Saturday, and I am up relatively early to make drinks and rouse my partner as she is going to have her hair done this morning at the salon attached to the gym. We silently drink coffee before having breakfast and driving to the gym. I decide to spend a couple of hours in the club lounge reading and drafting the first stages of today’s blog. I guess amongst my friends there are those saying “why am I not training?” The truth is I still feel shit and full of cold, although thankfully my nose has stopped running. Not a pretty picture but it is as it is. It’s been too long since I have been able to train in the way I would want to, and I fall into the trap of eating sweet things to comfort myself all the while worrying that I am putting on weight. It’s an old pattern and a common one, but although I know it, dredging up that initial act of will to make myself start the long haul back feels daunting. It also feels a little scary as I fear over doing it or how my body will react to the effort. I think what I am saying is that I feel vulnerable at the moment. I wrote to a friend recently about how I caught myself letting, or rather hoping the TV would comfort me. There I was sitting there in the morning watching TV and suddenly realised I was just watching it for comfort. The moment I realised I switched it off and went and wrote a letter as a way of trying to understand it. I sometimes feel awkward and guilty about what I ask some of my correspondents to put up with in my letters. In a Real World full of all the threats and perturbations to us all it does not seem fair to load others with my particular package of woes and anxieties. This is especially true of those friends who are themselves battling with their own life packages which in many cases far outweigh mine.

So, I drink a large black americano and contemplate how I am going to get started again. There are a few options, but I know that I favour getting back onto the rower and building up slowly again. Realistically I must set goals to achieve but they need to be in a sensible time frame. Anything I start now must be geared towards Christmas time. Ideally, I need a bit of weight to spare to cope with the Christmas indulgence. I am encouraged as I sit here in the gym lounge and look around at those who are far more corpulent than I and by their obvious efforts to stay fit and to exercise. For me it is more than weight loss, exercise represents my only way to fight my cancer. Everyday I do not make the effort cancer wins. It nibbles a bit more of me away and debilitates me by another iota. This is what scares me more than anything else, the fact that I might give up on myself. It’s tricky, because friends and family are supportive and encourage me to rest, to be careful, to be kind to myself and not to do myself damage, however I must take the risk. It is tempting to go along with this intended kindness but in my heart, I know I must push and push persistently. My next oncology appointment is on 1st November, so I have a month to make a dent in my complacency and my weight. Then it will be Christmas. I think the answer is to simplify and to routinise my life more constructively. A friend made a good point the other day when they said to me that I should consider training early in the day rather than waiting to later when I sometimes have run out of energy. It is a good point. Perhaps if I exercise before breakfast, it will significantly change the rest of my day’s activities. It’s worth a try. I know this may not be interesting but at least if I say it publicly, I might actually do it, a sort of commitment. All of this is a part of my process, of how I have to find ways to externalise what I am pushing around in my head. I know that if I do not do this, I will continue to push the stuff around and around in my head and I know that my head is very good at fooling itself, it will delude me, mislead me and try to comfort me with cognitive dissonance. Although I trust my brain not to hurt me it has some funny ways of doing so at times. At least being a psychologist and therapist taught me to take time out and to talk to my frontal lobes on occasions just to check out what is going on. It also taught me to check out with others whether it makes sense or whether I am just falling into old patterns or just talking bollocks. It would appear that this blog is one of the ways I try to disentangle my ongoing internal dialogue and how I interact with the Real World of material survival. It goes back to one of my basic beliefs, a lynch pin of my personal universe and that is “a central purpose of our lives is to make meaning and to build a personal universe to explain our existence and to make living possible “. I clearly carry the influence that Irvin Yalom had on my practice and thinking. In my personal universe I have cancer pushing me for answers and understanding. That brings me full circle to the need to live as long as possible in order to make as much meaning as possible and to live as well as possible. Time for another coffee and to read before moving on with my day. Actually, during this typing my nose goes into overdrive, I sneeze like a machine gun and my eyes water profusely, it’s almost like I am having an allergy attack, except I do not have allergies. I take an Actifed and fairly soon I feel the slightly light head effect of the pseudo ephedrine, but crucially my nose stops running, and I am able to function.

My day moved on. My partner emerged with a fresh hair style and we drive home to get shopping bags before moving on to the garden centre. There we bought fresh veg and salad and returned home. I’m feeling tired and descend in to watching half a football match and then follow it up with a rugby match. My local team the Tigers are playing Saracens, and they get thrashed by almost 50 points. It’s a disappointing afternoon. I rouse myself to open my Amazon parcel and find my cat deterrent panels have arrived. So with a supreme effort I set about making the hedgehog canteen into a a fortress. I name it Fort Hog.

I have replaced the garden camera and replenished the hedgehog food in Fort Hog. Now all I have to do is wait and see what happens. Pictures to follow. I notice that the garden is still trying it best at this late time to produce flowers and to thrive. The flowers in the front garden are providing late pollen for the bees.

In a fit of optimism, I have added a planner to the wall of my Shed. It was kicking around spare so I decided to use it. The dry marker does not work it’s been laying around for so long. There it is in all its virgin glory waiting for me to plan and also to find some new dry wipe pens. At the moment I quite like its blankness.

After all this unexpected activity I am done. I’ve no energy left apart from enough to semi complete the blog draft. I am about to watch Strictly, eat tea and then give myself up to whatever my family want to view. I shall no doubt nibble along the way, sip some sort of drink and finally take my night meds and go to bed. The poetry, the war in Ukraine, energy prices and the next chapter in the Blunder Truss saga is just going to have to wait. I’ve got a busy October so I need to get on form, sleep first.