Friday the day I swore I would train again. I wake up after a restless night and go through my usual rising routine and ring the GP surgery to book my 28 jab that is due on March the 3rd. At first they seem confused but after some toing and froing the GP reception staff finally got it and so I now have my slot. With that out of the way I check my vitals which are all good. I get into my training gear. Its psychologically important to do this as because once I have it on there is no going back. Stopping only to take my now late morning meds I grab my new sailing gloves with the long fingers and head for the rowing machine in the garage. Thankfully the weather is milder so the garage is not as icy as it was 22 days ago when I was last able to train on the rower. Figuring out how I co-ordinate all the button pushing that needs to be done to get going takes a while in full finger gloves but I get there and I am soon off on a 30 minute row. Bugger me I am stiff, it only takes a few days for me to seize up these days and lose fitness, it’s quite perturbing really. So I grind out the session, changing my grip to minimise any damage to my still healing hand scars. I get to the end with relief and feeling knackered, but I have kept the promise to myself to train today. Its a very average session but I will take that. Just under 6 kilometres and under 400 calories but it has got me over the 100 mark on my fitness App. So a job done.

I head for the couch and record the session in my journal and then snack on Marmite crumpets and Red Bull, I have not quite mastered the balanced and well crafted weight loss diet yet, especially as I top it off with a Crunchie. As I let this potent combination settle I prepare for a shower by gathering up the necessary sandwich bag, gaffer tape and newly delivered Nivea cream. My partner and I are going out with fiends for a meal tonight so I feel I ought to make the effort although I might have over done it on the Nivea cream having misjudged how big a pot is. It turns out that 400ml is big and I thought I’d have two to be on the safe side.

The shower, the hair drying and the creaming take longer than expected but I am ready for the rest of the day ahead. My partner returns from he physio and plaits my hair before we go and have a snack at the nearest, and cosiest garden centre tea room. There is time to chat about my partners impending retirement plans before we return home, she to nap and me to draft a bit more of the blog.

I spend more time reading Paul Muldoon and Harry Martinson’s Aniara. I suspect I might have nodded of before it is time to get ready to meet our friends at a nearby pub for an evening meal. It ages since we have seen them and I am looking forward to catching up with them. I can feel the urge to write but I am not sure what. Its a feeling I get sometimes when there is “Stuff” washing around inside me but I do not know what it is until I sit down and write, but it has to be the right time. Its a strange sensation but usually my head lets me know by suddenly dropping a phrase or a couple of lines into my head and then its time to write. It can be awkward as it can happen at any time with the result that I can end up scribbling phrases or lines on anything I can lay my hands on, anywhere at ant time. I just have to be patient with brain while it sorts itself out and then waves the green flag at me to go.

Thursday and its the day I see the hand therapist so I zip through my rising routine and get myself breakfast and down my meds. I cannot be bothered to go through the faff of putting my hand in a sandwich bag to keep it dry so I save the delights of a shower. I am checking my website and YouTube channel when I get a bit display on my screen and a voice telling me my machine is locked and to ring the “Microsoft” engineers immediately as my IP address had been invaded and my personal data was at risk. What I was not to do was turn off my machine but to ring the engineers so they could guide me through a process of getting rid of the threat. The voice just kept repeating itself over and over. As I was on my way to see the hand therapists I just turned my machine off and left it to its own devices. When I returned I switched my machine on and surprise surprise it functioned perfectly. Nice try scammers.

The hand therapist was as lovely as ever and undressed my wound before giving it a clean and then removing the dead skin around the scar. The upshot is that I have a small area in my palm that is still healing and a couple of spots on my ring finger that are still not healed yet. So I get a reduced dressing, new hand exercises and a time table to remove my bandages. On Saturday I can remove my palm Dressing and on Monday the ring finger dressing can go, I just need to put an ordinary plaster on the ring finger if I need to. After that its all about, compression, the exercises and the Nivea cream. I think I should be able to manage that. The hand and scar therapist is pleased with the way I am coming along adn so am I.

Once home I have a late lunch and turn on my “infected” laptop. As I said above there is no problem and the scam alert has gone. I check here on my web site first of all to ensure it is functioning and it clearly is. I’ve noticed recently I am getting spikes in the visiting and viewing figures from all over the world and I have no explanation why. So what started as a way of keeping family, friends and old colleagues up-to-date with what is going on with me, my cancer and immediate family it seems that it has grown slight beyond that. Perhaps it is bits and pieces of content that I put in now and again or that if you do this long enough then statistically the visitors and views increase a bit.

Having checked my laptop and the website I wander out in search of Nivea cream and a paper, the reality turned out to be that Nivea cream does not exist in my village and you have to visit at least two shops to get a paper with the crosswords in. Of course on this peregrination I also managed additional treats. So after my round trip I still had to order my NIvea Cream from Amazon, who say it will arrive tomorrow. I do the crosswords for the day and cruise towards the evening having spent time with my partner picking out possible TV wall paper. All this time I am intermittently strapping up my finger and doing my exercise routine. So by early evening and having eaten I return to the blog before slipping into the pre selected TV wallpaper. So my evening saunters toward my night meds and putting on the night splint. Tomorrow I shall train. Yes tomorrow I will train, the proper start of hitting Christmas nine or ten kilos lighter.

Wednesday and I am up and around quite early for me having completed my rising rituals, breakfasted and taken my morning meds. This morning is all about getting new poems onto my YouTube Channel: PROST8KANCERMAN. I try to rig my laptops so that I can use one as an auto prompt, but I am not sure it works that well, however I post three new unpublished poems. I hope people like them. I have put them here on the blog so you do not have to hunt around for them but by all means share them.

For those interested in following up about Spoon Theory here is the wikipedia link to the subject, but there are lots of articles and posters by all sorts of organisations on the internet. It has become really popular due to its accessibility in terms of understanding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory

By lunch time I am done but I wonder if this flurry of video activity is my way of dealing with the fact that I might have to read a poem in public in March. Ideally I would learn one by heart so I could just perform it but memorising stuff was never my forte. I could get the emotional gist of things and some of the hooks but I was always better at holding onto visual material. That’s one of the aspects of my dyslexia.

After my morning of YouTubing and post lunch I decide to do just one more video. It takes an age to get it any where near right plus the fact that I had got bored with my green ice hockey training jersey and decided to go for the real thing and let my hair down. My vow not to have my hair cut after it all fell out after chemo has left me with the long flow I now have but I am very disinclined to have it tampered with as for me it is a powerful visual reminder of how long I have been fighting and winning, something I think the poem reflects.

Finally I have had enough, I’ve probably done more than I should so I take to drafting the blog and playing with the technology to try and get things roughly right. I’m not going for “professional” after all there is no such thing as living a professional life only of being a professional within ones life. It would be ludicrous to set out to live a “professional” life unless one interprets that as aspiring to some sort of ethical, principled lifestyle in which everything is perfect. My experience is that I fuck up and I am not even sure I know what a perfect/professional life would look like. I always relied upon the maximization of error to maximize learning most of my life, I’m unlikely to stop now. There or there about will have to do me. Not that I would not want the doctors, dentists and trades people of the world not to do their best. But I guess that’s being professional not living a “professional” life.

In this day there are real world things to attend to like the Tesco order and a football match to watch later in the evening along side a lot of little chores, like bringing in the bins, that need to be attended to. I do attend to the chores but have time to continue reading Paul Muldoon’s Selected Poems 1968 – 2014. I suppose it is inevitable that as poets age the content of their poems include more and more “learnt stuff”, by which I mean the experience of their culture, what they have read and who they have met. Some of the poems become cascades of names and illusions to others work and associations between events. Some how the straight forwardness of experience seems to get wrapped differently. I maybe making a broad generalisation but that is how it seems to me, and I wonder if that has happened to me, especially lately. I hope not, I would like to think that I could write about the experiences I am trying to capture without comparison to others or using others work as the counterpoint to my own, but I know that occasionally the work of other poets sneak into my own verses. Tomorrow I see the hand therapist for another session to see how well my hand is healing after my operation on the 30th of January. I am hoping the bandage can come off completely so that I can get both hands wet and start back into training. I suspect she will once again remould my night splint. So I get into the rest of my day, head for the evening and my night meds.

Tuesday I wake to my partner going to work, so I have time to check my messages and socials before checking my vitals. Having got up and taken my morning meds I go the village shop for a paper but what I am really excited about is the letter that I received this morning from a friend in Scotland. In my local pub I order breakfast and a hot chocolate and settle back to read my letter. It is a delight to get letters especially this old colleague and friend. It appears her ideal place in the world is being “developed”, which means that everything from the putting green behind her apartments to the dolphins in the bay are going to suffer the consequences. I enjoy my letter alongside breakfast before heading home to do todays crosswords.

Crosswords done, I return to the task of find the pen top I lost sitting on the sofa, a small but irritating task. Logic demands that it must be close by and indeed it turns out to be so. I find it snuggled behind a sock that had found its way underneath the sofa. With this little victory achieved I move on to checking the garden camera for signs of “my” hedgehog! To my delight he/she is alive and well and last seen very recently in the garden. Its time to put some food out again and prepare the hedgehog hotel for Spring. I get the videos onto my system and replace the camera before refiling the bird and squirrel feeders. Its a crisis, I’ve run out of peanuts and bird seed, so its onto the internet and a reorder. While I am about it I rearrange some to the garden pots, noting how many of the are sprouting bulb shoots and how much is breaking through the ground. There is a camellia that has already opened a bud and had it fail due to the frost. The seasons are really changing. With the initial tinkering to the garden done I return to the sofa to read and ease into the evening.

The evening slides in and I start to draft the blog while seeing if an Australian drama is worth a watch. It isn’t looking promising at the moment but as there is still time for a film there is hope yet.

My frustration mounts as I am inpatient to get get back to training, I can feel my fitness drain away and I am becoming more tired more quickly. I have decided that once I have seen the hand therapist on Thursday I will start to row again on Friday. For now I take my night meds, don my night splint and go to bed. Only 48 hours to go before I hopefully loose my finger bandage and start to train again.

Monday and my partner brings me hot water as I struggle to the surface. There is much to do before I can get up. There are birthday greetings adn gifts to send followed by a call to the doctors to try and book my next hospital bloods and my GP monthly injection. The hospital bloods are possible but not the injection as the calendar is no yet on the system, which I think is cutting it a bit fine. With that out of the way I do my first set of physio hand exercises. With all that out of the way I finally get up and discover I have missed a call from a friend.

I munch my way through a couple of croissants and a small coffee before waving my partner off to the gym. My challenge is to get tonight meal in the crock pot, usually a doddle but with my right hand still with a dressing its a bit more of a challenge, especially the peeling and cutting up. It goes okay if a bit slow and I wrestle the ingredients into the pot and set it going. With that out of he way its time to bag up my hand in a freezer bag and gaffer tape it up so that I can take a much needed shower. Its an art form having a shower and keeping one hand dry and still getting to all the essential nooks and crannies. By the time I was out and dried, lunchtime loomed. I started to draft the blog when my partner returned home from the gym so it was time to go exploring another garden centre for food.

A large chunk of the afternoon is taken up with tuna melts, toasted teacakes and warm drinks as well as conversations about future plans. Once home we walk to the village shop to get a paper and some bits and pieces before returning home. There are cross words to do before tea and an evening of Unforgotten. Most exciting of all is the arrival of the poetry book I ordered. Its a collection of Paul Muldoon who I am going to see in mid March. He is supposed to be one of the worlds leading poets so I thought I ought to read some of his stuff.

Not only have the poems arrived but also my desperate buy of sailing gloves to get me back to training as quickly as possible. I am hoping that at this weeks meeting with the hand therapist will see me loose the bandage on my hand and I can get going. These gloves are full gloves and not the usual training gloves that are cut off across the fingers that would irritate my scar. I am really pleased with them, I seem to have got this right, a real find.

Saturday was a day of the poetry stanza, so I spent my usual waking moments taking my vitals, checking messages and then getting up for breakfast. By mid morning I was alone in the house and putting the finishing touches to my poetry contribution. By noon it was raining hard as I lunched and then set off to the stanza venue.

There was just the five of us this time at the Stanza, which left time for chat and to nibble the biscuits that people had bought. We thought that people had not come due to the rain. All the poems were interesting and well formed. Mine was well formed but I felt no where near the artistry of the other four. As a result of small numbers we finished early and I was able to drive back in the light.

A fish and chip tea saw the family move into the evening and the film The Queen of the Dessert, a bio pic of Gertrude Bell an English writer, traveller, spy and political officer who became and expert and influencer in the middle east. The film had her literally riding off into the sunset on a camel across the desert having told two princess they would become kings, which in life they actually did. The reality of her life was that she died of an over dose of sleepi.ng pills some time later. So with the film over thee was football highlights and night meds to take before getting off to bed. Al day I had tried to keep to my two hourly routine of hand exercises and compression as my finger continues to recover. This night I took pre-emptive paracetamol before donning my night finger splint and also added a layer of athletic bandage round my palm to padding to the palm.

Sunday in general the pre-emptive paracetamol and addition padding on my hand worked. I slept reasonably well and both I and my partner rose late after I had made warm drinks for us both. Breakfast followed by some “puttering around” during which I wrote snippets of a poem. Once my small number of chores were done I settled down to make sense of my jottings and finally got them into some sort of shape. This had clearly been formed out of yesterdays experience at the poetry stanza meeting.

434
I wonder if I have killed poetry,
taken something from the indescribable 
that I seek to capture in words. 
All those meters, iambic, trochee,
Villanelles and sonnets, the swathes of
forms and 
analytic tools I use 
to dissect what is and isn’t there.
How strange a world we live in.
I stub my toe and yell FUCK!
and then I wonder,
was my full-frontal fricative F
F enough,
Or the soft and singular vowel 
sufficiently sibilant
before the curly K and 
kicking K guttural end
to let catharsis begin?
Is this this the explanation of what
I left behind in childhood
while I learnt to colour 
inside the lines?
Or is this the self-conscience seeking
of what I now call adulthood. 
I murder my Villanelle 
and return to my pen and ink 
hoping the flow returns.
                                                                       434 16-02-2025

A world of too much analysis I think is the message, However no time to rest on my laurels I accompany my partner to the village Co-Op and get a paper and other essentials like Tunnock’s Tea Cakes and Crunchies. Returning home there is afternoon crumpets and a drink to be had while I draft the blog. Its a very British afternoon, writing, nibbling crumpets and reflecting on the world, that a friend described as “living in a dystopian Sci Fi novel”. I might join her in a glass of red wine, which does not seem such a bad way to counter the current political pissing contest that is going on.

In all this is my desperate need to get back to training, I need to do that soon before I loose any resistance to the side effects of my medications. I need to row again. To that end I have ordered a pair of sailing gloves that should offer protection to my hand scar. Once I have seen the hand therapist on Thursday training must begin in earnest again. I am managing to keep my weight more or less on the hundred kilo mark but I need to drop eight to ten kilos before next Christmas.

Friday and I am awake early doing my vitals, taking my meds and getting ready to go and see my hand therapist. So its all a bit of a rush but I am soon in the car to arrive on time. The hand therapist removes my dressing from yesterdays stitch removal and then washes my hand free of the last remaining blood. My wound is examined closely and it appears I have two spots that have not healed on the surface which means they are going to have to heal from the inside out, which is going to take a while. The therapist redresses the wound and then instructs me on my next set of physio exercises. I now have to wind athletic compression tape around my finger for ten minutes before I do my hand exercises, which now include making a fist. She measures my finger straightness with a neat little protractor tool and jots down my progress. With the basics done she reheats my finger splint and remoulds it to my finger in its new dressing. After forty five minutes she tells me how much I owe her and I give her fresh notes and drive home with my new dressing and instructions.

I decide to wait till lunch time to eat when I can take my partner, in the meantime I begin to read Aniara : A review of Man in Time and Space. by Harry Martinson. He was a Swedish poet who had a fascination with science and managed to combine poetry with it. So I settle down to read the introduction to it and the explanation of some of the names for things that Martinson created. First published in 1956 it is an intriguing glimpse of how someone thought the future might go given all the new ideas in physics and engineering of the time. The fact that it is written as 100 plus songs in an epic poem form makes it a fascination read, and a manageable one. Interestingly their is no copyright on it as it was decided that this should be available to everyone. My copy originated from Trent University library, I am curious to know how it came to be available to me. Clearly the university was not big on Swedish Nobel Prize winning poets.

My partner and I go to lunch and pull a blank at our first port of call, of course it is Valentines day so there are more people than usual eating out this lunch time. We find a space at our local garden centre and I get to have a late, late breakfast. On our return home we walk to the village shops and gather up a paper and treats before retuning home. I settle down t do the crosswords and then move onto preparing for tomorrows poetry stanza. I had decide to take my stab at a Villanelle but realise at the last moment that I have one of the key elements wrong so I spend much time re writing it so that the all the “B” lines in the rhyming structure through the poem rhyme. So I end up with a second version of my Villanelle to Villanelle. I will take to the Stanza meeting tomorrow then that me done with Villanelles, I leave the the field and acknowledge the much greater artistry and poetic talent of the likes of Dylan Thomas, Auden and Sylvia Plath.

428.1

Oh Villanelle Oh Villanelle how she loves to kill
with any weapon and fashion to inspire
she took their lives in ways to thrill.

This was no ordinary way for blood to spill
nor was it how most become immobile,
Oh Villanelle Oh Villanelle how she loves to kill
.
The boots below the tailored twill
would step ruggedly upon a smile
she took their lives in ways to thrill.

no end of ways for hearts to still
liberating souls a darker style
Oh Villanelle Oh Villanelle how she loves to kill.

From acrid poisons to electric drill
Villanelle ran the gamut of versatile
She took their lives in ways to thrill.

For body disposal pigs fit the bill
their voracious appetites like hellfire,
Oh Villanelle, Oh Villanelle how she loves to kill
she took their lives in ways to thrill.

                                                                                                    428.1 14-02-2025
						  A Villanelle for Villanelle of Killing Eve

Having made my adjustments and run off copies for tomorrow I set about drafting the blog. I am rapidly running out of spoons, it seems to have been a long week, but just when I thought I might sink into the evening a friend rings me. She is collecting her mother in law and has taken the opportunity to ring me. We chat for a while and catch up on our week and what is going on before she arrives at the train station to collect her guest. I finish off the blog and sink into the evening, I shall watch TV and do nothing more than let myself be entertained in ways far different from last nights performance of Stewart Lee vs The Man Wulf. It will be night meds for me and then a night with the amended finger splint. Hopefully I will not need to get up it the night to take pain killers.

Thursday, this is it, the day my stitches come out of my hand, so I am out of early and dressed in no time. There is a speed breakfast of toast, hot water and morning meds then its off across town to the hospital. I gave myself and hour and quarter to do a three quarter hour journey and still arrived almost a quarter of an hour late, the traffic into central Leicester and our again was horrendous. There were no accidents or road works just the sheer volume of traffic and traffic light systems that appear to make no sense at all. I at least managed to ring the hospital and tell them I was delayed.

Once I arrived it was all very efficient. The nurse meet me and took me to the clinical room and got me to sit of the couch while she gathered together her stitch removal kit. Padded sheet, tweezers, dressings and the most wicked looking hooked scalpel blade I had ever seen. She then cut my old dressing off and started to play hunt the stitch. She was very good at spotting the ends of them and more importantly the way the stitch ran. Once she has had determined which way the stitch ran she was able to cut them and then pull them out along the line they were put in. We were at it for sometime as some of the stitches were across the grain and others took some odd directions, not to mention there was quite a lot of them. Eventually we were done and the nurse redressed my scar and told me that it could come off in forty eight hours. She also gave me a spare dressing and a pair of sterile “use once” scissors for the hand therapist to use tomorrow when she examines the scar and adjusts my night splint. My fingers are all “wriggly” and I can now get my palm flat on the table but I cannot form a fist properly yet as my ring finger is still swollen. I suspect that the hand therapist will give me more exercises to continue stretching the finger and the scar tissue until I am able to form a fist and the ridge of scar tissue has levelled off. All in all it was a good experience that I look back on now that am home sipping a red bull and eating a Chrunchie to up my energy level. I also had the foresight to top up the car with petrol on the home.

So by noon had started to draft the blog and turn my attention to other things like light bulb replacement and trying to decide which poem, if any to take to this Saturdays poetry stanza meeting. My evening is going to be a treat as I am taking my eldest daughter to see Stewart Lee. We are fans of his brand of humour and I am looking forward to seeing his latest show: Stewart Lee vs The Wulf Man.

I spend some time checking the history of the blog and making sure I have the number right for its duration and the length of the phases its been through, so here are the up to date numbers as of today:

WELCOME ALL:                            01 SEP 2019 TO  01 SEP 2019               1 DAY

INDUCTION DAY:                         02 SEP 2019 TO 02 SEP 2019                 1 DAY

CHEMO DAY:                                04 SEPT 2019 TO 05 JAN 2020         124 DAYS

FINGERS CROSSED PHASE:      07 JAN 2020 TO 23 MAR 2020                77 DAYS

AS GOOD AS IT GETS PHASE 1: 24 MAR 2020 TO 08 FEB 2021               322 DAYS

AS GOOD AS IT GETS PHASE 2: 10 FEB 2021 TO 21 DEC 2021               315 DAYS

ANTIANDROGEN:                          22 DEC 2021 TO. 22 FEB 2022              63 DAYS

AS GOOD AS IT GET AGAIN:        23 FEB 2022 TO 31 OCT 2022               251 DAYS

ROCKET:                                         01 NOV 2022 TO 21 DEC 2022            51 DAYS

ROCKET BOOSTER:                       22 DEC 2022 TO 06 MAR 2023            75 DAYS

RUN UP TO RADIO THERAPY:      07 MAR 2023 TO 17 MAY 2023             72 DAYS

NO MANS LAND:                            18 MAY 2023 TO 29 MAY 2023          12 DAYS

REARMAMENT:                               30 MAY 2023 TO 07 JUNE 2023           12 DAYS

REARMED:                                       08 JUN 2023 TO 09 JUN 2023             2 DAYS

CHEMO II:                                         10 JUN 2023 TO 18 AUG 2024        435 DAYS

ANGINA ADVENTURE:                     19 AUG 2024 TO 25 SEP 2024            38 DAYS

CHEMO II THE REBOOT.                   26 SEP 2024 TO 13^TH FEB 2025        141 DAYS

                                                                                     TOTAL 1992 BLOG DAYS TO DATE

                                                                                                          13^TH FEBRUARY 2025

Given that the total days from the first date of the blog to todays date is 1993 days I think I’ve done quite well to be only 1 day adrift. The bottom line is the expectation was that I had 26 months from my diagnosis in June 2019 and here I am five years eight months and five days later. Go me!

I return home from seeing Stewart Lee full of his performance, which was unexpectedly physical as well as his usual clever verbal stuff. So where are the Liberal hero’s of comedy and politics. Not a Gandhi in sight.

Wednesday and I wake after a decent night’s sleep, check my socials and take my vitals, which are all good. My morning routine no includes physiotherapy exercises for my hand. I now do repetitions of “the hook, the duck and hand star jumps” every two hours, so I before I get up I do the first session and then set my phone timer for two hours. Where ever I am or what ever I am doing when the timer goes off I stop and do my “duck, hook, star jump” routine. So with my timer set for the day I get up and make breakfast and take my morning meds. The highlight of my day is going to be visiting the dental hygienist but first there is time to do some odd chores and have a shower. Sounds simple but I am not allowed to get my bandaged hand wet, however I have found the ideal way of keeping my hand dry with a freezer bag and my old friend gaffer tape. I made the mistake today of using the American version of gaffer tape which is far more heavy duty and stickier than normal gaffer tape, so all went well until it was time to take the bag off my hand. I now have a bald ring around my right wrist where the gaffer tape took all the hair and a layer of skin off when I removed the bag from my hand. Next time I will stick to the thinner UK gaffer tape, it will be kinder to my skin.

Feeling refreshed and having unblocked sinks and refilled the soap dispenser I got dressed and took my hair out of its plait and put it back in its pony tail before settling down to start to draft the blog. I realise that this is a lot of trivial detail but I suspect that this is me dealing with my anxiety about going to the dental hygienist. I am sure that all that metal on gum activity cannot be good for me, nor can the jabbing needles into my gums and hearing the word “bleeding ” is useful. What actually pisses me off is being patronised like a five year old and treated as if I do not know how to clean my teeth and the insistence that I should be spending precious time buggering about with those little “flu” brushes every day cleaning between my teeth like some Mary Poppins chimney sweep. With stage four metastatic prostate cancer I do have other things to concern my self with, like staying alive, exercise and making the most of life. Of course I will give my teeth and extra clean before I go but it is futile as I know I will get the same comments from the hygienist about my 76 year old nhs dentistry mouth. The only thing that gets complimented is the 6 crowns I paid for and I know they are itching to get to my one nhs crown which has been in since 1981 and is still pearly white and glows in UV light light a fang.

I return from the dental hygienist having experienced all the things I predicted except the cost, which was high for the time and attention that I got. Due to the practice having a training time I had time to pop into my local Co-Op and buy a paper and some lunch before returning for my overpriced teeth attention. Having returned home I ate and did the days crosswords and then began to research ISAs spurred on by the rumours that the government was going to raid them soon for extra revenue. By the end of he afternoon I had a plan, which means I will have to go to a building society branch and have a chat. Having constructed my plan I rang the hospital that are taking my stiches out of my hand tomorrow to ask if I will be okay to drive after their removal. After being bounced around a bit I got the message that I will be fine to drive, so all that remains is to get myself across town in time for the appointment in the morning. the traffic is very unpredictable so I could be really early or embarrassingly late. With all this out of the way I settle down to read the letter from a friend which arrived today. It is my friend who writes in green ink and she brings me up to date with what she has been doing and how her preparations for her garden in Spring are going. I just love getting letters, its such a buzz to open them up and read them slowly in a quiet moment knowing the effort that has gone into them.

My returns from visiting her mother with her brother and after time to decompress we eat tea and hunker down for the evening, me to watch the last ever derby between Liverpool and Everton to be played at Goodison Park. After that it will be night meds and bed for me as my hospital appointment is and early one. I will perhaps be able to share on the blog my operation scars or not depending if they wrap my hand back up again.

Tuesday rolls round and as my partner goes to work I rouse myself and take my vitals, all good there. After checking my socials and messages I get and take my morning meds whilst doing my physio exercises for my hand which is feeling better. With the kitchen cleared I am off to the local pub for breakfast/brunch. Collecting a paper on the way I settle down at a table and order my Spanish Hash and a hot chocolate. I like to be in different places to write letters so I use a page from my journal and set about slowly writing a letter to a friend. I can write with my operated on hand but slowly and only in capitals. This is a hang over from my university days when I took all my notes in capitals and then typed them up when I went home, it was the only way could know that I would be able to read them later. My food was good and when finished I was in for a pleasant surprise, my drink was free as I had ordered my food before 11:30am. A small but lovely win for the day.

Once home I found envelopes and stamps and prepared to send my letter. I settled down to do the crosswords of the day. One of them turned out to be quite tricky due to what I think was a mis leading picture component to the clue. As I puzzled away the window cleaners arrived and proceeded to run their clever extending sponge on a hose pole over the windows. Not a ladder in sight these days, they were soon on their way having taken advantage of being able to park on the new drive and I returned to the crosswords. There then followed a period of what I can only call life admin. All those bits and pieces that need doing but have no interest value to anyone, but by the time I was through them it was time to wander over to the Posy Office to send my letter and buy a sandwich for an afternoon snack and begin to draft the blog.

I am becoming impatient to see what my hand looks like with out the stitches and how quickly I can jettison any form of dressing apart from my night finger splint. It will be at this point I will be able to share my post operation scar and most importantly resume training on the rower. I feel itchy inside to get going again and need to get started on my own recover plan. I am still encumbered by needing to shower with my hand in a gaffer taped sandwich bag to keep my dressing dry and all the other little adventures that having a bandaged hand means I have to undertake. My hand is restless to be free as it can wriggle and do a lot of things already. At the moment it feels like a boxers taped hand waiting to be laced into the fighting gloves and eager to get on with it. Occasionally I get a burning sensation in part of the incision line but it quickly passes. More persistent is the tingling numbness in the extremities of my fingers, which I was warned might happened but should over time recover, although this is not guaranteed. This is another reason I want to get free of my bandage so I can get my hand doing all the normal things it would do to see if I can speed up the return of normal feeling in my finger tips . I seem to have recovered normal movement. I think the numbness is due to a form of nerve bruising which is going to take time to work through, although I have no idea if beating them on a keyboard is waking them up or constantly putting them back to sleep again.

This evening there is a big football match on which I hope to watch. I like sport but I may have to cut down on it, all my news feeds are crammed with sports stuff driven by whatever algorithms I am plugged into, or rather what algorithms are plugged into me. I am seriously considering a period of sports fasting (except six nations rugby) and replacing it with something more brain feedery ( my made up word) and seeing how long it take to adapt what comes through in what I am being fed by my cyber feeds. I am also becoming advert intolerant, I find them insulting and patronising, more to the point taking up more and more of the time of what I watch on television. The BBC of course does not do adverts but so much of the programming is crap, like Pointless, The One Show and East Enders. Even the Graham Norton Show is a disguised advertising platform. This probably sounds snobby but I get an increasingly strong sense that life is too short to be putting up with the crap I do not like. The solution lays with me I know so perhaps I need to choose my activities more carefully and pick ones that are more brain food than processed cyber pulp. Its not like there is a shortage of books and other stuff to do. So as from tonight I shall try to change my diet and hopefully feel the benefit.