Without celebrities, our lives would be vapid and soulless. Even the most worthless and unassuming object can instantly can fetch a king’s ransom on eBay if any celebrity so much as excretes a bodily fluid on it, and this is by no means a modern phenomenon. In the first century, a giddy teenage fan thought she had secured the winning bid on Jesus’ blood-sodden Shroud of Turin only to be cruelly gazumped in the dying seconds by the mysteriously monikered ‘Pope_3lol’.

With the dawn of the internet, our celebrity stalking has reached dizzy new heights and has made costly expenses like night-vision goggles and specimen bags a thing of the past. Every self-respecting celebrity has set up his or her own website complete with a tediously extensive biography, a furiously bitter blog and thousands of photographs of the celebrity‘s own face contorted into various unsightly gurns. However, some celebrity websites exceed all expectations.

For example, one day you might stumble across William Roache’s website if you ever happen to repeatedly batter your clenched fist onto your keyboard and mistakenly google William Roache. Better known as Ken from Coronation Street, William has inadvertently produced one of the most incredible multimedia experiences of our generation. At first glance, it looks like any normal shit celebrity website — a picture of his beaming face, biographies, latest news — but, after a few seconds, his picture begins to move and speak like an enchanted corpse.

“Hello, welcome to my website!” he enthuses, as we all look on in wide-eyed astonishment. After the pleasantries, he masks his obvious fury towards anyone who calls him Bill or Ken with a forced grimace and appeases his legions of fans with some brief Coronation Street information before speaking, at length, about his more artistic projects such as his nationwide ‘An Evening With William Roach‘ tour. All of this whilst standing at a bizarre angle which suggests he’s suffered a debilitating stroke mid-pace. As if all of this wasn’t enough, you also have the opportunity to print out a photograph that William has signed and scanned – it’s just like an autograph, but without all the tedious hassle of actually having to meet the person.

Elsewhere on your internet, there’s gremlin-faced breakfast television moron Matthew Wright’s offering. As soon as you enter his site and see a section proudly devoted to ‘Matthew and Hawkwind’ it quickly becomes apparent that Matthew Wright has the self-awareness of a dead paramecium. Apparently, he’s inexplicably joined the terrible 70s space rock band on stage a number of times as a singer — surely it would be just as effective to stomp around a town centre, clanging a bell and bellowing ‘I wish I was young again’ in tears? Delving deeper in to the site, in ‘When he’s not at work…’ you’ll find a massive picture of Matthew Wright, naked but for a blue neckerchief and khaki shorts, holding aloft a giant, dead fish with a triumphant grin on his stupid face.

Honourable mentions go to a complete list of books ever read by Art Garfunkel, Paul Daniels’ deeply depressing blog of right-wing despair, and Kanye West’s infantile ramblings written exclusively in capital letters. Have a look.

Jamie Ross

The last fortnight can only be described as an interminable nightmare. After spending a vast proportion of my recent time boastfully lauding it over other cancer patients due to feeling tip-top, the Cancer Fairy finally took it upon himself to mercilessly beat me into the ground with his giant stick of misery.

The problem arose around this time last week when I was diagnosed with a chest infection. I wasn’t particularly worried about this, I had been told to expect all manner of infections here and there due to the fact that I currently have the immune system of a small HIV positive insect. However, there’s something about having six visibly concerned medical professionals gathered around you that makes you question what they know that you don’t. After much deliberation, they decided that I’d need to spend at least two nights getting constant antibiotics through a drip at Ninewells Hospital.

This news whipped up scant enthusiasm within me. I had been to Ninewells a few times before and each visit appears to be more emotionally crippling than the last. If I’m not getting diagnosed with cancer I’m visiting dying relatives, getting my neck sliced open or ejaculating into a tiny pot in a cold, lonely room. If something goes wrong in my life, Ninewells almost always rears its ugly head as the grim setting. It is to me as the Führerbunker is to Adolf Hitler.

Arriving at the haematology unit, I couldn’t help but notice that there was a tantalising selection of whisky, gin and other spirits on a tray next to the massive TV. I don’t know why Dundonian cancer patients require a minibar but I felt comforted by the fact that, if my boredom was to reach dangerous levels, I could always get off my mash and stomp around the corridors after midnight – most likely wearing nothing but a vast array of medical paraphernalia as a giant, funny hat.

After 20 full minutes of fantasising exclusively about this possibility, I was ushered through to a small room by a young female doctor who looked uncannily like Geri Halliwell to learn my grim fate. “Can I come?” asked my Mother, at which point Doctor Spice looked at me and whispered “Do you know her?” – evidently thinking that she was an insane drifter woman desperate to latch onto a complete stranger’s medical consultation.

Bracing myself to be told that one and a half of my lungs had fallen off, the Doctor tapped me on the chest a few times, made me breathe a bit and then shooed me away home with a big sack of drugs to keep me happy. I didn’t quite know how to react – what had she missed that my Perth doctors were so gravely concerned about? Also, I couldn’t help but feel slightly aggrieved that the decision to stick a giant needle in the back of my hand in preparation for intravenous antibiotics had proven to be overenthusiastically premature. Anyway, I removed such trivial matters from my head and skipped away home once again reassured that I am, in fact, indestructible.

Jamie Ross

Upon any diagnosis of a serious health problem, you’ll be given an entire rainforest’s worth of information leaflets. I assume that the main purpose of these are to put a patient’s mind at ease in a worrying time, but in my case, this was a spectacular failure for two reasons. Firstly, being given a list of local funeral directors and will-writers is not a precursor to a relaxing night’s sleep. Secondly, upon reading the infinite list of possible treatment side effects, I saw ‘complete or partial hair loss’ casually tossed in amongst insignificant things such as heart failure or permanent lung damage.

Any person who has ever given me so much as a fleeting glance will realise that this is the single worst thing that could possibly happen to me. I’ve never made a secret of my vanity — I’ve often been mocked for my vast hairspray collection, and I used to spend countless mornings persuading my Mum to write a sick note for the previous day of school because I was having a bad hair day and refused to go in.

However, now it appears that such callous actions have blown up in my face in the form of karma-induced hair loss. Of course, some doctors may tell you that it’s down to an awful drug slowly but surely destroying almost every cell in my body, but they’d say anything to sound like they know something that a common man doesn’t. It’s almost definitely karma pixies pulling it out strand by strand with maniacal glee, teaching me tiny lesson after tiny lesson.

My nurse has said that it would be unusual for me to lose my hair completely, but I should be ‘prepared for some thinning‘ which I thought was a terrifyingly vague statement. Will I end up as the first nineteen-year-old in history to adopt a comb-over? Also, if this is true and I do have some of my original hair at the end, I’ll surely have two very different lengths of ridiculous hair when what I have lost begins to grow back. New hair can apparently be a completely different colour to the original, so I could easily end up looking like an incredibly shit and low-budget Batman villain.

I’ve voiced these concerns with my nursing team, which often leads to hilarious jokes about my vanity. They just don’t understand why my hair is so important, stupidly believing that I’d be more concerned with overcoming cancer than whether I look sexy on the ward. But who knows who I could meet? A woman under 93 has to enter the haematology unit at some point and, when that day comes, I will be prepared to pounce.

Jamie Ross

I awoke with a jolt of excitement today. I heard my door open, and through bleary eyes I saw my mother coming into the room with an envelope in her outstretched arm. What could this be? A wistful letter of love from an old flame? A massive order for Jamie Ross charity wristbands? Of course not, it was a letter from my old mates at the sperm bank.

I don’t know how you like to start your day, fellow students, but I’d venture that very few of you would choose to wake up by receiving a letter straight from the desk of a sperm nurse which, in its very first sentence, informs you that you have a “slightly low sperm count“.

About a month ago, I had to give a sperm sample due to the small chance that my treatment could make me infertile. I don’t know who invented chemotherapy, but his efforts to iron out the flaws in his creation can only really be described as lacklustre. If he went on Dragon’s Den he’d no doubt present something revolutionary and fantastic, much like Reggae Reggae sauce, but it would probably cause eight of your toes to fall off and make the earth explode.

Apparently having a slightly below average count is of little consequence to me, but they thought I’d get a kick out of this emasculating piece of trivia anyway. They claim that it’s “most likely” down to my illness, which reads to me as a thinly-veiled suggestion that I have rubbish testicles. However, I am reassuringly told that they have “great motility” which means that, although perhaps low in number, they are a force to be reckoned with. Much like the Spartan army.

They go on to instruct me that I have to contact them as soon as I enter a serious relationship so that they can sort out the relevant consent forms for it. This begs the question, how in shitting crikey am I supposed to bring this up to the lucky lady? At what stage in a relationship is it acceptable for me to suggest that her name should be written onto my bottle of sperm?

This also means that somewhere in Ninewells Hospital there will be an inevitably long and depressing record of each successive failed relationship that I have had to cancel consent for. Perhaps the sperm receptionist will moonlight as a handy relationship councillor for me. ’Oh dear, what happened this time Jamie?’ ’Same as last time Doreen, I told her I needed her date of birth and address to fill out the form for her to mother my test tube spawn‘.

In the final paragraph they inform me that I don’t have AIDS, which was a relief. I think that finding out that I had both cancer and AIDS in the same year would have been somewhat of a bitter pill to swallow. Anyway, it was on that bombshell that the letter ended and I was left to pick over the prospect of living my life knowing I make slightly less sperm than a normal man, but it’s okay, because they could have AIDS.

Jamie Ross

People react in different ways when you tell them that you have cancer. Most people react in a tactful manner, sending a nice message of support and sympathy. Some people – mostly idiots – become upset. Then there are the people who react by laughing, due to my oft-controversial humour in the past leading them to think that I’m joking, but this is often followed by a certain degree of guilt.

However, the worst people by far are those who think that the single thing that I need most at this troubling time is the power of prayer. It’s true to say that there are few graver dangers that cancer patients face than the prospect of becoming some born-again religious type. Evangelists always try to get people when they’re down. If they’re not hassling cancer patients like myself, they’re after the homeless, people just released from prison, or recovering alcoholics.

This is why the Vatican is in direct competition with the makers of The Jeremy Kyle Show. Viewers of the show will be familiar with Kyle’s catchphrase ‘wear a condom!‘ which he frequently screams at teenage parents. This is not, however, the sage family planning advice that it appears to be – it is an involuntary outburst of defiance against his main rival, the Catholic Church. Don’t get me wrong. I firmly believe that everyone should have the right to believe in and practice whatever religion they choose to follow.

However, a few people have told me that they’ve been praying specifically for me in church. I don‘t quite know what to make of this. While I really do appreciate any form of well-wishing, this created visions of a giant picture of my smiling face at the front of a church being doused with holy water, whilst a bearded man in a colourful jumper sings songs about me, accompanied by his acoustic guitar, which would most likely be plastered with ‘Jesus Rocks!’ stickers. My second name rhymes with cross; the song pretty much writes itself. In my eyes, there appears to be only one beneficiary of these acts – namely God himself.

I’m either going to make a full recovery or, by a reassuringly unlikely stroke of spectacularly bad luck, not. In one of these cases people will believe that God has graciously come to my aid and celebrate his amazing healing ability and, in the other, that He has ignored the prayers and let me perish, meaning everyone will sing loads of hymns about what an ace guy he is. Is it just me, or is skullduggery afoot? It appears that this sly God character has placed himself in a win-win situation, and I shan’t stand for it.

Jamie Ross

This time last year, I was exactly the same as many of you reading this. A rosy-cheeked, eighteen-year-old fresher being gradually corrupted by all that Glasgow University had to offer. I prowled the disconcertingly sticky floors of The Hive, too inebriated to notice that it had already claimed both of my shoes. I insisted that my friends take a photo of me emerging from the giant stone vagina next to the Boyd Orr building on each and every occasion that I left Cheesy Pop, genuinely believing that each time was more funny than the last. I stole traffic cones, road signs and all forms of paraphernalia designed specifically for public safety.

You could say that I embodied everything that makes society look down upon students. That was until July 31st of this year, when I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma – cancer of the lymph nodes.

This might have acted as a convenient distraction for my parents if I had failed my exams, but I had actually achieved a set of results that were described, somewhat dismissively, as ‘satisfactory’ by Websurf.

Consequently, I had to ask the university if I could postpone my studies for a year, cancel the lease on my lovely new flat and settle back into the nest I had flown from less than a year before. Evidently, I was entirely incapable of handling the responsibility of living without my parents. They couldn’t turn their backs on me for a second without me getting childishly giddy on the power of having an overdraft, feeding my insatiable hunger for kebabs until it quite literally nearly killed me. Let the fable of ‘the fresher who partied so hard that it gave him cancer’ be a cautionary tale to all.

Facing six months of intensive chemotherapy, I saw two very different roads open up before me. One option was to collapse within myself in an implosion of self-pity, never get out of bed and eat nothing but Kettle Chips with salty tears running down my face.

The other was to embrace the situation, to go through the experience with a skip in my step and to use it as an opportunity to explore my curiosity for writing – whilst also never getting out of bed and eating nothing but Kettle Chips. This is exactly what has happened, and what brings me to our wonderful student newspaper a slightly fatter man than I was three months ago.

With this column, you have the opportunity to track my progress, thoughts and experiences as I undergo my chemotherapy and whatever other nonsense I’m subjected to – which so far seems to consist of spending an inexplicably large amount of time completely Billy Bollocks in hospital with a never-ending merry-go-round of old men gawping at my naked form.

As a synopsis, I know the diary of a teenage cancer patient may not sound like a ripping good laugh but I do aim to entertain aswell as inform. Unfortunately, I will most likely fail at both. Luckily for me, however, you can’t criticise me because I have cancer and that would make you an awful, thoughtless monster.

Until next time, take care cancer fans.