John Diamond's life is "perfect" he has a gorgeous wife, two wonderful children and successful career as a journalist writing an article for a weekend paper. Things couldn't get much better. Then he found the lump.
Reading the play A Lump in My Throat; you can tell that John is scared by this, although he does a good job of trying to cover it with humour. From the very beginning theirs dramatic tension this links him with the audience. He gains this link so early in the play and it's this which makes the play so meaningful and thought provoking.
John Diamond grew up in Hackney, his family were not very well off, and so his life was anything but easy in his early years. However, he was a bright child and did very well at school. He had aspired to become a drama teacher and after he got his degree he decided he would prefer to go into journalism. He was incredibly successful and even won the prestigious award of Journalist of the Year 1997. He was a very public figure and was on many television and radio shows but he was mostly known for his weekly column in The Times newspaper. In this column he would talk about anything and everything that happened to cross his mind. He was tremendously quick-witted and therefore an extremely funny man and had many devoted readers. All this added up to a pretty much perfect life'.
John had smoked his way heavily through more than 19 years of his life. He had started at thirteen when his best friend; Joe Besser had suggested that they would both "pull more girls" if they did. They had both promised to give up when they turned eighteen. By the time John had a job he was on a pack a day. When he was in his mid-thirties he realised that after ten minutes of football it took him an hour to get his breath back; he was on two packs a day and he decided to quit.
Not that I ever did stop smoking properly', he managed to get himself addicted to the exact thing that was designed to make him stop;...