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The second time I visited was the day after I’d shed tears in a Wetherspoons. (It wasn’t just crying; it was loud, angry tears audible for everyone in the pub.) Although still an emotional wreck, I was slightly better off than during my first visit when I wept while buttering toast. Three years later, it remains the café I frequent most, even though it’s over 200 miles from my home, and I’ve been just once this year. I return because I’ve always relied on the kindness of strangers, and even if they don’t recall, I’ll never forget how the staff comforted me when I was in tears back in May 2022.
They could see that the tears flowing from my eyes weren’t due to indecision over a breakfast order. Typically, the concern in a café is how to ask if I can swap eggs for a sausage, but my emotions overflowed because the purpose of my trip to Saltash, in Cornwall, was to visit the grave of a woman named Beth Matthews.
She had saved countless lives by blogging and tweeting about her mental health issues, but sadly lost her fight in the spring of 2022.
Last weekend, I was in Saltash for the first time this year to place flowers on her grave, so it seemed fitting to revisit the café that had always shown me kindness before journeying up north to London.
Sipping a Diet Coke while observing the rain thrash upon anyone brave enough to walk down the street, I reflected on just how much had changed since my initial visit.
Saltashians (I’m unsure if that’s a term, especially as it sounds too much like the Kardashians) will note that the café has undergone changes this year. It has exchanged hands and is now called Lydia’s Brews and Bites, featuring new dishes and a different sausage supplier than the previous establishment.
I will mention that the server who was so kind when I was crying still works there, so the spirit of the old place persists. I’ll also inform everyone that the sausages are much tastier than they were in prior years.
I wish that the biggest change over the past three-and-a-bit years was the succulent sausages, but instead it’s the fact that I now have incurable bowel cancer.
My cancer is the reason why I can’t walk up the town’s punishing hills as easily as I used to. It’s the reason why I only managed one trip to Saltash this year.
It’s the reason why I got flashbacks of things that happened during previous visits while wondering how many more times I’ll be able to come back to Cornwall before cancer takes over my body.
And it’s the reason statistics suggest I’ve only got an 11% chance of still being alive in the summer of 2028. It’s also the reason why I’m leading the Daily Express’s Cancer Care campaign.
Cancer is the one group of diseases that all politicians like to focus on, with quick access to treatments seen as a way to measure NHS success and win votes at election time.
But the treatment patients receive focuses on just the physical aspects like cutting out tumours and using chemotherapy to kill cancerous cells.
It doesn’t take into account the mental health aspects of the disease, like the person I wanted to be being wiped out by the effects of the drugs, and knowing I probably won’t make it to my 50th birthday.
The Government needs to change this. It needs to ensure that all cancer hospitals take the mental health of patients just as seriously as they do their physical health.
This is why the Daily Express is campaigning for all cancer patients to receive mental health support both during and after treatment.
