There's Something I've Been Dying to Tell You

Lynda enjoyed a career spanning forty-five years. Her roles covered drama as Helen Herriott in All Creatures Great and Small and comedy in her own series Faith in the Future, which won Best Comedy in 1998. She also managed to give us a twirl in Strictly Come Dancing and plenty of lip as a Loose Woman for six years. She created the role of Chris in the stage version of Calendar Girls and after a successful run in the West End went on to spend four years playing to full houses in a nationwide tour and she is still loved and remembered as the long-suffering mum in the OXO commercials. Lynda had previously written Lost and Found which was a Sunday Times bestseller and she enjoyed bestselling success with her fiction writing too. Her real life family brought her great joy and she lived in north London with her youngest son, Robert, and her stepson Bradley, while her eldest son Michael lived just round the corner. She finally found true happiness with her husband Michael Pattemore and they were married in 2008 on her sixtieth birthday. Lynda sadly lost her battle with cancer in October 2014.

Her brilliantly titled book, There's Something I've Been Dying to Tell You, charts the unravelling of that delusion, and her determination to wrest a meaningful life out of sudden chaos. By turns, it is riotous, deeply serious, practical and sad. Reading it is like being at her kitchen table with a glass of wine to hand. Not just listening to the expletives of pain or the dawning of reality, but rooting for her when the treatment appears to be working, sharing her fears as her life expectation dwindles, and rocking with laughter at the absurdities that go with having the "least sexy" cancer of them all. Her description of the mechanics of dealing with a stoma bag in the ladies' at Buckingham Palace, when she accepted her OBE in March, reads like a comedy script.