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How a brain tumour turned my mum into a stand-up comedian

When she awoke from surgery, Ruth Linton had changed. But what terrified her children turned out to be a form of liberation for her

January 15, 2020 16:16
Ruth (left) and Deborah Linton
3 min read

My mum is, in many ways, the archetypal glamorous Jewish grandmother.

She serves my children crudités on her best plates when they go for tea and puts cucumber in their water.

A blow dry or platter of sandwiches are the solution to everything and, when Chanukah fell at the same time as Christmas, she garnished the salt beef with cranberries.

She’s always been pretty funny. But when she was diagnosed with a meningioma — a slow-growing brain tumour detected, after months of crushing headaches, in August 2014 — packing out the upstairs room of a Manchester pub with her own stand-up comedy act was the last thing I expected to feature in her recovery.