Jim Perrin is on Facebook, part 2.

We were told that Jim Perrin continues to repeat, 22/02/2019, the ‘story’ of his horrific experiences as a cancer sufferer, ref. Does Jim Perrin, Guardian Country Diarist, really have Terminal Lung Cancer? with notes generously contributed by a cancer consultant, and Jim Perrin’s cancer: truth or fantasy? and has self-plagiarised in great part from his dreadful book West and from his pre-publication article in the Sunday Times, 2010. He is doubtless somewhat frailer these days, (with an increasing tendency to play his ‘Little Old Man’ card), but still travels to and fro between France and Wales.

 ‘A dozen years ago, at the end of an extensive series of tests, I had a consultation with a wise old general chest physician on the brink of retirement from an NHS in which he’d worked for nearly fifty years, who was in charge of my case. I’d been diagnosed with metastatic disease in both lungs (highly improbable, incidentally), [This disclaimer — this ‘get-out-clause’— was not in Jim Perrin’s original writing on the subject!] had been told by an over-dramatic young GP that I had a one-in ten chance of surviving beyond five years (she was wearing a very low-cut top revealing a spectacular embonpoint —even supposing sick men can notice such things—and wheeled across from her desk on her chair to position herself between my legs and told me this. I presumed she was working on my will to live, and looked her straight in the eye); the oncologist to whom I was referred had recommended right pneumonectomy (why, if it was in both lungs, I wondered?), chemotherapy and radiotherapy. I’d just heard of a man in Aberdeen with the same supposed condition, who’d had a healthy lung accidentally removed and the diseased one left in place… I was already thinking ‘bollocks to that’ when I went to see the old physician. ‘Those boys in Shrewsbury are a bit knife-happy’ he mused, after reading through my notes. ‘Things grow slowly at your age. No harm in waiting a while to see what happens. If I were you, I’d just bog off somewhere healthy, get out of this country…’ I could’ve hugged him. I knew what was wrong with me, and it wasn’t cancer.’ 

Do note how in this account he has changed his tune. His survival over all these years has given him the lie and he badly needs to amend his story. He has written that he was actually suffering the somatic effect of profound grief, and by doing so tacitly admitted it was not the Terminal Lung Cancer from which, in his book of 2010 — with its many in-depth descriptions of his deathly symptoms — his numerous articles and interviews, he had been claiming to be dying; even citing July, 2007 as his date of diagnosis!

‘So I sold my home and left Wales, and was fortunate to have been in a position  to do both. I bought a house in Ariège and set to renovating it… Yes, a dozen years ago I ‘bogged off’ somewhere healthy.’

We know, first-hand, that there were two young women in succession who were both left defrauded and devastated in Wales. (They were among several Jim Perrin involved himself with after our sister Jac died, but were the last before he went to Ariège.)  One was relieved of tens of thousands of pounds and one ‘lost’ the entire value of her own property, just prior to Jim Perrin’s being fortunate in his ability to go to France and buy ‘his’ house…

To read the notes an independent consultant so generously prepared for us regarding all the far-fetched details in the account Jim Perrin wrote, is to realise just how foolish the author was — and is:

Notes concerning lung cancer, with reference to Jim Perrin’s claim to have the disease. 

Jac’s sisters.