A tale of two Wendys

I only know two people called Wendy. I used to work with the first Wendy. If you looked at us in the street together you would think we had absolutely nothing in common. She is 27, tall and very glamorous and skirts the fringes of WAG culture in the North. She is Louis Vuitton'd and Prada'd up to her eyeballs. As stated before I live in Cherokee land (heap big debts to deal with....), am not tall, am certainly not 27 and need a shed load of make-up for glamour these days. She and I spent four years together working on our own and we developed a pretty close friendship. I tried my best to persuade her to go to University and leave her mean boyfriend (Big Bad Baz) who pretended that he didn't have two other kids for two years. He also set fire to her car and threatened to kill her, but that's another story. She married him, had two sons and things have been pretty rocky. He offered to pay for a boob job for her and last week she phoned me up from the hospital bed to say she'd had it done and was very sore. Big Bad Baz walked into the hospital, lifted the sheet and said 'They're not very big' then went fishing overnight. Wendy said to me 'I thought it would cure everything between us but it's made no difference at all'. Lurch said not all men are the same.


The second Wendy is my lovely sister-in-law, married to my younger brother Pete. Pete is the most empathetic, supportive husband you could meet - my older sister, Clare, and I think it's because we wanted a sister when he was born so we called him Caroline and dressed him in girl's clothes for three years. Wendy is the love of his life and they have 3 kids, all teenagers. My mother, El Vel, the head of the household, the matriarch, former maths teacher and Deputy Head phoned me up last week to say that Wendy had a cyst that her doctor said was probably benign and was going to have it checked out. She phoned me again this week to say that it was bad news and that Wendy's got breast cancer, Pete is in pieces. I phoned Wendy and had to fight back tears, she sounded so brave and so so scared. We're all praying it's going to be OK and my fab friend Julia who's had breast cancer (visited her in the hospital day after having breast removed and she gave me a high five and shouted 'I've passed! whoohoo!!' when I asked her what she'd passed she replied 'the liver function test..')has given Wendy her number for night or day contact. Lurch is very upset as he's very fond of Wendy but that hasn't stopped him from stalking the web as anticipated and yes, he's now realised that men get breast cancer too. I'm going to find his obsessive self examination and nipple squeezing hard to stomach...