WE SUPPORT the same football team; so we are discussing forthcoming fixtures, and our chances of success. Our perspectives differ, though. For him, this season's results are particularly important, because, while I may live to see next season, he won't. September is stretching it. My friend has cancer of the lungs, and it is a question of months, not years.

He starts radiotherapy soon, which they say will help with the pain, and perhaps give him an extra month or two, but no more. His children and grandchildren were visiting on the day that I was there: they were playing, fighting, talking, laughing, and getting on with life, but getting on with it with him.

There is some discussion, late-afternoon, about going out for some chicken nuggets instead of the planned sausages. But my friend will stay with liquids - the only thing he can keep down. He is on morphine; but his wife is not, and it is still a bit of a shock for her. She knows that he is dying, but probably won't believe it until he's gone, because we're all like that: we believe slowly, and as we are able.

Thankfully, no one talks of a "battle". Every week, another celebrity is reported in the media as having "lost his/her battle with cancer", but we will not go down that path. I remember the poet Anthony Wilson's frustration when people referred to his experience of cancer as "a fight" (Features, 14 September).

"This is based on the unthinking assumption that having cancer is a battle," he wrote. "This is deeply unhelpful, because it makes a link between the character of the person who is ill, and their chances of surviving the disease."

The way in which Wilko Johnson speaks suggests that it is not a battle at all. In fact, the former Dr Feelgood guitarist said, the news that he was suffering from terminal cancer of the pancreas made him feel "vividly alive". The 65-year-old spoke on the BBC's Front Row: "I noticed the symptoms a few months ago; there was this lump in my stomach. I treated it by ignoring it and hoping it would go away.

"When I went in for the diagnosis, and the doctor told me 'You've got cancer,' it was quite plain it was an inoperable thing. We walked out of there, and I felt an elation of spirit. You're walking along, and suddenly you're vividly alive. You're looking at the trees and the sky and everything, and it's just 'whoah!'

"I am actually a miserable person. I've spent most of my life moping in depressions and things, but this has all lifted."

This is not everyone's story, but it reminds me of Anthony de Mello's description of the enlightened as those who know they may not live to see tomorrow. Doesn't everyone know this, comes the reply. They do, he says, but not everyone feels it. Mr Johnson feels it.