THE MYSTERY OF MAUDIE

Most of my friends know by now that I am the sort of movie watcher who almost attends a film school of her own, so dedicated am I to catching films at the Arts Picturehouse Cinema in Cambridge. It is a cosy little three screen cineplex, each screen snuggled up to the next, and all tucked into the smallest edge of a building. I visit it as you would a library - while returning one lot of books, your eyes spy a new possibility. In my case, Maudie, directed by Irish director Aisling Walsh. 

The tender biopic reveals the unamorous coupling of Maud Lewis, the Nova Scotia painter and her fish smuggling peasant Everett Lewis. Maud's life would move anyone to tears - born with juvenile arthritis that eventually crippled her, she was also betrayed by dishonourable members of her family who sold her precious newborn for money, telling Maud that her baby had been born deformed like her mother and buried immediately.

Years later Maud learns the truth. Everett takes her to see her baby, now a grown woman, happy, tending to roses outside the white and blue shutters of her home. Maud cowers in the shadow of her husband's truck, broken and healed, simultaneously.

The shadows of Maud's life are painted over by her extraordinary capacity for wielding joy into simple brushwork. Deceptively simple. Her work began to sell, began to be loved - passers by to her tiny, wildly decorated house, were enchanted. She was commissioned by the likes of Richard Nixon, then President of the United States. 

In my own little cabin in the garden, I have been wielding my brushes and paint. Every dark or gloomy corner now has a fresh white or blue coat, reassuring my eyes of light. The past week has been a complex one to navigate - I had a slender catheter surgically inserted into my vein, one end hanging outside for me to self administer liquid antibiotics, and the other end resting atop my heart. Self administration makes me respect my nurses even more than usual - so many little details to concentrate on; air bubbles and contamination to be careful of. Twenty eight injected infusions done, two to go. Unless the doctors decide otherwise.

By the end of her life, Maud was crippled with arthritis, unable to walk, but still able to hook her brush into the curled claw of her hand, and do the thing that made her utterly content with her life. Paint pictures. The whole world framed in a tiny square of happiness. To be an artist is to know suffering, but to know beauty and joy more. 

HOW TO SURVIVE RITUXIMAB

1) Do nothing.

2) But when the drug, which makes your heart and mind race, wakes you up before dawn, lie there and hope for sleep again.

3) When there's absolutely no hope, totter out of bed into the kitchen, scrabble around the fridge and settle on a virtuous carrot.

4) Wash the carrot down with a few ginger biscuits, a glass of water and several white tablets. Remember you still haven't renewed your various prescriptions, promise yourself you absolutely will attend to it later and then forget all about tablets by

5) finding the most mind numbing documentary on Netflix. It's called, say, 'The Queen of Versailles' about a rather grimly mismatched couple determined to build the biggest, brashest house on American soil. You will retain nothing later except a solitary fact about the real Versailles almost bankrupting France with its gilt and glory. This from google and not the documentary.

6) No fever or tachycardia yet and you float about between bed and kitchen, eating noodles, watching rain turn to sun, and wondering why you aren't simply stepping out of your little house and walking the half hour to your nieces, one of whom has taken to saying, 'Shai! gone!' with a sad little flick of her hand.

7) At 4 in the afternoon, you have a high point of wellness. You steel yourself not to get dressed or put your contacts in, but to sit, still pyjama clad at the open window, sun blazing into your half shut eyes, drinking coffee laced with syrup and two Jaffa cakes melting as fast as you can eat them.

8) By half past five, sun turned to long shadows, you are in bed with a creeping temperature, a steady marathoning heart and a throat that burns with a thirst you cannot pacify. In the doorway, an old fashioned tape player and Catherine Alliott's rural comedy A Crowded Marriage. A fox has decapitated Cynthia. Not the heroine. The chicken...

9) You think about washing your hair.

10) You listen to the birds.

11) You write a blog post about how you survive Rituximab the wonder drug. The cancer drug. The lupus drug. The soon to be Parkinson's drug. You think about cupcakes, not the cake but the frosting. And washing your hair. And how quiet it is because the tape needs to be changed to Side 13. You take a breath, prepare to peel the blankets off your curled up legs and brace for cooler air. There will always be more tea, hot buttered toast and you will

12) begin again.