These blogs can get a little bit repetitive now and again, and possibly a bit depressing too – it is about cancer after all. So I’ve decided to dedicate the odd blog for stuff that has kept me happy and sane over the past few months. It will make me happy writing them, so hopefully it will make you smile reading them.

For the first of these – let’s call them the Keeping Matt Sane blogs – it would be unfair to start anywhere else but Italy. Nothing has brought me more joy over the past few years, let alone months, than Italy has. Or, more to the point, the stuff that happened in Italy. It was three weeks of bliss in an otherwise stormy few months, and it kept both myself and my fiancée Gemma going for weeks afterwards.

This isn’t like my other blogs. It’s not an update or a blog about an experience or treatment. Instead, it’s exploring something. This week, something happened that made me question my decision to go public with my cancer diagnosis. 

I woke up to the news David Bowie had died of cancer at 69. For music fans everywhere it will have been an extremely sad day, and I definitely felt it too – even if I must admit to not knowing much of his catalogue beyond the obvious stuff! But it wasn’t his death itself that made me question certain things – it was the way he handled it.

That’s because Bowie hadn’t told anyone about his illness. He had kept quiet for 18 months, released an album and then died quietly a few days later. It made me wonder whether that was the right way to go about it – apart from the death bit, obviously! But a few people on twitter who I follow certainly thought so.