going west

29th February 2020: 
The world's financial markets look poised to crash over the coronavirus outbreak as it is spreading worldwide and will soon amount to an official pandemic.  I forget about this while I go out and enjoy a night out in London! Celebrating the birthday of a precious friend from medical school who became a colleague working as one of our oncologists in skin cancer management at my hospital, and who has so brilliantly and bravely survived a malignant brain tumour. We have bonded deeply over our shared personal journeys through our cancers, and share and rejoice in life out the other end of it.  We know better than most how precious life is when you have faced your own mortality, and now we live well and we live hard and we love hard and we have to fear little. The reality isn’t quite so simple. But we still strive to be that way. We went to see Pretty Woman The Musical in the West End. A gaggle of brilliant girls, so many laughs, so much fun! As for coronavirus, what coronavirus? Leicester Square was absolutely packed tonight, and so was All Bar One-everyone carefree and just enjoying the evening. It is hard to think that what has been going on in Asia and more recently spreading to Europe, could ever reach us on our island. But it may be in touching distance without us knowing today, and looking at Leicester Square tonight, if that virus was anywhere in our midst, this one pocket of London alone would be an epicentre for spread. Then we find out that one of the group spent the whole evening messaging her daughter who was living and working in France and had to travel back and now had the symptoms of the virus that we’ve been told to notify and isolate for.  It seems to be getting ever closer..