Richard Madeley warned men need to get checked for prostate cancer (Image: ITV)
We try very hard not to be bossy in this column. Opinionated, yes: finger-wagging, no – at least, I hope not. Each to his or her own, and all that.
But this week, I’m going to make an exception. The following is directed directly at all men reading this; men above a certain age, anyway… 50 and beyond.
Go for a prostate cancer check. Pick up the phone, call your GP surgery, and book yourself a PSA test. Do it now, even if you are completely symptom-free (warning signs may include trouble peeing, traces of blood in the pee, bone pain, unexpected weight loss, and unexplained fevers). In fact, do it ESPECIALLY if you are symptom-free.
Why? Well, I’m not going to tell you how to suck eggs. I’m sure you know, as a regular newspaper reader, that prostate cancer has just overtaken breast cancer as the most common cancer in the UK. One in eight of us will be diagnosed with it in our lifetime, and 12,000 of us die from it every 12 months.
Not good. Not good at all.
Richard Madely has urged men to get checked (Image: Getty)
The problem is – and this is why I’m urging you to get tested, ESPECIALLY if you’re symptom-free – is that prostate cancer is a sneaky b*****d.
It creeps up on you unawares.
A tumour can be steadily growing away down there without giving even a hint of its existence.
And by the time it does, it can be way too late – it’s started to fan out elsewhere in the body.
Early diagnosis, then, is absolutely key. Early stage tumours can be successfully zapped, or simply monitored. (Many men die WITH prostate cancer, not of it).
For example, writer and restaurant critic Giles Coren, 55, last week revealed he has just been diagnosed with the disease, but was reassured the growth would require monitoring; no treatment is necessary for the moment.
It’s obvious that we need a national screening programme similar to the one for breast cancer, but in the absence of that, it’s down to us blokes to self-start.
I’m 68 and I’m practising what I preach. I’ve raided the piggy bank and opted for an MRI scan in the next week or so. I don’t have any symptoms, but that’s no guarantee all’s well. Fingers crossed. I’ll let you know how I get on.
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Look. I support all attempts to make it more difficult for children – mostly young men – to get their hands on knives. Every little helps, etc. And yes, knife manufacturers should be asking themselves why so many of their products have to have sharp points. When did you last need to use the tip of a kitchen knife when you, say, chopped carrots or carved a joint? A rounded tip would serve just as well.
Police need to continue stop and search, says Richard Madeley (Image: Getty)
But the fact is that the millions of long-bladed, super-sharp, pointed knives already out there aren’t going to evaporate into thin air. We’re stuck with them, in much the same way that America is stuck with all its guns.
Trump could sign a executive order tomorrow banning the sale of all guns (ha – as if!) but the US would still have a huge problem for decades, if not centuries, to come. They’re out there, along with trillions of rounds of live ammo. They’re not going to stop working or turn into blancmange.
Here, the simplest most effective way to control knife crime is staring us in the face. It’s called stop-and-search. It works. Random checks outside school gates and at bus stops. Condign punishment for anyone caught carrying. Can we stop talking about it and just DO it?
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Lily Collins and her husband Charlie McDowell have welcomed a daughter (Image: Getty)
Farmer Tony Martin, who shot burglar dead in 1999, dies aged 80 (Image: PA)
What is wrong with people? Who would sit snidely tap-tapping away at their phone or laptop to vent their poison at Lily Collins for daring to celebrate her recent baby’s birth by surrogacy? The Emily In Paris star’s husband, Charlie McDowell, describes the abuse that followed the arrival of daughter Tove last Saturday as “hateful jibes”. He has a right to respond to
them, of course, but I would have advised the couple to completely ignore the haters. Trolls loathe being ignored. A response – any response – makes them feel important. They’re not. They’re just sad and damaged.
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The strange case of Tony Martin quietly turned its final page with the Norfolk farmer’s death this week, aged 80.
Martin became an overnight cause cèlébre in 1999 when he shot one burglar dead and wounded another during a raid on his lonely farmhouse.
We’ll never really know what happened. Was Martin, right, – as the prosecution alleged – lying in wait, shotgun cocked and ready for an extrajudicial execution? Or was he, as he claimed, woken by suspicious sounds, and fired in legitimate self-defence?
He always proclaimed he’d do the same again; which is perhaps why he was never troubled by burglars again.
Summary of care received by Valdo Calocane will be made public (Image: PA)
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It almost beggars belief that Valdo Calocane, the man who killed three people on the streets of Nottingham in 2023, was allowed to avoid taking long-lasting antipsychotic medication because “he didn’t like needles”.
This man, we learned this week, had previously punched a police officer in the face, held his flatmates “hostage”, terrified a neighbour to the extent that she leapt out of a first-floor window badly injuring her back and needing surgery, and so unnerved medical staff that they refused to visit him at home on their own.
Safety in numbers. Unless, of course, you were an innocent walking home, or to work, early one midsummer’s morning.
No safety for Grace Kumar, Barnaby Webber, or Ian Coates. Just a terrible end at the hands of a man “who didn’t like needles”. A man with a diagnosis for paranoid schizophrenia; a man nevertheless allowed to decline the medication that would keep him relatively sane and others safe.
All because “he didn’t like needles” and – we learned this week in a devastating NHS England review – because he “didn’t consider himself to have a mental health condition”.
Dear. God.