TWO MANY COOKS

by Anton Wills-Eve


<a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/powerful-suggestion/”>Powerful Suggestion</a>

twenty years ago.

TWO MANY COOKS

If I could have 1995 all over again I might not have given up writing for my own pleasure on April 14th that year. You must think I’m mad. A lot of people do. But honestly, that was the day I wrote back to a major publishing house and regretted I could not accept their generous offer of £150,000 ($250,000) advance to write my autobiography. The thing that stopped me was that I could not have done it without telling the truth. If I had told the truth my family would have been distraught and I would have lost many of my close friends. So I just said sorry, no deal.  Well what’s so bad in that? My life was exciting, interesting, sad, funny and full of all the things many people wish they could say with honsesty about themselves and what they had been through. But the faces in my dreams just crushed me into nightmare after nightmare and I pulled out. I’m not sorry because I still have many friends who would not be talking to me now if I’d told the truth about them. But what I hate about my decision was what it led to making me do.

I was 52 years old at the time and had a son of five and a half just starting proper school. I couldn’t expose him to what I would have written. His brother, then aged 26 would have been far more deeply hurt so it wasn’t on. But what did I do instead? Well I somehow managed to carry on fighting a dreadful illness, and keeping a lot of the world up to spec on the main breaking news stories, and manage to get to Mass at least once a week. But to do this I started to increase my alcohol intake seriously. Nobody noticed because I had a huge tolerance to this form of abuse which I had been using for most of my life to get through my health problems. But it was just enough to turn a very bad anxiety neurosis into a form of cancer that was diagnosed in February 2,000 and has been with me ever since. It keeps me in agony most days. Was I right to keep mum when I did? I know what I think.

What do you think?

AWE

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