When in London you may find yourself on a night Bus. The temptation is always to put in earphones and doze away the creeping hangover and/or party induced nausea that is almost certainly occurring if you're on that bus in the first place.
This can be a mistake, because you rarely get as strange a conversation as you might overhear
For example, as I was trundling towards Oxford Circus after a pretty boozy night, a couple got on. They were in the middle of a heated debate. Well, he sounded 'heated' she was obviously just getting a bit bored with continuing this conversation. I tuned in, because they were right behind me and tried to figure out what the cause of contention was...
I have to say, it surprised me. It wasn't the usual Saturday night relationship fall out. No, he was trying to get her to 'Promise to never get chemotherapy'. Yes. Never. No matter what the condition, or the prognosis. She quite reasonably, but certainly wearily, responded. 'Well, it's not part of my life.. so I don't really want to think about it now'. Now, a more subtle student of the feminine mind (Such as my good self) might have read the slight double use of words in that sentence, where 'think' also stands for 'talk'.
But he continued, explaining all about cellular damage and how it never worked, painting a lurid picture of tubes and lost hair. She again said 'Well, it's not really part of my life, so I can't really commit to that decision'. A very sensible position to take. It isn't in her life and so she doesn't have any evidence as to it's necessity in the future, therefore a promise to her jackass boyfriend would be ludicrous. But still he persisted, going on about how there was a new extract from hemp that could.. blah blah blee blah...
Now I know hemp and it's extracts does have many useful medicinal properties and furthermore is great for almost everything and if we committed solely to just using that then the 60s utopia would spring from the concrete and we'd all join hands and sing 'Let the Sunshine in' naked, but this is the point where I snapped... I turned round and bellowed into his face
"Wow, you must really love that girl... trying to protect her from a treatment to an illness that she doesn't have and hopefully never will.. it really shows your caring side that you are at 5am browbeating her into giving a potentially fatal promise... and I know that a 20-young man in skinny jeans and a t-shirt on a nightbus at 5am probably does have the medical credentials necessary to diagnose hemp for an illness that hasn't even happened yet, but in the future, if something terrible did happen she might decide she wants a second opinion from someone who has done some training, perhaps even actually has a job doing this kind of thing, has an actual condition to diagnose, rather than a hypothetical one and has the most resources to make it a reality rather than sucking on a hemp bag for the extracts... and then if that happened, and they chose targeted chemotherapy, which has saved the lives of people in my own family, she would be torn between surviving, albeit with possible side effects, or keeping a promise to a douchebag flash-in-the-pan ex-boyfriend that she, hopefully, split up with on a night bus on the morning of the 22nd September 2013 for being an utter utter utter bellend."
Of course, I didn't say that. I put in my earphones so I didn't have to.
They got off at the next stop. I'd like to think they are spending today apart. I also really hope that neither of them ever have to choose between chemo and hemp.
(Yeah Yeah I know, Big Pharma Shill blah blah blee... Of course not. Big Pharma USE Hemp by the way, where it's benefit has been established. They aren't perfect by any stretch, and should be constantly questioned and challenged, but that doesn't mean that something is bad just because they use it.. oh and they DEFINITELY save more lives than you ever will)
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