ When he told me those words, I felt a total sense of familiarity. Yes, of course they know me. I have been there. And I will be there again.

Those of us who have lived with death for many years - those of us who have died, and then returned - and those who have accompanied such people during their almost dying (my wife with me) - seem connected in some way hard to fathom to what I can only call a parallel dimension. It’s not by any volition of our own - it’s not by any desire to know secrets or to claim any knowledge whatsoever about anything - it simply is. There are moments when we are spoken to. And my wife experienced such a moment this morning. And I think it should be recorded.

I’ve been hard at work on my new novel of recent months, so I’ve rather fallen behind in the blog department, I’m afraid. Many apologies there. I know visitors to my website like to have a new blog to read now and then, and I shall attempt to be more productive in the future. This time around I’d like to ask for your help for a very deserving cause.

You may not know it, but I have been followed by the Royal Marsden Hospital in Fulham, London, for more than twenty years now. I fell ill with my first cancer in 1988, and was followed in France - most specifically Purpan, Rangeuil, and Claudius Regaud hospitals in Toulouse - for close on five years. My cancer was declared terminal in 1992, but, fortunately for me, my French doctors took a punt on where the cancer might have sprung from, and the punt proved correct. I was then passed on by my French radiologist (who had trained at the Royal Marsden) to the RM Sutton, and then, later, to the RM Fulham. The RM Fulham picked up another cancer, after eight years of follow-up visits, for which I have undergone treatment for the past twelve or so years. So the Royal Marsden has, to all intents and purposes, been keeping me (very much) alive. So I owe it. And all the people who work there.

On 17 March 2013 my wife Claudia and I will be taking part in the Royal Marsden Charity Walk, which covers the fourteen miles between the two Royal Marsden Hospitals. I’d be very grateful if any of you who feel that the Royal Marsden does brilliant work (90% of all cancer nurses in the UK train there) to please go to our site at Just Giving, and make a donation. Any amount at all would be most appreciated. And it goes straight to the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity. Here’s the link:

http://www.justgiving.com/The-Priester-Reading-Family.

Thanks for this. In my next blog I promise to get back to literary matters.

I’m delighted to say that my novel, The Music-Makers, will be available on Kindle for the very first time this autumn/fall. The Music-Makers is set in England, Italy and France, and takes in the May 1968 riots in Paris, 1950s Cornwall, and contemporary England, France and Italy. It’s a love story with complications, and I can’t pretend that there are neither personal revocations nor autobiographical elements to it. Readers, however, will have to tease these out for themselves, and I wish them joy of it. I enjoyed writing it, and would love to see it filmed, as it covers a great many romantic variations and many hedonistic delights. A more mature Fifty Shades of Grey? Please decide for yourselves. You heard it here first.

I’ve just noticed that my novel, The Nostradamus Prophecies, has just hit the Number 1 spot in the Kindle Top 100 Crime, Thrillers & Mystery Bestsellers list, ahead of Jeffrey Archer, Peter James, Lee Child and David Baldacci. I’m over the moon. The book came out three years ago, so to know that so many people are still enjoying (and even better, buying it) is most gratifying indeed! On the main Kindle list my book is at Number 6, behind five erotic novels, including the Fifty Shades series. What does that say about public taste? I wish I knew. But it’s a red letter day for me and the book anyway. I really hope a lot of new readers like The Nostradamus Prophecies enough to go for The Mayan Codex and The Third Antichrist too, to complete the series.

There are many advantages to living in towns. Entertainment. Access. Convenience. Excitement. The elusive joys of communal living. But there is one thing that’s done better in the country. I’m talking about our festivals. In recent weeks I’ve been to the Dinton (Wiltshire) Jazz Festival, the Ashley Wood Acoustic Music Festival, and the Chalke Valley History Festival. I never felt crowded out. I never had to fight for a seat. I didn’t have problems parking. I saw world class performers in perfect settings. People had both the time and the inclination to talk. Best of all, I heard a major young talent - Fyfe Dangerfield of The Guillemots. And in the intimate setting of an age old barn, without loudspeakers, without mud, and without any grief. I love towns, don’t get me wrong. But there are simply too many people in them.

I grew up in the South of France. First in Juan Les Pins, and then, later, my parents bought an old farmhouse and twenty acres of land a few kilometres from Figanieres, in Provence. I went to school in England, but at the end of every term I would fly home to Nice airport and my father would pick me up in his deux chevaux and take me to the casino. I was looked after by the barmen and the off duty croupiers while he gambled. He’d made sure beforehand to buy me a good selection of French comics - Mandrake, The Phantom, Tintin, Asterix, Lucky Luke - because he never knew if he would have enough money to get us back home, let alone fill the car up, and at least this way I would be occupied. He’d also have a haircut. That way he could claim he had something back for the day if it all went pear-shaped.

I love France. I love the smell of it, and the sound of it, and the look of it. I love the French language, and the French people. My father is buried in Figanieres cemetery and every now and then I go back to inspect the little bit of land we still have left and to pay him a visit. The night he died (New Year’s Eve 1980) he had won a thousand pounds in the casino and I used this to buy his coffin. It would have amused him to know that the casino had contributed to his funeral costs.

It’s for this reason that I rejoice at the news that a French publisher has just bought the rights to my Antichrist Trilogy, and intends to publish all three books over the next couple of years. The books are largely about French people, and the French way of thinking. We are told - and I believe this to be true - that France is one of the hardest markets for an Englishman to crack. Especially if he has the temerity to write about the French. Well I hope my background partially obviates this disadvantage.

How my beautiful father would have loved to know that I now have six or seven books out in France. He lived there for the last twenty years of his life and never mastered the language. But he loved the place. Best of all would have been if I could have settled him, the night he died, into his sailing boat - the Nymphaea - and shunted it out into the Golfe de Lyon with a good tailwind and a few gallons of paraffin. He was the sort of man who ought to have had a Viking send off.