Cancer’s the sort of thing in respect of which a lot of people are very, very earnest indeed.  It’s a pleasure, then, to discover Cancerous Capers, a blog about cancer by someone with cancer, that is light and funny and… well, not earnest:

I’m Jamie Ross.
I’m twenty, and I was an English student until last August when my doctor threw a giant cancerous spanner in the works. This blog tracks my little fracas with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and is a reading experience that will make you laugh, cry and possibly physically sick as I mention my testicles more times than social convention deems acceptable.

What’s particularly pleasing is that Ross has been picked up by The Independent and the Scottish Sun – and that he’s apoplectic with rage about the latter, because they didn’t ask (which is among the reasons why I’m not linking there).  There’s something very right with the world when a cancer patient can record in public that, notwithstanding his illness, being ripped off by The Sun is still among the worst things that can have happened to him:

They led with the stomach-turning headline of ‘Blog of Courage’ and tediously droned on about what a “brave teen” I am. I’m astonished that it didn’t come with a huge cut-outable photo of my smiling, pale face for housewives across the country to hold their shriekingly oversentimental candlelit vigils next to – most likely with ‘Kinross Princess’ emblazoned in massive lettering across it. There seems to be some insane belief amongst idiot headline writers that having cancer instantly makes you brave. It doesn’t. It makes you bald, podgy, ill and bored – ‘Blog of Sheer Tedium’ would have been a far more appropriate headline. I had to wake up my Mum at 4am last week specifically so she could remove a below-average sized spider from my room – that‘s your sodding megahero, The Sun.
It’s not just the sheer, horrific tweeness of the article that makes it amongst the worst things ever to happen to me either…

Now, that’s what I call a sense of perspective.

Meanwhile, Tim Ireland sticks it to the Sun here and here.