In the spring of 2021, the broadcaster Charlie Bird was handling a bona fide journalistic scoop. He had been tipped off about the existence of a sensational decades-old cold case: a 1970s criminal gang threatening the Irish government with the introduction of foot-and-mouth disease into the country, with what would be cataclysmic consequences for the agricultural sector. The gang sought to extort five million pounds: and for several months (in a gratifyingly odd dimension to the story), they and the Government exchanged coded messages via the Social & Personal column of the Irish Times – before the gang members lost their nerve, and the conspiracy petered out.
Bird headlined the reporting of this bizarre episode: in podcasts and radio programmes, he detailed the conspiracy in all its lurid complexity. But some of the responses, including from fellow journalists, were focused on Bird, and not on his investigation: his voice sounded strained and slurred, his broadcasting persona suddenly unfamiliar. Was Bird himself now the story? Did he have something he needed to disclose?
Bird was eventually diagnosed with motor neuron disease: incurable, untreatable, unmistakably terminal, and sometimes called the “one-thousand-day disease” on account of how long a patient can on average expect to live following its onset. He records this period of dreadful anxiety with rigour, detailing the rising fear, the tears in private and public, the gradual release of news into the public realm that he was unwell. And he does not beat about the bush, recalling the excruciating slowness of diagnosis, and the medications – well-meant but hardly helpful – pushed upon him for post-traumatic stress disorder. “I was confused and annoyed at being told I was suffering only from stress,” he writes.
Time and Tide is not an autobiography in the conventional sense. We are certainly given many necessary glimpses of Bird’s family and private life, and compelling reflections on his varied and distinguished broadcasting career, and honourable advocacy in support of the Stardust families and marriage equality campaign: he provides all the context a reader might require.
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In essence, however, this is a book about ill health, and the steps that must be taken on a road to what will inevitably be a rapid, hastening death. His is a world of raw emotion: the private Bird is inconsolable in the face of bad news, he is buoyed and defended by meshing circles of close friends, he is more than able to communicate his distress, there is no sense of isolation in his life – and these descriptions are at once strangely consoling, and deeply shocking and affecting.
Bird offers us a portrait of how illness proceeds towards death, and a host of psychological insights into how we might manage such a fearful diagnosis – the distress, the absorption of the facts, the gradual movement towards something like acceptance. He provides us with necessary insights into how best to die.
Bird’s diagnosis with motor neuron disease and his life since then have been essentially public events
Countless others have been forced to experience such a deadly diagnosis, and forced to live through the stages that follow – but Bird’s experience attains a sort of ghastly distinction in terms of its profile. His diagnosis and his life since then have been essentially public events, and this book is at its most complex and unsettling when it describes this aspect of his experience. Bird has not chosen, but perhaps absorbed, this public element and made it part of his journey. He has raised awareness of his illness and situation, and broadened the narrative to encompass many surrounding issues – and this book carries forward this public project.
In particular, Bird’s description of his decision to undertake a charity fundraising climb of Croagh Patrick takes on the character of a quest. A private goal, for this is a journey he must take, to demonstrate to himself that he can – and a public one, to raise money for neurological treatment, as he comes to understand the paucity of such services available across the west.
This is, of course, a running theme in the Irish healthcare system: consistently it takes the spotlight of (sometimes fleeting) public engagement to raise awareness and bring in funds, although systemic change seldom or never follows. An ill Charlie Bird should absolutely not have had to climb Croagh Patrick in order to raise money for this particular issue – but on this subject he is nothing if not pragmatic, and this quest becomes a celebration of communality, of the ties that bind us. Friends, colleagues, members of wider society join the climb, and a great deal of money is duly raised. Essentially, Bird has taken his hellish private diagnosis, and rendered it socially useful – and this in itself is remarkable, and in all ways laudable.
Illness has also shadowed the life and times of another prominent contemporary Irish broadcaster – and its presence exposed in the same unsettling public manner. In 2002, the Uppsala-based cancer specialist Barbro Eriksson was watching an interview with RTÉ's then Northern editor Tommie Gorman on Swedish television. Gorman was well acquainted with Uppsala: since 1998, he had been a regular visitor to the city, to receive treatment for the slow-moving form of cancer with which he had been diagnosed several years previously, and which had – so it seemed – been successfully treated.
Now, watching Gorman on television, Eriksson noticed that the Irishman’s skin was unnaturally flushed. She contacted him,; tests were undertaken, and it was discovered that the cancer had returned and was moving through his body – that, in Gorman’s own phrase, “I had 30 tumours dotted like pepper and salt on my liver”.
This startling and accurate medical assessment, courtesy of a Swedish current affairs programme, encapsulates a sense in which Gorman’s life – like Bird’s – has been intricately woven with television as a medium and a form of instant and mass communication; in which a news correspondent and a private individual have been at times effectively melded into one. This melding is the crucial component of Never Better, Gorman’s account of his life, and – as one of RTÉ's longest-serving and most high-profile news correspondents – his observation of, and participation in, a wider Irish and European history.
Gorman’s description of his experience of cancer – the diagnosis, his changing psychological response to the illness, his clearly articulated understanding that his chances of recovery were considerably better if he were to be treated abroad rather than in Ireland – forms a central gripping element in this book. His experience, moreover, eerily echoes that of Bird in terms of its public engagement – in Gorman’s case, the recognition of his ability at this high-profile period in his life to raise public awareness of just how possible state-funded overseas treatment was (and is), as a result of European Union regulations.
Readers of life-writing – of memoir, biography and autobiography, journals, letters – seek out intimacy, instants of revelation, the shaft of light that brings emotional and psychological clarity to a life – and at certain moments in this book, Gorman supplies all the intimacy the hungriest reader could demand. In the darkness that accompanies his diagnosis, he describes his emotions at the prospect of leaving his wife and family, and of departing life while there are still tasks to undertake. He describes, too, the tranquillity that eventually accompanies his acceptance of the likelihood of death from this remorselessly advancing cancer.
Gorman’s narrative shines as he outlines the history of his roots in Leitrim and Sligo, his family’s modest means, his father’s issues with alcohol and more besides
Gorman’s story is always at its most intimate when he permits the reader to catch sight of his inmost self, the most private aspects of his life. Any account of illness involves a relentless exposure of the body’s workings: we must describe how we have been turned inside-out, sliced and slit and irradiated in the hope of healing – and it takes courage, always, both to revisit any memory fraught with pain and ill-health, and to permit a curious world to gawp upon such a scene of carnage.
Courage is involved also in examining the early years of our lives – but here too, Gorman’s narrative shines, as he outlines the history of his roots in Leitrim and Sligo, his family’s modest means, his father’s issues with alcohol, the encounters with want, with illness, with death, and all set against a panorama of 20th-century Irish social and political history: the family dramas and sorrows, and the swirl of national life that any reader will recognise, and understand. Gorman – both memoirist and journalist – is interested above all, one senses, in the quotidian, in the everyday material that provides meaning to each of our lives. It is during these parts of the book that his blending of public and private is at its most effective.
In other contexts, the impact of this memoir appears less immediately powerful. Gorman’s profession has placed him close to key moments and key figures in recent history – particularly in relation to Northern Ireland’s fraught politics. Again we nibble for detail – but at such times, the book frequently holds the reader at arm’s length. Tense situations are described as if from a judicious distance, and the complex personalities brought together to thrash out solutions tend to be assessed in neutral terms, when we perhaps expect a little shake of salt.
One might conclude that the instincts of the balanced news correspondent have in this book eclipsed the role of the writer with tales to tell – but Gorman is schooled in the even-handed traditions of public service broadcasting, and is focused here on another lesson, a more spacious picture, larger spans of time. His ultimate advice for the reader, perhaps, is one that Charlie Bird might share: that such larger pictures are what matter – and that effects and outcomes are worth striving for, even as they move inexorably beyond our control.
Neil Hegarty’s biography of David Frost is published by WH Allen.
The literary wealth of ill health: three unmissable books about sickness
In Your Face (1997) details Lia Mills’s experience of oral cancer, from diagnosis to recovery: the shock, the fear, the layers of treatments to be experienced, including reconstructive surgery. Lyrical, visceral, humorous but always unflinching, this is a compelling account of an experience that most of us would prefer not to have to think about.
At the centre of Hilary Mantel’s memoir Giving Up the Ghost (2003) flickers a presentiment of the child she could not have – a result of the endometriosis which led to chronic ill-health, gruesome medical interventions, and eventual self-diagnosis. This is a remarkable and shocking book, and necessary reading.
Brian Dillon’s Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (2009) describes how a desire for unattainable bodily perfection can lead to psychological illness, misery, despair, and neurosis – as well as to startling creativity. Detailing lives from Charlotte Brontë to Charles Dickens to Florence Nightingale, this is a fascinating study.
