Friends, family and assorted strangers have been sending thoughts and prayers about my ‘cancer journey’. It is, in the nicest possible way, a lot

I wrote a piece a few weeks ago railing at the app-heavy facelessness of dealing with the NHS about what I believe is known as one’s care pathway. My point was that it might be efficient if reducing head count in admin departments is what counts as efficiency, but not if clear communication is the aim. The whole palaver of the comms around the journey to diagnosis was more of a drama than the diagnosis itself, which was for a very mild variant of skin cancer. As fond as I am of a wallow in self-pity and catastrophisation, even I couldn’t get myself into a panic over this. So I certainly wasn’t courting sympathy or concern by making too much of it, and I was as careful as possible to get this across.

But then a couple of media outlets ran clickbait-type headlines along the lines of AC REVEALS HE HAS CANCER. And everything went nuts; thoughts and prayers came streaming in from all quarters. There were family and friends – to whom I’d not mentioned it because I didn’t think it merited a mention. There were people I’d not heard from in years.

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The actor has said Shakespeare’s language can be understood ‘in the body’. I couldn’t disagree more

I want to believe in reincarnation because I want to come back as Paul Mescal. What it must be like to be irresistible. I’m sure it gets wearing, but I’d still like to give it a try, just for research purposes. Not so much for the carnal stuff, but for the way every word he utters is taken to be as beautiful as he is. Intoxicated by their admiration, his admirers leap headfirst into the still waters of his pronouncements apparently certain of hidden depths thereunder.

So it has been with the reaction to how he comforted his director when she confessed, in so many words, that she couldn’t always grasp what Shakespeare was on about. We’ve all been there. At least I have. There there, quoth Mescal: “Listen, if Shakespeare is performed right, you don’t have to understand what they’re saying. You feel it in the body, the language is written like that.”