Wednesday and its a day I should be going to a funeral but I feel crap so decide not to go. My partner and her brother will go. I get up late and make breakfast and take my morning meds. I’ve dressed in my training clothes in the hope that as the day goes on I will feel well enough to train. By mid day my partner has left and I continue to paint over the wall scar left by the instillation of the new house alarm. I bring the bins in and write a poem based on my experience of the last poetry stanza. I also message the alarm company to get an update on my new system. next on my list is parcelling up hardback copies of my last two poetry collections and boxing them up to go the team at Ruler’s Wit, the publishing team. Then its time to begin to draft todays blog. It seems very little but I find more and more that small jobs are taking longer and it is difficult to find a rhythm.

565
Shakespeare  reveals the yobbo 
who has read a few books,
It’s a fair summary of the easy way,
the short cut to the end 
justified by meagre means.
Avoid the work, the graft
to get the skills nailed
and the knowledge imbedded.
There is and never was the time 
to take time, to immerse 
and indulge, to reflect. 
Always drowning, always sinking
in the effort to stay moving. 
Years behind as the dyslexic 
dragged to the back of the class
to do raffia and be advised to 
be a butchers boy. A life
of stealing, lifting and dodging 
all the while knowing that learning 
was the ticket out. Steinbeck
saved me, correspondence courses,
Vesta curies and a cold single room
made me Balzac like.
Finally university opened the eyes
and then the doors,
but even now the years of ignorance
cannot be washed away 
and I stumble over words
that do not fit my mouth
or my history.

								565  21-10-2026

I come to a stop when I cannot find the big labels I bought and cannot get to where they might be. Perhaps its time to train. I go to the garage and not that it is 10 degrees, on the chilly side. Once strapped on the rower I get going and keep going. The outcome? I am a monster, crashing my best distance since 29th of April this year and on over 6 kilometre an hour pace. This is very unexpected but very welcome. Making the effort is paying off in a short time, now the onus is on me to keep this training going.

Of course I am on the laptop straight away to get it on the blog. I need to keep this going, the real goal is to lose weight so nothing is good until I weigh in on Sunday and see my weight reduce. That will be a slower process than the improvement in the rowing. No more sweets for me now. I want that drop in clothes size.

My evening comes along with an early football match, an Indian take away and then more Reacher. Inane but pleasingly gratuitously violent. I clear the decks, take my night meds and get myself to bed.

.

Tuesday and I wake quite early for me, to find my partner already up and ready to go to the physio and then onto the gym for an Aqua class. My eldest daughter had already gone to work so by the time I get up I am alone in the house. I get my now usual breakfast of muesli and yoghurt and take my morning meds. My red track suit keeps me warm as I eat and listen to Ten To The Top on Radio2 before I go to the garage and strap onto the rower. Its another 20 minute session on level 3, the lowest I’ve ever been. My plan is to gradually increase both time and resistance level over time . Ultimately I would like to get back to the tine when I rowed for an hour on level 5, but that is a long way off and a lot of weight has to be lost before I will get anywhere near that kind of performance.

Todays session goes reasonably well and I do better than yesterday, so I am pleased. I rest before clambering off the rower and returning to the house to get cold orange juice and a chance to rest properly. I record my session, get out of my kit and start to draft the blog before lunch with my partner when she returns from the gym.

The afternoon is filled with Amazon orders, reading and checking that all the clothes I need for tomorrows funeral are ready. I’m not feeling that good but I assume I will get better. My partner returns home from visiting her mother in the care home and we eat the evening meal before watching Reacher and football before I take my meds and get myself to bed.

Saturday I wake up and immediately think about the poetry stanza. I take my morning meds and then start the preparation for the poetry stanza. I run off the copies of the poem I am taking and tidy up my papers. When the time comes I drive to the venue. There is still a wedding going on, where they are doing post service flower throwing and photos. Other Stanza members arrive and eventually the vicar ushers us into the actual church where we eventually have our meeting. I hand over a couple of hardback copies of my collections to the person who wrote the Foreword to both the collections.

The meeting goes well although not as many as we thought would be there are. There is a wide range of poems, some of them being worked on over time and some of them fresh. It is a constant delight the range of things that people find inspiration in. From stamp collections to walking holidays and ballet. I get to read the ballet poem based on The Rite of Spring and find that reading it aloud is a fun thing to do. My own creation, a rip off of a Shakespeare sonnet. Apparently I betrayed myself with some “too posh” words. First time that has ever been thought of me. One or the poems contained some definitely unchurch like language which was fun to hear in the environment.

563 (18)
Shall I compare you to a summers day?	
                                                                                     Yes I compared you to a summers day.
Thou art more lovely and more temperate .
                                                                                     You are right fit and kindly.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
                                                                                     Cruel weather can ruin nascent flowers in May,
And summers lease hath all too short a date;
                                                                                      and summer may not last long;
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
                                                                                      even with some very hot days
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
                                                                                      there are many cloudy times
And ever fair from fair sometimes declines,
                                                                                       when glorious full blooms wilt badly,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimm’d.
                                                                                      either by chance or global warming.
But thy eternal summer shall not faded
                                                                                       But your good looks don’t wrinkle
Nor lose possession of that thou owest;
                                                                                      and you do not lose your allure;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
                                                                                      it looks like death will avoid you,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest.
                                                                                     even though you get older.
So long as men can breathe and see,
                                                                                       As long as I respire and have sight
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
                                                                                        you will be a looker and always will be.

					563 (18) 12-10-2026

At the end of the meeting I drive home and arrive in time for Strictly. The evening passes with Strictly over and then episodes of Reacher before taking my meds and going to bed.

Sunday and it takes a while for me to surface. In truth I lazed all the day apart from the walk to the village shop with my partner to get food and a Sunday paper. There is a women’s football match and some American football to watch. Of course the evening has more Reacher before I go to bed feeling that some how the day has slipped through my fingers.

Monday and I wake up with a cracking headache. This is the day I was going to start training again. As I get up I am not feeling the best so get into my training kit and then I have breakfast late while I wait for the paracetamol to kick in. There are some small chores that I do and then do the cross words in the paper that my partner brought in. After a simple sandwich lunch I gird my loins and head for the garage and the rower. Its been 16 days since I last trained, having been on holiday and done injection week. I get onto the rower, put Sophie Ellis Bexter’s kitchen disco session on the hear phones and start to pull. Like all first sessions it is a tough one but I grind it to the end and end up content with with the figures.

I take a well earned shower and slip into some sloppy clothes. Once tidy I start to catch up with drafting the blog for the last three days before tea after which my partner disappears for her singing lesson. I shall read and investigate what new TV drama series is available. Of course there will be night meds and then a rush to bed. The challenge now is to keep up my training and my amended diet that goes with it. No more sweets, puddings, biscuits and other sugary goodies. The aim is to loose weight and get body fit for Christmas. This is more of a relaunch post holiday. At the moment I weigh in at 104.1 kilos, I must get down to the mid nineties at least by Christmas. I need to drop at least one underwear size!

Thursday and I wake late. I remember this on Friday when I return to the uncompleted blog of Thursday. I wonder what did I do and there is a significant pause while I try to remember what my Thursday consisted of. In reality not a lot returns apart from a late breakfast that is really lunch eaten with my partner before we both go to the person who does our nails in her new garage conversion. There was some time spent trying to write a Golden Spade, a form of poem that uses stolen lines from one poem and uses each word as the last word of each line of a new poem. I had chosen the opening lines of a poem by one of the poetry stanza and tried to write a new poem from it. I did not finish it, but may return to it at some later point. Having had my nails clipped and re-polished with a subtle sparkle my partner and I went to visit her brother in order for a questionnaire to be completed as part of a house transaction. I sipped blacked coffee and spectated the process. Then it was home to an evening meal and the final episodes of Neagley, a spin off from Reacher. Having completed Neagley we started on Reacher before I took my meds and went to bed . So I am sure there are other quite important small details that my mind has jettisoned over night but as far as I am concerned that was that particular Thursday of my life. In reality there is a profusion of details that I could conjure up but once started it could snowball into a novel, just like Marcel Proust’s recollection of the smell of freshly baked Madeleines lead him to write the five novels that comprise In Search of Lost Time. As it happens the 15th of October 2014 is the anniversary of my finishing reading that set of novels. Now that’s the real wonder of the unconscious, that on the anniversary of the finishing I end up using it as an explanation of my memory of a day without realising it until I look at my diary. That’s why I loved psychology and why psychology is far more difficult than rocket science.

Friday and I wake late with only an hour before my dentist appointment. My partner goes to the gym to take an aqua class so I have some fresh orange juice to wash down my morning meds and begin my pre dentist ritual. Of course I brush my teeth vigorously and ensure that I do not get toothpaste on my T shirt, the later double checked. The walk down the road to the dentist’s surgery is slow as my body hasn’t really woken up properly yet. At reception I am booked in and settle down to wait. To fill the time I check my messages and send one or two of my own. There is a family birthday to acknowledge and a couple of other things to note.

Eventually I am called into the dentist’s room. My dentist is excellent and has been my dentist for years now. We catch up n family news and then she looks at my mouth and concludes that the lost crown and pin can be glued back in. There is an x-ray taken to check the root is still good and then she sets about gluing the tooth back into place. It does not take long and I am soon at the reception desk paying my bill. The walk home is slow. Once home I check my emails, which today entails reading The Visionary, the weekly newsletter of the Universal Life Church. An interesting read it provides a running commentary on the religious and legal issues that are current in America. Some of it is truly frightening as various religious groups try to impose themselves and beliefs on the state institutions and culture of the country. There is clearly a battle going on between the religious and the secular in America all of which is becoming more polarised and politicised. With that read I start to draft the blog and return to my attempts to write a Golden Shovel.

My Golden Shovel comes together, not good, but okay for my fist and what will be my only attempt. I have chosen the opening lines of a Helen Jayne poem, An Account of Minor Aristocracy, a poet in the poetry stanza group I am in. I first heard this poem in September 2024. It is a first phrase that made me laugh and know I was in for an interesting time with the rest of the poem. The lines are: ” According to a black sheep aunt swigging mead / at a family gathering we were descendants / of Count Sackville- Barret or some such bloke.” So I have use each word to be the end of a line in a new poem, as below;

564
It was by total accident, according 
to a relation who happened to 
find scrolls and a
wallet of papers, black
and charred like pirated sheep,
that the strange woman was my aunt.
Taken aback I found myself swigging 
from a honeyed bottle marked mead
by cheeky monks who knew at
what temperature the the bee made a 
juice that could make illicit family.
Vats and flagons found at every gathering
the drinkers drunk until I became we
and here and now to when and where.
So now I wonder where my descendants
will find themselves partaking of
their nectar and losing count
of whether they are Sackville
or some bastards by Barret.
Perhaps it does not matter or
if it does whether there is some 
reason to care if such
issues matter to a modern bloke.

                                                                         564 16-10-2026
                                                    Acknowledgement to Helen Jayne and "An Account of Minor Aristocracy"
                                                    A Golden Shovel, my first and last.

My partner returns from the gym and we go out for a late lunch of coffee and tuna melts. We chat and clarify our life admin lists before going home. I immediately set about reclaiming the “My BT” app on my phone. It takes ages and I do it by accident. Now I just have a key and code to put in. I tried to get my BT email app to work but after several frustrating tries and failures I give up and finish the Golden Shovel and put it on the blog. Its one of those things that having done it I doubt I will ever do it again. As evening approaches I run my eye over my youngest daughter’s CV and then ease into the evening of a meal and TV. I may do a crossword or two and sign a couple of hard back copies of my books for the guy who wrote the forewords to them. Then it will be all night meds and sleep in readiness for tomorrows poetry stanza, a face to face one, which is always nice.

Its Wednesday and an interesting day ahead with the house alarm system due to be upgraded, so I am up quite early for me. On checking my emails I find more GP blood results have come in. Ferramin and B12 have been added to the previous results. I up date my results sheet and look up the meaning of the results. It turns out that all my results are within the normal range, hence the GP not needing to see me and just wanting more bloods at the end of November.

As I am preparing breakfast the alarm company engineer arrived. I am clearly getting old and bigoted as betrayed by my surprised response to the engineer being a woman. Why I should be surprised I’ve no idea but It clearly highlights my prejudice. Any way I show her around the alarm system and move my car so that she can pull her van onto the drive. Of course I offer her a drink and then scamper about making her tea with two sugars. With the engineer beavering away on the top box I have breakfast and my partner goes off to see her mother with her brother. I send birthday greetings to my eldest grandson in Sweden. With all the admin done and everyone busy doing their thing I start to draft the blog for the day. I am still feeling groggy from my Monday injection. When I say “groggy” I mean sore and fatigued, with aching joints and a low level of energy. I know that by the end of the week I will have recovered in time for the in person poetry stanza meeting on Saturday. In the meantime I pick off chores one at a time till I have run out of energy and retreat to the sofa to read or, if in the afternoon, take a crafty nap.

The afternoon passes and soon the alarm engineer is joined by “the apprentice” and soon after “ladder man” turns up. I then loose a crown as I eat a fruit pastille. As a result I spend the next thirty minutes ringing my dentist and getting an appointment for Friday. There is a bit of drilling and then I’m asked to move my car so the new external alarm box can be put up and and added into the system. It about five o’clock before I am asked to put the code into the system. The system is tested and my word it loud, there is no mistaking it for anything other than an alarm. I sign off the paper work both analogue and digital. Then the engineers disappear and its time to move the cars so my partner can go out to meet her friend for a meal.

As my partner drives off to her meal I watch a football match and order an Indian take away. As I wait for my food Amazon deliver the hard back copies of my last two poetry collections. Its a strange and different feeling picking up the hard back versions of my books. Somehow it feels more permanent and likely to last.

The rest of my evening is football followed by football until its time to take my meds and get myself of to bed. Tomorrow is the day I go to get my nails done so I hope I get a good nights sleep.

Its Tuesday and I finally wake up at 11.11am feeling totally crap. Yesterday’s 28 day injection is not only sore but I feel nothing but fatigue. I feel like I have been beaten up and left for dead in a hedge. I do get up and take my morning drugs with some orange juice and then I rouse myself to put my washing away and refill my dosettes with my drugs for the next two weeks. On checking my mail I find I have some blood results from the GP. There is nothing spectacular in them, in fact they are normal for me. Later in the day I get a message from the GP telling me to book another set of bloods for the end of November. I have to do that for the oncology team any way so its not an imposition.

I putter around down loading the poems for Saturdays poetry stanza meeting and trying to get my phone to access my emails. One of the poems that comes through is a poem about a performance of The Rite of Spring, it prompts me to watch a YouTube video of it, which answered the question of which woodwind instrument starts the ballet off. It is of course the Bassoon. Unfortunately the poem does not match the drive, intensity or primal feel of the ballet, but it prompted me to watch it again. By mid afternoon I am knackered when my son rings to ask for a chat. We agree by WhatsApp to have a pee break before we talk but I get a message to hang fire as there is a car crisis going on. So I drink my diet Coke, nibble on some Bourbons and draft the days blog. Eventually my son rings me and we talk cars and the strange fact that diesel needs to be warmed up when the weather turns cold and in Sweden it turns cold very suddenly. Tonight is a football night, England women v Greece in a world cup qualifier. I have no energy left but will rouse myself to see the bins out and tidy up the back bedroom as tomorrow we have an engineer coming to upgrade our house security system. Probably wiser than just buying more baseball bats.

Monday, the first day back from holiday and as luck would have it today is also 28 day jab day. This day also means that I am going to have another set of bloods taken so I am hardly looking forward to today. I get up and take my morning meds and empty the dishwasher. It soon becomes time to drive to the GP surgery. The village becoming larger means that it is becoming difficult to park at the surgery. I finally get into the handkerchief size parking area and book in. The blood vampire nurse calls me in and I ask whether I will be getting my 28 injection. It turns out that I am not booked in from my 28 day injection, I get my bloods done and my B12 injection, I then popped into the regular nurses to see what was going on. The nurse checked and found I was not booked in but said she would do it anyway. So I get my jab and then spent what seemed like a long time getting out of the car park.

Once home I unpack my holiday bags and put my washing in. I spend the morning re writing Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18. It was a spur of the moment thought that was prompted by not knowing what to take to this weeks Poetry Stanza meeting. It was also a response to my feeling a bit grim post injection.

563 (18)

Shall I compare you to a summers day?	
                                                                                         Yes I compared you to a summers day.
Thou art more lovely and more temperate .
                                                                                         You are right fit and kindly.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
                                                                                         Cruel weather can ruin flowers in May,
And summers lease hath all too short a date;
                                                                                         and summer may not last long;
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
                                                                                         even with some very hot days
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
                                                                                         there are many cloudy times
And ever fair from fair sometimes declines,
                                                                                         when nascent blooms wilt badly,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimm’d.
                                                                                         either by chance or global warming.
But thy eternal summer shall not faded
                                                                                        But your good looks don’t wrinkle
Nor lose possession of that thou owest;
                                                                                        and you do not lose your allure;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
                                                                                       it looks like death will avoid you,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest.
                                                                                       even though you get older.
So long as men can breathe and see,
                                                                                       As long as I respire and have sight
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
                                                                                        you will be a looker and always will be.

					                                                                                            563 (18) 12-10-2026

with one eye on the clock I move my car to enable the Tesco delivery in the late afternoon and then get on with the draft of the blog. As the day wears on my injection site gets more sore and I feel myself experiencing the “withdrawing junkie” symptoms that accompany the injection. So I shall ease into the evening with no plan other than taking my night meds and getting to bed as early as possible. I may have declared myself in partial remission but the monthly cycle of Degarelix injections is a pain and never seems to do anything different other than give me 72 hours or long of discomfort.

Sunday and it is driving home day, so after a coffee and meds it was all down to packing and getting ready to go. My partner and I have toasted bagels to sustain us and then we pack the car. With everything tidied up we set the SatNav and finally leave the holiday apartment. We get away about 9:30 and from then on it was all sunny driving, mostly on motorways. I was expecting to return the way we came but my SatNav took us the most obvious motorway route, which was considerably longer than the journey coming. On the way back we stopped a couple of times for a quick pee and some sustenance, but mostly it was motorway driving. It was 3 o’clock when I finally pulled into the home drive.

Making the effort my partner and I unpack the car and close the drive gates up. Of course there is post to open, mostly stuff that will go in the recycling and a new cover for my old Kindle. Most welcoming was the recliner where I get my feet up and rest while watching a rugby match. It is like this that I drift into the evening with its Strictly results programme and then to the finishing episodes of the Norwegian drama that I started to watch while on holiday. There is also Tesco order to finalise and I need to prepare myself for tomorrow’s 28 day injection. Tomorrow will also see me give another set of bloods as my GP wants to check them given that he was concerned about the last set. I could do with it really but I guess I need to see it through.

Friday was a slow waking day. The weather initially cloudy and drizzly. I sat for a while watching the sea until breakfast, thinking about the beaches I have walked up and down in my life. I eat breakfast croissants with my partner and then as the weather brightens up I get ready for another beach walk. I am fatigued, I am not sure why and wonder if I am suffering from adrenal insufficiency as I reduce my steroid intake. It is warm on the beach but I do not manage far before I need to turn back. When we get back to the beach side café I am dripping in sweat and need to sit for a while to recover. This is not good, I am hoping it is lack of fitness, which I can do something about. While I rest the crows dine at the next table.

Once rested my partner and I go into the café and order an all day breakfast. I go for eggs benedict, which turns out to be a good choice. As a treat we both go for a the apple and blackberry crumble with custard. No other way to have crumble, anything else is just not British. As we eat people come and go all eating fast and moving on, everyone seems to be in a rush despite the weather and the location. Maybe its because I am older and now appreciate the event of having a meal out more than I used to or I am just getting slower altogether. I have to say I do not think that my conversation skills have grown to fill the space and I am acutely aware that I can be silent for quite long periods of time. A lot goes on in my head though but most of it is not worth dropping out of my mouth.

We return to the apartment where I d several crosswords on my laptop before watching England women’s football team beat Greece in a world cup qualifier. This was followed by the final episodes of Blame and the tail end of the Graham Norton show before I took my night meds and went to bed. An alarming day in a way, in that I found myself so fatigued, I’m hoping for better tomorrow.

Saturday and I wake to a sunny morning. I take my partner a tea in bed and then catch up with my messages and the blog. There are bagels for breakfast as I tap out the draft of the blog. Today is the last full day of the holiday and I am determined to climb the steep cliff path to town one last time. First there is a Tesco order to arrange so that there is food arriving at home for when we get back. This Monday is a jab Monday so I want as little to do as possible in the first couple of days of the week.

My partner and I climb the steep cliff path, me needing a rest half way up. We walk into town where I search for postcards. There are none to be found and I am thirsty. My partner spots a small stall next to a Malaysian kitchen that sells all sorts of home made stuff including honey, and there in a rack were postcards. Five or six different pictures. I bought five with the aim of writing and sending them once I am home. Having cracked this task my partner and I enter Café 25 and wait for a while before being seated in the window seat. It is brilliantly sunny and we are hot. I order chilli con carne, a strawberry milkshake and a Pepsi. The food is okay and very welcome as we sit and watch the various people who arrive all of whom seem to have a dog. I have never been anywhere where there are so many dogs. I’m beginning to wonder if you are issued with a dog if you move to Wales, or certainly Tenby.

Having dined well I go to Roly’s fudge shop and pay an extortionate amount for a couple of bags of fudge, the After Eights have run out. Theni t was off to the paper shop for a paper and to top up the milk supply. With everything we came for stowed in the rucksack we walk back to the apartment, but we do not make it past the small beach side café. We linger and eat a huge ice cream and drink coffee while looking out over the beach and looking at all the dogs that bring their owners into the café. My favourite pictures of the holiday are the ones where I am relaxing, one of course with a huge ice cream.

After a long lazy rest we return to the apartment where I read the paper and keep an eye on the football scores. Brentford manage a 2-2 draw, keeping them unbeaten so far this season. I catch up with the blog and then pack my office backpack with all the techno I brought. Its time to watch Strictly and the football highlights before some perfunctory packing and preparation to drive home tomorrow. I take my evening meds and retire to bed for the last time in Tenby.

Thursday and after a good nights sleep there is a luxury lay in until its time for breakfast. Breakfast is taken on the balcony as the sun shines over Tenby bay. With breakfast done and the sun shining my partner and I decide to take the walk into Tenby and to visit the art museum. It means a climb up the steep cliff path but we go anyway. My partner negotiates the slope much better than me, as I need to rest half way up and then again at the top. With the slope conquered we walk into Tenby town and then onto Tenby harbour. From there we make our way up the Castle Hill to the museum. Its a small local museum with three floors and an RNLI display. The ground floor is local history and how Tenby became a tourist town from before the first world war. The second floor was a revelation as it housed the art collection amongst which were several August John paintings and drawings. This was a real treat and very unexpected. There were also two sculptures, one a self portrait of Augustus John.

Of course while wondering around looking at the various exhibits I naturally I need to take a piss so on the third floor I find the museum toilet tucked away in the RNLI room. As I sit contemplating one of the strangest toilets I’ve been I realise that the keen museum curators have included a display of bed pans and toilet pots. Nothing like having a themed display to contemplate while on the toilet.

We descend the steep climb from the museum and head for a restaurant where we late lunch on a fine carbonara and have long drinks. A couple visiting Tenby chat to us as we dine. Having eaten and rested we buy a paper and some supplies and then head back to the apartment.

I settle down to do the crosswords for the day and to see how my reviving Kindle Paperwhite is recovering. To my surprise my Kindle lives except the cover has rotted. I review my library and order a new cover for the Kindle. Then its time for tea and to draft the blog for the day. My partner and I settle down to watch Winter and his continuing hunt for the killer of his girlfriend and of course others. At the end of the night I take my meds and get to bed.