Rain, Mud and Cancer

Basingstoke 10 am. Another grassy field and at £1.00 per litre of rain, we were covered in a lot of money.

There were not many people there to start but you could tell that the organisers were expecting more, and we were early.

A quick cup of tea and a wander around and within the hour there were hundreds there. It was difficult to tell just how many because the ground was flat and you can only see who is next to you. A kiss on the cheek and off she went.

So many women and so many smiles, it was difficult to put cancer and all this pink and joviality together, and yet there was an undertone, a current of steely resolve that was in everyone over the age of 12.

There were men there of course to give encouragement, although strangely none was needed. I was merely a spectator, I have never felt so overlooked, by so many, but I was happy to observe.

At 11am 5000 women moved across the start line.

As I watched them go past I was struck by the amount of different women that were there. I’m not going to mince my words, there were ladies who were collecting their pensions, there were the tanned high maintenance girls that would give a man nothing but grief, there were girls who were so skinny they had ribs like a xylophone, and there were girls who were frankly, big. There were children led by grandmothers, there were fitness fanatics running like whippets, and there were friends chatting on the way round. In short every kind of woman I have seen in 37 years passed me by on that field, and none of it mattered. It has never mattered to me what a woman is like as long s they are friendly and unarmed, but what I realised was, that for once; none of it mattered to them either. Women judge women far more harshly than men. Women perceive other women as competition, but not on this field in Basingstoke, or on hundreds of other fields around the country. For these few hours they were truly of one mind – and I found that truly inspirational.

If so many women could so easily put down the differences they normally carry, for a cause so good, and that the common ground that they ran, walked and trudged and cried over had not an ounce of selfishness in it, then I thought that there was hope for the human race yet. This was not Glastonbury, they were not here for a good time, they had not come with an expectation to be entertained or get some kind of value for money, they had made on the whole weeks or months of sweat filled effort to get to this stage – and here they were in their thousands.

They were here, I feel, to climb to the top of a disease that had affected them all and stand on the summit and with a smile and a laugh, stamp their feet, together, and say that they will beat this.

What I can’t wait for, and I hope that I see in my lifetime, is when it is beaten, where this steely eye will turn next, for if it is war or famine, then best you put down your gun now and pick up the plough, because it can surely only be a matter of time.