I just had to sit right down and write himself a letter...

I am not given to writing fan-letters. The last one I wrote, aged 11, to an actor, Martin Jarvis, who was playing the lead in the BBC's adaptation of "Nicholas Nickelby." Even then, keen to find an angle, something that would make my adulation stand out from the rest, I told him that I loved his nose. Novel approach, eh? It got me a signed photograph but no special acknowledgement, which is what I'd really hoped for.
On Friday, I wrote my second fan-letter to the journalist AA Gill whose columns I have enjoyed for so many years in the Sunday Times. I, like many others, was shocked and saddened last weekend when he announced, in the same sentence, that he was getting married and that he has cancer. Not just some little tumour, but, as he described it, " an embarrassment of cancer, the full English." He wrote, "There is barely a morsel of offal that is not included. I have a trucker's gut-buster, gimpy, malevolent, meaty, malignancy." Until now, he has always made smile aloud, wincing at his excoriating wit, while marvelling at his eloquence. Severely dyslexic he writes nothing and dictates everything. For me, he symbolises a triumph over dyslexia. While he talks dismissively of the well-intentioned efforts of special needs teachers like myself, I am the first to admit there is no magic bullet for those who experience severe dyslexia.
So I wrote to him because the news weighed heavily on my heart and I had to write, to release the valve on pain which would not lift. So I thanked him and said how much I had enjoyed his latest book, "Pour me, a Life," an autobiography describing his recovery from alcoholism when he was thirty. I told him how I was one of the happy band of special needs teachers who'd done their best to make him better. It was important to me to say what I felt, because too often we miss out on opportunities of saying things that need to be said. So I wrote him a letter, a proper pen and ink job,  which I hoped would stand out from the hundreds of emails he would no doubt be receiving. I hope he reads it. It makes me feel better thinking that he might. 
I am sure he he will be happier that I praised his elegant prose and not his aquiline nose.