When ‘How are you?’ becomes a painful question to answer | Letter

Mark Cottle, who has metastatic prostate cancer, responds to an article by Carolin Würfel

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.