Thursday, I wake up in the spare room as my partner has a squeaky throat. I check and find she is still in bed and has cancelled her physio appointment. Once up I clear the kitchen and make breakfast. I am not feeling top notch myself but I have got into my training kit. Having spent a bit of time catching upon news and message boards I finally go to the garage and strap myself on the rower. Its six days since I last rowed as my 28 injection has set me back a bit. The garage is cold so I get going as quickly as I can. My body is not happy so I focus on being steady. By the end of the half hour I have got into a rhythm and the numbers are quite good.

I record the session in my journal and change into my clothes for going to the beautician to have my nails done later. I drive my partner, who is slowly recovering from her squeaky voice , to the beautician where we settle in. My partner goes first while I sip hot water and chat to the beautician. It comes to my turn and I am pleased to find that my usual “sparkles” have been found. After about forty minutes I have neat and discreetly sparkly nails.

I drive home and spend what is left of the afternoon doing the days crosswords. I have just about finished the puzzles when Amazon deliver my latest book. It is the new David Sedaris book of essays entitled The Land and its People. I enjoy Sedaris’s wit and off beat humour so I am looking forward to my new read.

Having eaten the evening meal I settle down to watch England play Croatia. England sneak it by a narrow margin. With the game over I draft the days blog and then continue to watch TV until I take my night meds and go to bed looking for a long nights sleep.

Tuesday, first day post 28 day injection and I am feeling ropey. I do eventually get up after checking my socials and messages. A simple breakfast and my morning meds sees me into mid morning and more Christmas organising. While my partner goes to visit her mother in the care home I apply a second coat of gloss to the stair bannisters and then prepare a shepherds pie for tea. I am still feeling sore from yesterdays injection and not at my best. Most of the day is lost in cognitive mist until the evening when I eat and watch TV with my partner. The outstanding memory of the day is reading Rabindranath Tagore’s poem Unending Love. I think it is a staggering poem and makes me think that I may not have it in me to write a good love poem.

Unending Love

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,
Its ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played alongside millions of lovers, shared in the same
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell-
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you
The love of all man’s days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours –
And the songs of every poet past and forever

So with the poem in my head I take my meds, put the bins out, load the dishwasher and go to bed hoping for inspiration.

Wednesday and I wake up after a reasonable nights sleep. I check my news feeds and socials before my partner brings me a hot water and the news that the Land Registry has made an error on the deeds of her mothers house when it was digitised. It has a wrong post code on a document generated when the deed was digitised. I make my breakfast and take my morning meds while my partner waits over 30 minutes on the phone trying to get through to the land registry without success. My partner is picked up by a friend for lunch so I send a message to the land registry pointing out the error. They claim to respond in 24 hours during business hours so in theory they should reply tomorrow. It is all unwanted aggravation at a difficult time and appears to be a simple transcription error.

I watch an interview with David Sadaris, the American essay writer and wit and note he has a new book out, which I order. My eldest daughter brings me a paper and a box of Maltesers so I settle to do the days cross words and to draft the blog for the today and yesterday. After a while I find myself writing poems, one of which is below.

571
I would like to announce 
that I am not heart broken
at not winning the 
National Poetry Competition.
It was an afternoon foolishness
when I thought “ l’ll give it a go”.
I’m no Woolf or Sackville –West,
winning for fun,
nor am I a McCartney Lennon combo
writing a swimming pool at will.
Somewhere hidden in this futile entry
lays the lost hope and fantasies
of  recognition that lurk darkly
in the unconscious, prodding 
and giving voice to the 
vestigial child’s fears.
Its easier to send verses to oblivion 
than face the fact
that the child 
has come along for the ride.

						571 11-11-2026

My partner returns from her long lunch with her throat still sore and her voice disappearing. We both rest for the rest of the afternoon until I make myself tea. The evening is more Jack Ryan and an episode of Celebrity Race Across the World before my partner goes off to bed hoping to recover by tomorrow’s appointment with the physio and the manicurist. I finish drafting the blog and clear the kitchen before taking my night meds and going off to sleep in the spare room in an attempt to avoid catching whatever my partner has.

It was a weekend of grandchildren activities. My partner and I spent the weekend in the Forest of Dean helping to keep two young grandsons amused to help out our youngest daughter while her partner was away for the weekend. The boys are a delight and have super amounts of energy and curiosity, however they still have moments when they want to snuggle up under an arm pit and be read to. The youngest, just eleven months is crawling and at high speed so Christmas is going to be fun especially when he gets interested in the Christmas tree and the pretty lights. We left the boys to welcome home their dad at lunch time and I drove back in a single hop to home. All I was fit for was watching England thump Australia at rugby, whilst feeling a touch of PGSD, ( post grandchildren stress disorder). A slow evening recovery saw me do a Tesco order for Monday and book a Christmas slot before taking my night meds and going off to bed knowing I need to be up early tomorrow to have my 28 day jab a the GP surgery.

Monday arrives after a patchy nights sleep, although this night did not include a period of time with a three year old sharpening his elbows on my back. I get up, down a glass of hot water and prepare to get to the GP surgery. I take my morning meds and spend a bit of time waiting with my partner for her Uber to arrive and take her to her ski clinic appointment. I walk to the surgery and I am soon in with the nurse who very effectively and efficiently pumps my depot into me. I should be good for another 28 days now. While there I make an appointment for my next set of hospital blood tests. So at the end of November I will have my first PSA results for quite a while. It is an important marker and will determine whether I need to see the oncologist before my planned oncology review in January next year. After being jabbed I arrive home just in time to see my partner leave in her Uber.

I make breakfast and then refill my drugs dosettes for the next two weeks. At the end of these two weeks I will be down to taking 2mg of steroids, which will trigger a visit to the GP to be assessed for how well the tapering off of the steroids is going. I spend some time pursing the web for Christmas present ideas but fail to find anything inspirational. I spend some time reading the foreword and the translators notes of the new poetry book that arrived yesterday. It is the collected poems of Rabindranath Tagore and Indian poet who was the first non European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

His poetry is very much a spiritual exploration of the cultural stories that shape the beliefs of the Indian continent. It is interesting how each culture has its own stories and explanations for creation and the subsequent mysteries. His more mature work is more personal and explores what happens in his life. I’m not sure of what I think of him yet, I need time to read and digest a lot more. At this point my partner returns and we go for a lunch time snack at a local garden centre. It is intensely foggy today and as a result I have to research how to turn my fog lights on and off on the car. I eventually figure it out.

Post lunch my partner and I are both feeling sleepy but we brave the local Co-op and its small parking spaces. We shop for tea and a paper so that the crosswords will keep us amused in the afternoon. It turns out I am in form and zip through the puzzles. In a big effort I go for repainting the stair bannisters that have worn badly. I get my sanding mouse and get to work on the stair rails. Soon I am painting them and enjoying the satisfaction of having presentable stair rails again. By the time I have put everything away I am knackered so my partner make toasted tea cakes as a late afternoon treat. I start to draft the blog while tea cooks and await to see if my partner is going to her singing lesson tonight. There is a Tesco order to take in later but it is clear my evening is going to be reading poetry, watching a bit of TV and ten having an early night to recover from my PGSD.

Friday and I wake up after a good nights sleep. My partner brings me a hot water, which I sip as I order a new poetry collection. Rabindranath Tagore was the first non European to win the Noble Prize for literature, specifically for poetry, so I am interested to see what his poetry is like. I get up and make breakfast and take my morning meds, before packing my bags to go to my youngest daughters.

I drive my partner and I to the Forest of Dean. Along the way my GPS packs up on the car and we have to rely upon my partners i-phone and Google maps to get to our destination. Once arrived I find a place to park the car and we settle down with coffee to chat and catch up before it is time for the children to come from the nursery. I sit with the eldest boy and watch a CBBC’s cartoon about a young fish with an imagination that runs away with him. Its great fun and the eldest boy tucks himself up under one arm to watch with me.

At tea time we all congregate in the kitchen and eat pie. The two boys are good eaters and soon we all have clean plates. Its bath time and my youngest daughter and my partner bath the two boys before the youngest going to bed and the elder one having some books read with him. With the reading done he goes to bed. I draft the blog and then settle down for a quiet night and a relatively early night. It has been a lovely day but I am tired after the drive and I have a nagging issue about the cars GPS not working. It is as if it suddenly got lost between junctions 10 and 11 of the M5, very strange, and it never recovered. Its very quiet here and there is a real sense of being surrounded by the forest.

Its a Thursday morning and I wake up after a reasonable nights sleep. I check my messages and news feeds, same old world, and I move on. Every so often a check my bank accounts and so what is going on and what new “products” the banks are offering. On inspection I find I have not used my ISA allowance and I have soem money that is not earning what it could do, so I do a bit of juggling and move some money around. I still am not happy with one bank so I foresee I shall be moving more money at some point. Its a bit of a challenge because most banks offer their best interest rates over the longer terms, which are conceivably beyond my life span, so I have to juggle thigs a bit. Anyway with my money review done I get up just in time to wave my partner off to the gym for another aqua class. I make breakfast and deal with my post. All my Christmas wrapping paper and cards have arrived all I have to do now is sort the presents.

There is no avoiding the training session. After yesterdays really crap session I am not looking forward to todays session. I get into my kit and sort out my ear buds with Sophie Ellis Bexter’s Kitchen Disco Halloween special and make my way to the garage. Strapped in I start and try to get going early with a faster stroke rate. Its a real effort but I keep going. By the end of the session I am knackered but the effort proves worth it, this is my best session yet and I crack the 6 kilometre milestone and the 400 calories barrier. This is more like it. Today feels so different from yesterday and the poem it inspired.

I am very pleased with the session and immediately record it in my journal before settling down to draft the blog as I cool down. In an spurt if energy I take my new sanding mouse upstairs and give it a trial run on a stair case post top that was worst for wear. The mouse performed excellently. So as to not waste the Mouse’s efforts I retrieved the recently bought can of white gloss paint from the garage and give the post top a new smooth coat of paint. It all seems to have gone well apart from the paint can lid not going back on smoothly. I wash out the brush as my partner returns from the gym.

Pleased with my morning my partner and I go to a local garden centre for a bite to eat where we chat about new fires, curtains and crosswords amongst other things. We return home where my partner starts to follow up issues with the local council and I fill the bird and squirrel feeders. In a moment of tidiness I rake up the fallen leaves at the top end of the garden just to keep it looking like it is cared for. I begin to run out of energy and retreat to the sofa where I update the blog and prepare for an early evening football match. At some point I shall begin to pack for tomorrows journey to my youngest daughters, where I suspect my two youngest grandsons will tire me out wonderfully. Tonight I take my night meds in the hope that I sleep well and wake as energised as I did today, but it is impossible to predict.

Wednesday finds me waking up feeling tired, but I am not sure why. My partner brings me a hot water before going to the gym for an aqua class. I struggle to get myself up, its a strange feeling, I’ve no explanation for it, some days are just like this. The big step of the morning is to get myself going and to get up. I am not depressed I just lack energy. When I find myself like this I write just to get something externalised and out of my head. It saves me time and time again. So I write what ever comes to mind, today it was this.

569
Hypnotised by lethargy
my head knows the way 
but the body just stands.
Its like being sabotaged 
from the inside 
like some insidious parasite.
It makes everything an effort
even thinking about 
some action is stunted
in its growth.
Doing anything is a
major campaign
So life is a war
waged against a self enemy
hidden away like a terrorist
motivated by paralysis
and denial of life.
Written late morning
in bed, my only response 
is to pull on kit
and row.
It appears mindlessness
is my only weapon.

                                                    569 04-11-2026

Having written I get up and into my training kit. I make breakfast and take my morning meds and make my way to the garage and the rower. I strap in and set the session for 30 minutes. I get going and once again have Sophie Ellis Bexter’s Kitchen Disco in my ears. Its a hell of a session every pull is an effort and it does not ease. I am just pleased to stop at the end of the session time. The data on the monitor tells me everything I need to know. Its a very poor distance and is the equivalent of three minutes slower than Mondays session. So my body has not lied to me this morning.

I retreat to the lounge where I find I have an Amazon delivery. The sanding mouse I ordered has arrived so of course I unpack it and check it works. I feel I can tackle the stair rails and posts that need to be rubbed down and repainted. There will be a test on a small area first but if all goes well then it will be full speed ahead, or at least “steady as she goes”. So having dumped the packaging and brought the bins in I set about drafting the blog.

My partner returns from the gym and the household goes into rest and admin mode. After a while My partner and I walkdown to the village shop collecting my latest prescription from the pharmacy. Having collected our food in the co-op we jostled our way through the flood of school children who had been released from the local academy to pay for our goodies. Once home I settle down to do the days crosswords. Then suddenly it is early evening and I am watching an early evening football match. I do not make it through the second match and switch to watching celebrity race across the world. For once the evening news is worth watching as it reports the American midterm elections where the Democrats have pulverised Trumps Republicans. For the first time in a long time reasonable, rational and kind Americans have flexed their democratic muscles and drawn a line of what is acceptable and what is not. I take my evening meds, return to the blog and then take myself of to bed. Hopefully tomorrow will find me with more energy as I try out my new sanding mouse, train and prepare to drive to my youngest daughters for the weekend.

Tuesday and I feel reasonably rested. My partner brings me a hot water, which I sip as I check my messages and Apps. I get up and have a shower before making breakfast and taking my morning meds. I feel unmotivated to do anything so I have a lazy morning apart from moving the cars around on the drive as we have someone coming to stay the night.

Eventually it is time for me to go to the chiropodist. I park in the co-op car park and decide to get a sandwich and a drink. Clutching my all day breakfast sarnie and a can of diet Red Bull I go to the self service till. It all goes well until I press the finish button when the screen displays a message saying I have to wait and have my age checked by a member of staff to ensure I am old enough to buy Red Bull. After an initial outburst of “Oh for fuck sake” I look around for a member of staff. There is one in a kiosk selling addictive tobacco products and vapes to a queue of addicts, no sign of any other staff. I give up and leave my highly dangerous Red Bull in the bagging area and walk over to the chiropodist.

My chiropodist is a wizard. She sets to work on my feet and instantly my feet feel happy. By the time she has finished with me my feet are singing and ready for Christmas. I drive home to find our guest has arrived. I retreat to the sofa and begin to look for some tools I need. After a while I order the mouse sander and boards that I need to prepare the stair rails for repainting. With my shopping done I settle down to watch an early European football match. My partner and her friend go out to dine and my eldest daughter goes off to the gym. I make my tea and then start to draft the blog as the second European match starts. Manchester United are being handed their arses by Roma.

The evening comes to an end and I take my meds. Tomorrow I need to train hard and pack ready to travel to my youngest daughters for the weekend.

.

Monday and I have slept reasonably well. I feel a bit groggy but the hot water my partner brings to me perks me up. I get up and get into my training gear and down a pasty for breakfast followed by my morning meds. There the followed a period of puttering. Lots of little jobs that require time to do but are fiddly, like changing a light bulb when you have to unscrew the retaining shield whilst standing on a bouncy bed. Getting through to the GP surgery to book my next 28 day jab is also a simple task but requires waiting in the call queue. I take a leap and order my Christmas wrapping paper and cards. All I need to do now is think about presents. So after several such puttering chores I finally get to go to the garage and the rowing machine. There are soem things in life that you buy and never realise how much you are going to use them and what a role they play in your life. My rowing machine is definitely the piece of equipment that I bought that has been responsible for keeping me as fit as possible over the cancer years. I strap myself onto the rower and set the session for 30 minutes. I set off and just try to keep it steady for the session. At the end is a pleasant surprise as I have gone the furthest I’ve been in half an hour since I started up again.

I record the session in my journal and have a coke to quench my thirst. I laze for a bit and then have a couple of toasted tea cakes for late lunch. I think I am getting fitter but the toasted tea cakes maybe the reason I am not losing weight. I get our of my training gear and wait for Tesco to deliver. My partner is visiting her mother in the care home. My eldest daughter helped me with the Tesco delivery to get it squirreled away and I then I relaxed for a while till I draft the blog for the day. As I am typing I get a message that my youngest daughter has been offered the job she went for interview for today. It is a procurement role which is a progressive step from her previous buying role, which opens up new possibilities for qualifications and a career path in the future. It is excellent news.

My evening is a slow haul of TV drama and some reading before I take my evening meds and head for bed and and early night. At the moment I have slipped into not thinking about where I am with my cancer. Its a strange no mans land where is appears that I am free to just carry on and do what ever I can manage. In my head I feel like I’ve been given time off and that I do not need to think about my cancer until January 2027 when my next oncology review is due. I think I maybe fooling myself a bit given the state of my kidney function and the unknown activity or not of my cancer but it feels like there is nothing I can do except wait and see. The oncologist told me a year ago that I had 12 to 18 months and in a few weeks the 12 months will be up, I have no doubt I will make my 79 birthday in July and I am pretty sure I am good for 80. So its keep on going, keep writing and publishing and see what happens.

Saturday and I am up latish. Breakfast and morning meds done I check to see where my sprung clamps are in terms of delivery. They are due between 1:30 and 3:30pm which means I have time to go and buy the materials I need to mend the fence panel that has lost its top binding slats and coping length. So after a bit of faffing about I and my partner drive to the local WIckes. I peruse the wood stocks and odds and ends while my partner gives the garden section a look. I find wood that is not cured and will need treating, my partner finds fence panel batons at a fraction of the price which match the panel I am mending. With the wood found and a tube of no nails we look for paint for the bannisters and the garage door. I am astounded at the price of paint! It is so expensive, admittedly it is a long time since I bought paint but it seems incredible to me that the price is so high. We find what paint we want and then go to the check out. Luckily I had taken Elsie (the SUV) so I could get the wood lengths in to the car relatively easily. Then it was home via a garden centre for a coffee and a toasted tea cake. The coffee lodge was full on Halloween, which was very lovely and fun.

Once home I needed a bit of a rest and watched a rugby match before I gathered together the tool and materials I needed to do the fence panel. While watching the rugby the sprung loaded clamps I ordered arrived so my tool needs were completed. While I prepared my partner planted up the pots with the plants we had bought. eventually I got to work. The repair concept was easy but as always as in real life the repair was more challenging. Over time fence panels change shape and warp a bit which meant that the top line of the fence panel had bowed. It meant making adjustments to the lengths that I was applying and some crafty jiggery pokery. The buying of the spring clamps was a stoke of genius as I was able to set the top binding lathes in place with the clamps before screwing them and gluing them in place. With the lathes in place I could then place the capping lathe on top of them, making the finish rain proof. The top cap was also screwed and glued. After a lot of adjustments the job was done and all I could hope for was that everything would dry and stay in place over night, which it has.

Why is it that putting the tools away after any job seems to take for ever? However I get all the tools stowed away including the new spring clamps, which I am sure will come in handy again at a future date. I then settle down to watch some more excellent rugby before tea and of course Strictly, the Halloween special. It was the usual nonsense but mindlessly entertaining. No idea who will go out this week, the public are so fickle. My partner and I watch the final episodes of Cross an American police drama. Interestingly the major murderer appears to live while the hero turns in his badge unable to face the systems lack of moral fortitude. Meds then beds in the hope of sleep and weight loss at tomorrows weigh in.

Sunday and I have slept well and get up to make breakfast and take my morning medications. I start to draft the blog however my partner and I decide to go to the garden centre to get food, plants and to start our Christmas food shopping by enrolling in the butchers Christmas club. We do all of this successfully so back home I continue the blog and wait for the afternoons football match to come onto the TV. For the first time in a while I am running out of new books to read but I am aware that I still have an unused book token so I might risk a trip to a book shop at some point, probably when I go to have my eyes tested again as its a while since I did.

The football match is a goal fest and is a good watch after which I watch some standard Sunday afternoon TV while I keep warm. My intention is to watch the Strictly results show and then go for an early night. Tomorrow has a lot of life admin to do and medical sessions to organise. Of course I have to train and I am determined to keep pushing my performance on, either by extending the sessions or increasing the resistance level. I am not loosing weight. When I weighed in today I found my weight had not moved despite my training, so I will need to start changing my diet and cutting out some of the things I eat. Sweets, biscuits and buns are the obvious ones to go. More muesli and less bread based things. November is upon me and the pressure is to get on with my “body for Christmas” campaign.

Friday and its been a bad night so I wake up late and feel grim and headachy. My partner brings me a hot water and goes to the gym. I eventually get up and get into my training kit before making breakfast. My intention is to train but I feel decidedly off so I open the post (bills and instantly recyclable crap) and take paracetamol. While I wait for the pain killers to kick in I scribble a poem, which kind of captures where I am.

568
I feel under attack
by fearsome erosion.
Parts of me disappear
in full view
as I try to stand
in the face of the tides
that sweep in from oceans
of changes and lost time.
The lesser me strives
to be the person I was,
do the things that defined me,
but I find I lack the parts.
This is a dip, at least
I hope it is. 
In truth I’ve no way of knowing
So this is how it is,
A new personal universe 
with more than its share 
of dark matter. 

						568 30-10-2026

As I sit an await the numbing effects of the paracetamol I draft the first part of todays blog. Its as far as it might get today. However I do find the energy and gusto to pay the invoices for the instillation and maintenance of the upgraded house alarm system.

My partner returns from the gym and finds me newly out of the garage and another rowing session. Again I extend to thirty minutes despite feeling crap. Once again with Sophie Ellis Bexter’s Kitchen Disco in my ears I set off and try to not look at the monitor in order to just keep going. Of course eventually I take a peep at the distance and do a quick rough calculation of how much time has passed and do another calculation of how many more tunes I need to listen to before I get close to the end, using three minutes as the average tune length. Eventually I take another peek and find I am down to the last two and a half minutes. I feel sluggish and I am convinced that this is slower and shorter than yesterdays half hour session. To my surprise when I get to compare the two sessions I have gone further and spent more calories than yesterday. I am pleased with this, it means I can rest at the weekend with a clear conscience.

With my training kit still on I have soup for lunch and then I join my partner in the garden. She is busy planting up the pots in the front garden so I set about junking the old tomato plants, pruning the Lilly’s, and of course cutting back the Peonies. Its late in the year to be doing this but this year has been exceptional for how long it has taken the to die back. I can do no more having filled the compost bin so I retreat back inside and note the down the wood sizes I need to repair the fence. I also order the G clamps that I need to use in the fence repair. Tomorrow or over the weekend I will need to go to B&Q to buy the wood I need. Having finally got out of my training kit I return to the sofa and update the blog. I have no doubt that tonight I will be glued to the last episode of The Traitors. Hopefully my exercise today will mean that I will sleep well tonight.