It’s not just Germans like Carolin Würfel (16 December) who face a challenge with the question “How are you?” When I was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer, that question went from being a routine conversation-opener to something much trickier.
The convention, in Britain at least, is to answer something like “Oh, not bad…” Frankly, things are very bad, so I’m stuck between the dishonesty of the ritual reply and the full truth, which is a lot to fling back at someone offering an innocent greeting. I’ve developed the more nuanced response “All right today”, which I use if I really am doing all right in the general context of things.
Some days are genuinely rotten, in which case it remains a struggle to work out what to say, but the rest of the time I try to respond relative to my “new normal”. Some days I still have joyous events and upbeat feelings, in which case I’d stretch to a buoyant “Pretty good today”, but always I feel compelled to append the word “today” as a matter of honesty about the future.
Mark Cottle
Maesygwartha, Monmouthshire
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