Mo Fanning - British writer and comic

Diary

Age before beauty

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Age

Age before beauty makes no sense. If our society valued growing old over looking young, magazines like Best would carry adverts for wrinkle cream not anti-wrinkle cream. Grey pride would be a thing. Paris Fashion Week would major on fleece fabric and loose-fitting slacks with elasticated ankle cuffs.

The other day on a bus, a girl took my breath away. She said, ‘Would you like my seat?’

I’m at that age where if there isn’t gravy, I haven’t had my dinner. Half of my emails offer vouchers for money off thermal nightwear or gadgets to open jam jars. The drugs I take are no longer recreational and I take naps after a challenging sandwich.

Friends insist that with age comes wisdom and serenity, but with each passing year, the urge grows stronger to call local radio shows and moan about parking.

I no longer recognise the music being played in Tesco. My go-to aisle is the one where they sell dented tins, and nothing excites me more than bulk buying. I already own 16 spare toilet rolls and six extra bags of pasta. I was panic buying before it became a thing.

Genuine joy

When stuff falls on the floor, I leave it there. Being able to perform gravity-defying athletic sexual acts is great, but there’s genuine joy in putting down your car keys and finding them straight away.

With online forms, I scroll so far for my year of birth it’s causing hard skin to form. Parts of me have sagged. When I get out of bed, my scrotum hits the floor before my feet.

I don’t get social media. Twitter is like someone put Mein Kampf on shuffle.

Kind people tell me the best is yet to come, that I’m middle-aged. There’s no way I‘ll live another 54 years. Even if I could, I wouldn’t. I’ve bought sticking plasters, and that’s a slippery slope.

Plasters – carpet slippers – death.

Weight loss – simply the BEST

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Best slimming tips

Have you ever stumbled upon a magazine called ‘Best’? You’ll find it in every low-grade supermarket next to the crossword puzzle books. They’re designed to sharpen the mind. ‘Best’ sets out to ruin it.

Reading ‘Best’ is like having your nasty aunty Pat round for tea. It’s sixty pages of fat-shaming, miracle diets and Meghan Markle bitchery, interspersed with motivational stories of women who lost weight by eating tar. Two dry heaves and a dizzy turn later, they’d lost a pound. There’s a problem page. Written by Vanessa Feltz. Who in their right mind takes advice from Vanessa Feltz?

Best having a pop at Meghan again‘Best’ is addictive. I have two settings. Worried for the world and craving cheese, and yet ‘Best’ has me convinced I’ll lose ten pounds in ten days by committing to their good sleep diet. You swig half a pint of Night Nurse before each meal. By the time desert arrives, you’re face-down in a plate of spaghetti.

Most mornings, the man in my mirror looks like something the dog slept on. My body isn’t a temple. It’s a phone … on emergency battery.

Lose weight … change everything

I know I should change my diet. Healthy eating involves more than an ability to refuse doughnuts. We’re talking serious lifestyle changes. Much as I’d like to fit 32-inch jeans, I’m not getting up two hours early each morning to turn a head of cauliflower into couscous for an exciting weekday supper.

I refuse to follow any diet plan where breakfast is two almonds and you get to lick an apple for lunch. You skip dinner to cry at photos of yourself aged 17 in Speedos.

I’ve tried a Fitbit. It was like having the bitchiest of gay best friends on my wrist. Most days, I spend my time counting down the hours until I’m allowed to eat again.

Meditation appealed. I loved being able to call lying down a lifestyle choice. I downloaded a class and put it on, before promptly falling asleep. At three in the morning, I woke starving and ate a whole bag of oven chips. Still frozen.

I’ve become an organ donor. It’s one way to make sure I get to wear slim-fit coffin jeans.

Whatever ‘Best’ wants me or its target market readers to believe, dealing with grief is hard when I can’t even drown my feelings in food.

I’m sorry you’ve lost your mother: they make it sound like I’ve left her in another room

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Farewell Mother

My mother has passed away. At 1.30 this morning, I woke. My husband, too. He trailed downstairs to her temporary bedroom, and I listened for the rattle of laboured breathing. Seconds later, he appeared and asked me to stay calm. 

Storm Dennis is due in her part of the country any time now, already raindrops ricochet off the industrial-strength window shutters I always judged OTT. My mother lived for the seven-day weather forecast. To know her death coincided with headline-making winds would bring tickled pink pleasure.

First the 2am district nurses, and then a funeral director who carried out low-key choreographed manoeuvres under cover of night offered sympathy. ‘I’m so sorry you’ve lost your mother,’ they each said and made it sound like I’d left her in another room.

Loss doesn’t cover what I feel, even though this death came after two months of decline.  Nursing her through the last four weeks of her illness was so intense, it’s overwhelming to suddenly find her gone.

What have I lost?

Until today, whenever something monumental happened in my life, I told her. For once, she was aware of the shifting sands before I was. Who do I tell stuff now?

Having lived with the soundtrack of her favourite radio phone-in shows, I’d expected to find relief in silence. The tumbling away of the ground was unexpected.

Without pain

Together with my wonderful, patient and caring husband, I brought my mother home, and obeyed a series of often irrational demands. A bigger television even though she was blind, new garden furniture and a 42-point master service of the car she hasn’t driven in a year.

She died without pain or anxiety (thanks to class A drugs) and with dignity (thanks to Damart thermal nightwear).

She was too fond of jam, French fancies, Lucozade and supermarket whisky. A bag of sugar with a bus pass. My mother had reached that glorious age where social norms no longer mattered. She’d cheerfully point out someone fat in a voice too loud, slam her front door in the face of anyone with a clipboard, and openly bought the Daily Mail.

I’ve been with the same man for 22 years. She still thought it a phase; like selfies, fidget-spinners and casual racism. It took until last year for her to accept that when answering the phone, it was no longer the law to recite her number.

All of this I have lost, but I will never lose the woman who somehow scraped together money to make up a shortfall in the deposit on our first house, who accepted my husband like another son and who spent her last days repeating how sorry she was not to found not at her best.

Nothing good comes from the death of someone adored, but the scale and bottomless pain I feel surely signals shared love. This I haven’t lost. This I never will.

Rest in peace, Pauline. I love you.

Death: Don’t try this at home

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My mother has been dying for 47 days and yet everyone who visits insists she looks better. They hover by her bedside and make impossible promises about things they’ll do together when she’s back on her feet.

Sometimes she manages a smile. Sometimes I do too. We both know we’re lying.

In the early years of the 20th century, 85% of people died in their home, surrounded by their family. Today, most find death in a hospital, care home or hospice. When I learned my mother wouldn’t get better, the hope for dying well became important. I made a deal with myself. She’ll end her days with dignity and in as much comfort as her catalogue of illness allows.

Most people get money in Christmas cards. Ten years ago, my mother slipped a copy of her living will into mine. This is what she wants.

Change

She’s always hated change. The Jif to Cif transition years were hell. Despite being confined to a hired hospital bed, she keeps control of the heating. I’m living in a sauna with scatter cushions.

On days when a nurse comes to change her dressings, my mother moans in pain. Afterwards, her mind melts, and sends her to wander through a mumbling, muttering maze as it mends.

Living out of a suitcase in a box room has taken its toll. Most mornings, the person staring back from the mirror looks like something the dog slept on. On the plus side, she’s now blind, and no longer knows for sure when I put on weight. It doesn’t stop the jibes.

My mother won’t get better. These are her final days and weeks. Each day, someone else dressed in blue arrives to remind us of this and hand over death-themed permission slips. When the time comes, a trained medical professional gets to dip into a stash of powerful drugs with a street value twice that of our car. Another signed document lets the same person pronounce her dead, freeing us of the need to ring around for a rare-as-hens-teeth out-of-hours doctor.

The unspoken rules of death

As this grim circus plays out , we ignore the elephant that’s not such in the room, as juggling balls and doing tricks for money.

An unspoken rule insists the living avoid saying the wrong thing to the dying. Like her visiting friends with their cards and flowers, those closet to my mother speak in positive terms, and never dare show frustration or exhaustion.

I sit next to her bed and drink tea, listening for any change in her breathing and trying to make sense of the words she cries as she drifts in and out of sleep. Late into the night, I watch TV and marvel at the self-confidence of the young and chiselled gods who populate reality shows.

Death forces you to reflect on what matters. I think it might be sex with 25-year-olds.

My mother how she should be remembered in death
Riding a camel in the 1980s, as you do

Testicular cancer: Few dinner parties pass without me tossing my scrotum into the conversation

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Last year, around 2,300 British men were told they had testicular cancer. That’s more than six every day. The number of cases diagnosed has doubled since the mid-1970s with 70 men dying each year from the disease. 1 in 250 men will get testicular cancer. With those numbers, it’s only a matter of time before Moonpig does a card.

Despite being one of the most treatable cancers, there remain many misconceptions around testicular cancer.

As a notorious homosexual and a big fan of manscaping, I was no stranger to self-examination and judged myself low risk. Testicular cancer mainly affects men aged between 15 and 49, with those aged under 35 the most vulnerable. I was 52: a time for allotments and escorted cruises down the Rhine.

Instead, I sat through a scrotal ultrasound (as much fun as it sounds), trying to read the expression on my consultant’s face. She sent me to sit in a different part of the hospital where another doctor came to tell me I had cancer. He explained the operation (in and out within the day, literally) and what might happen afterwards. I may be anxious, suffer mood swings and feel tired. I joked about how this suggested I must have had cancer since the age of fifteen. He didn’t laugh.

Have a feel

A study by cancer charity, Orchid discovered that 67% of British men don’t know how to check their balls. Once a month, have a feel. Ideally after a bath or shower. The most typical symptom is a painless swelling or small pea-sized lump in one ball. If one of your balls seems firmer, or looks different to the other, if there’s a dull ache or sharp pain or a sense of heaviness–even if not constant–you need to get yourself checked out. Most lumps or swellings are not a sign of cancer, but they should never be ignored.

And if it is cancer, trust me, the fear of becoming a uniballer is more daunting than the reality. Few dinner parties pass without me tossing my scrotum into the conversation. 80% of cases are cured completely, that rises to 98% if caught early.

Fast forward, and I’m about to mark two cancer-free years. Unless Mooonpig gets its act into gear, I won’t celebrate, but it’s a milestone I’m relieved to reach. Losing one ball is no big deal. I’ve been with the same bloke for over twenty years, so it was largely decorative. Most men of my age don’t so much have a scrotum as a windsock, so the nip and tuck of surgery has given me that much-sought-after youthful look.

Under surveillance

Men who’ve had testicular cancer once are 12 times more likely to get it again. The NHS has me covered. For ten years, I’ll be ‘under surveillance’ and not just by Cambridge Analytica. For the first few years, every three months, there’s a blood test, every six a scan. It sounds intrusive, but I see this as insurance. The rest of you bounce from one credit card bill to the next, not knowing what’s going on inside your bodies. I get a regular MoT.

My life changed after cancer. In a good way. As soon as I knew I wasn’t going to die right away, I returned to writing – after years of putting it off ‘until tomorrow’. I went from knowing next to nothing about the subject, to talking about testicular cancer to everyone. Online and in the office … anyone willing to listen. I summoned up the nerve to try stand-up comedy – turns out that’s even scarier than losing a ball.

Most people suffer poor mental health post-trauma and I can’t deny there are days when anxiety wins. I no longer drink and that leaves me with little in the way of release when the world grows big and scary. I’ve reached the age when the people from Saga Insurance stalk me with junk mail and Facebook suggests male incontinence pants. But last year, I got married to a man I met 22 years earlier. I told jokes on stage in front of 200 people and finished work on my next book.

Cancer doesn’t need to be an end. In almost every case, it’s the beginning.

How to check for Testicular Cancer
How to check for Testicular Cancer