The phone rings. Bad news. Another friend has breast cancer. Surely not another one. I'm beginning to feel anxious that I don't sound surprised enough. I want to groan and say: "Oh, not you too." But then I would consign her, by implying a multitude of others with the same problem, to a rather tiresome, complaining rabble. But people don't want that, they want their own condition to be unique, the cause of specific panic. As indeed it is for them. It remains, despite all the improvements in drugs and treatment, life-threatening. So the phone call must be taken very seriously.
How odd that at the other end of the generations, young women are eager to have their breasts sliced open and lumps of enhancing synthetics pumped into them.
What is clear is that breast problems matter more than, say, bunions or warts, or even hip trouble and rheumatism. These ailments may be painful but they don't strike at the core of ourselves in quite the same way. Artist depictions of St Agatha, the martyr who had her breasts severed by a Roman soldier, often show her carrying them in a little dish - perhaps illustrating the resistance women feel when made to lose a breast.
If conjuring up this macabre image may seem inappropriate, then ascribe it to a certain hysteria on my part. As popular psychology will tell you, hysteria can conceal true feeling. The fact is that my own younger sister and only sibling died of breast cancer three years ago. A close friend had an operation last week, another is only a little further along in her treatment, and many others are walking tall and proud having put the trauma behind them. Breast cancer is part of my extended family.
For years, women getting older have been on a roller-coaster ride of hopes and fears. First the good news: new drug trials, less brutal surgery. Bad news: hormone replacement therapy (HRT) increases risk, there is talk of cancer being a western lifestyle disease. Good news, again: an entirely new drug could make all the difference. Bad news, again: HRT doesn't help keep the heart healthy, as was once thought, though may still be protecting against osteoporosis. (This is a side issue, I know, but read the medical pages and you end up suffering from hypochondria).
My friend's personal roller coaster indicates just how upfront both medicine and women are about these things now. On a Wednesday she went into hospital for the appropriate operation. The whole thing was over and she was home by the same evening. The following Monday, she was a lively presence at my book publishing jamboree. There was a visit to the specialist on Thursday, and on Friday of the same week the stitches were out. The very next day, she flew to Cape Town on BBC business. This seems to me to be stoicism of a high order, probably more than her employers deserve or are even aware of. She returns at the end of the month to face six months of radiation therapy.
Meanwhile, there is news of a battle lost. The redoubtable Claire Venables, one of the outstanding spirits of British theatre in the past two decades, finally died of cancer this week. I hadn't known she was ill, and had one of those heart-stopping moments when I turned to the obituaries page.
Women around me are having to deal with breast cancer on a daily basis; the phone call, the friend's operation, the sudden obituary. Are men, I wonder, aware of the scale of what seems to me like an epidemic? As the prime minister, Tony Blair can, quite rightly, alert the medical resources of the country to come to his aid in an emergency. I only hope he reminds Cherie to find time, between important legal cases and the care of her family, to go for a mammogram. She may be patron of Breast Cancer Care, but women have a habit of making a fuss over the care of others and forgetting to care for themselves.
Oh, that reminds me, I must go for my free flu jab.
· Joan Bakewell's memoir, The Centre of the Bed, is published by Hodder & Stoughton. To order a copy for £17 plus p&p (rrp £20), call 0870 066 7979.
