My superfit best friend got cancer at 47 – we battled it by going raving

My phone pinged with a WhatsApp from my friend Conrad. “Fancy this?” He’d sent a link to an event at the Barbican: the Outlook Orchestra, a proper orchestra playing drum and bass — the fast, bass-heavy dance music we’d danced to as students in the Nineties. Violins doing Fabio and Grooverider, in a hall where people usually sit in silence for Beethoven. “WHAT?!” I typed back. I was in. It was Easter 2023 and we had a few drinks in the bar first. Talking was already hard for Con. He had a terminal brain tumour, and between that and the surgery to cut some of it out, he’d lost a lot of his words. Sentences cost him effort and often trailed off before he could say what he meant. Then we took our seats, the music started, and none of that mattered. The hall was full of 40 and 50-something ravers just like us. Some had even brought air horns. Everyone was on their feet within minutes and nobody sat down for two hours. That is how Con and I spent much of the last year of his life, raving like we were students again. The bass was so deep you felt it in your chest and nobody could talk over it, so his missing words didn’t matter. For a few hours, Con could forget he was dying. Con and I had met in 1994, aged 18, in Griffin Close halls at Birmingham University. He was a lanky 6ft 4in boy from Bristol who spent every weekend raving. I was a sheltered, middle-class girl from north London who had barely set foot in a nightclub. I followed him anyway, feeling intimidated but cool. Shorts Most weekends we were at the Custard Factory in Digbeth, where I tried to hide my posh accent. It’s a “cultural centre” now. In the mid-Nineties, it was where we spent our weekends dancing to LTJ Bukem, Roni Size and, of course, Fabio and Grooverider. Con was a hedonist with a tidy mind. Our gang would stagger back exhausted, and his room would be pristine. He was a stickler for grammar and the first person I knew to pay into a pension. Then we grew up. Mostly. Con became a software engineer and married Dijana, a Macedonian who is one of the most direct, and most caring, people I’ve ever met, and one of my very best friends. I introduced them. They were the happiest couple I knew, partly because Con cheerfully did whatever Dijana told him. He was also modest. When a work quiz asked staff for a fact nobody knew about them, his colleagues humble-bragged about their sporting triumphs. Con said he had once eaten six kebabs in a weekend. In early 2022, Con woke up unable to speak or read properly. Doctors said it was a stroke, and Con, struggling for words, rang round his friends to explain the warning signs so we’d get to hospital quickly if it ever happened to us. But his speech never fully came back, and more tests followed. In May, Dijana called. It had never been a stroke. Con had a grade 4 glioblastoma. My superfit friend, who ran up to 50 miles a week and cycled as far again, had an aggressive cancer with no cure. Eighteen months, tops. Phone still pressed to my ear, I sat down on the pavement. After that, Con and I met once a week: a Friday or Saturday if there was a rave, a Wednesday for drinks if not. It felt like a secret life. During the week I was money and business editor at this paper, with a team and a budget, plus two kids and a husband at home. At weekends I was back in the crowd, arms in the air, yelling for a rewind. We saw Andy C, DJ Hype and Shy FX. Then the Outlook Orchestra announced a date in Bristol, Con’s home town, where he’d grown up dancing to this music. I booked two tickets and WhatsApped him with far too many exclamation marks. “No way!” he replied. But a few weeks before the gig, Con started having seizures. Instead of dancing in Bristol, he ended up in intensive care after a second operation, again kept awake so surgeons could judge how much tumour to take. I sold the tickets to a colleague, who sent me videos of the gig. I showed them to Con at his bedside. In his last six months, Con wasn’t up to raving. We tried meals, but talking became too stressful. We switched to films, then, when Hollywood plots confused him, to old Hitchcocks. He asked me to sit on his right, because he could no longer see anything on his left. He never complained. After I watched him stagger off unsteadily from the cinema one evening, Dijana suggested I came to theirs instead. In his last six months, the raves were replaced with movies So I visited on Sundays. Dijana cooked us a feast and Con and I drank wine and did jigsaws. He was ridiculously good at them. Even as the tumour ravaged his brain, he kept going, piece by piece. Then the Outlook Orchestra announced a London date for March. A second chance. I bought two tickets, wondered about ticket insurance in case he wasn’t still here, felt terrible for even thinking it, and gave them to Con at a jigsaw session around his birthday in November. For me it was a big ta-da moment. I don’t think he really understood what I was giving him. By March, Con was in a hospice. Neither of us went to the gig, and the tickets went unused. He barely spoke by then, but he was still very much Con, a man of science with no time for alternative treatments. When a kind woman came in to offer him reiki, he waited until she was leaving, then produced the clearest three words I’d heard from him in weeks: “F**k that s**t.” I wish I could tell you I told him I loved him, the way you love a friend who’s known you since you were 18. I’d rehearsed it over and over. Only I didn’t. Once he tried to speak to me. He seemed so intent, but his words didn’t make sense, and I backed away awkwardly. I still regret it. I hope he knew anyway. Con died on 10 April 2024, aged 49, at Trinity Hospice in Clapham, south London, with Dijana, who had nursed him through two years of illness, and the three children he loved so fiercely, Oscar, Felix and Arabella, at his side. Six months later, a WhatsApp from my friends Fran and Jessica. Fancy this? Fabio and Grooverider at Koko in Camden. Hell, yes. We danced for eight hours and drank far too much. At one point I cried, and like an idiot tried to push to the front to ask the MC to give Con a shout-out. I gave up. Fran and Jessica have already booked the next one. I’ll be there for Con, yelling for a rewind.