In Praise of Buns, Blossom, Bach. And Life.
Why Good Friday is one of my most treasured days of the year
Tomorrow morning, I plan to leave my flat early and walk through London’s still-quiet streets to a nearby bakery. On my way, I’ll pause to admire the hot-pink hydrangeas outside a nearby Victorian mansion block. With any luck, the sun will be shining. At the bakery, I’ll be greeted by warm cinnamon and yeast-scented air, and I’ll leave holding a paper bag filled with hot cross buns.
At home, I’ll put them in the oven and make a pot of strong English breakfast tea. When the buns are just the right golden-brown colour, I’ll take them out of the oven and slather them with salty butter, watching it melt and sink into them.
When I take a bite, it’ll be my first in almost a year. You can, of course, now buy hot cross buns anytime, but I prefer to save mine for Easter; it makes them all the more special.
In the afternoon, I’ll meet my family at an eighteenth-century church tucked away behind Regent Street in central London, to attend a performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion. It’s a Good Friday ritual for my family, stretching back over two decades.
My parents are not religious: while my father was brought up an Anglican, he doesn’t believe in God, and my mother is from a secular German-Jewish family. Nonetheless, gathering together in the church, to hear Bach’s exquisite oratorio about Christ’s last days on earth has always felt sacred. Pandemic aside, I’ve rarely missed a performance.
Twenty-one years ago, towards the end of the Passion, as the choir lamented Jesus’s death, I suddenly had a vision of my funeral taking place in the church, my coffin being carried down the central aisle. It was unsettling. But I soon forgot about it.
Until nine days later. In the early hours of a Sunday morning, while I was getting ready for bed after a night out, my hand encountered an unfamiliar hard sensation beneath the skin on my left breast. I froze. And that vision from the church came flooding back in.
Over the coming days and weeks, I oscillated between terror and telling myself I was being ridiculous. After all, as everyone, including my mum, kept saying, ‘Nine out of ten breast lumps are benign. Especially at your age.’ Plus (back then), we had zero family history of breast cancer. Still, that image of my funeral kept reappearing, and when it did, I’d convince myself I was psychic.
It was only after a GP, then a surgeon, my ultrasound in his hands, reassured me the lump was benign that I relaxed. In fact, I was totally relaxed when I was wheeled into an operating theatre to have it removed, comforted by the surgeon’s final pre-op words to me: don’t worry, it definitely isn’t cancer.
Nasty little bugger, was his revised description of the lump, after I came round from the anaesthetic. It turned out I needed eight months of treatment to give me the best chance of not being destroyed by it:
There were regular visits to a chemotherapy unit, where I was usually the youngest by decades. The aching cold of a blue ice-cap was placed over my head in my determined but unsuccessful attempt to save my hair. Ruby-red liquid dripped into a vein in my arm. Often, it made me throw up the entire night.
Later, there was radiotherapy, where I lay on a bed, watching the giant white arm of the accelerator machine trace an arc across my body as it delivered its daily dose of radiation. It left me bone-tired and with raw-pink, tender skin, which I figured was a better deal than being left hairless and nauseous.
Finally, Good Friday came round again, and I was back in the church with my family, my hair still short, my body and heart still exhausted and shaken. As soon as the music began, a shock wave of emotion spread through me. I could feel sobs gathering, and had to pinch my thigh and focus on the blues and purples of the stained-glass window behind the altar, to stop them bursting out.
I was full of sadness for everything I’d been through in the past year. And full of such relief and gratitude to still be here.
Gratitude resurfaces every Good Friday: for the luxury of the four-day weekend stretching ahead; for this first swathe of spring, when the world is bursting back into life, and when all of summer still awaits us. And most of all, for this continuing life. A life in which I still get to savour buns, blossom, Bach, and so much more.
I wish you a lovely weekend, wherever you are, and whatever you are celebrating.
Love,
Annabel
PS, If you’re interested in reading the full story of what it was like to have cancer as a young, single Londoner, my memoir Hidden is available to buy here. It’s been described as “a truly page-turning read. You have to know what happens next because Chown paints her world so vividly and in quite a surprising way, quite joyfully. The sensuality of being alive is here in every paragraph.”
This stopped me in my tracks as I read it. In the same way that life can shift from the everyday to the extraordinary in a heartbeat. Thank you 🙏