Wednesday, I am awakened at 8 o’clock with a coffee and a time check. I check my Fitbit and confirm that I slept poorly last night, probably due to the excitement of yesterday and the information that I am consciously and unconsciously processing. Anyway I do not have time for any namby-pamby reflection I’ve got a date with the chiropodist at 9 o’clock. I borrow my partners car and drive to the next village and arrive so early that the “foot shop” is not open. I buy a paper and sit in the car completing the quick crossword until the appointment time. The chiropodist is her usual cheery self as she soaks my feet in a magic potion (probably eye of newt and tongue of lark with a dash of oriental mushroom), then its out with the tools and away she goes shaving, clipping and filing until the final rub over with a smooth and oily unguent. Oh how my feet sing with delight, this is truly a pampering and a luxury.

I drive home, dump the car and go to the village café for breakfast. I settle down to complete another puzzle but get chatting to the old boy on the next table. He was a miner at the village pit for twenty years then worked on the land and did building work. He knows all the farmers around the village and who had what built and what the land cost. He’s still doing gardens and building fences and appears to know most of the old families in the village and is quick to tell you which ones are okay and which ones are “thick”. A chum of his arrives from a visit to a hospital to have a head lump checked. There was no getting away from him till he had shown me the picture of his head wound that he keeps on his phone. Just the sort of after breakfast sight I needed, but that’s old buggers for you, seen it all done it all and don’t give a bugger, its how things are. No snow flaking here, its in your face life, piles and all. Of course its not all quaint, we don’t make anything any more, there are too many people coming to the country and foreigners own all our industries. I guess when you’ve spent twenty years down a pit on the coal face your world has changed more than most. I escape the head wound photo and walk home with the cash I promised to get for my partner so she can pay her mother’s carer when she visits her mother in the afternoon.

Once home I clear away my washing and bring the bin in. I clean up the laundry area and retrieve all the clothing that has fallen down the back of the washing machine and tumble dryer. There is enough to fill the washing basket again. Eventually the place is ship shape again and I sit down to do some life admin and my accounts. The window cleaner appears and says I owe him for one, I tell him he is wrong and that I’ve got the acknowledgement and I counter with a required confirmation of the frequency that they have down for us. I tell him I will BACS the current one, which I duly do once he has departed. I return to the comfort of the lounge and reply to my messages before starting on the draft of todays blog. A friend wishes me a happy Burns night and another invites me for coffee, to which I reply I am available for a skinny organic soya mocha macchiato with extra hot yaks foam yoga mat infused achino, at her convenience next week. I am aware that I am easily irritated at the moment, a sure sign that I am digesting things from yesterday and I feel the draw of the Shed and the need to read quietly or write to occupy me. The fact that I am listening to the midday concert on Radio 3 is also a bit of a give way. Fortunately it is orchestral music, if it had been choral or Lieder I would have looked for something else. There are times when I just do not want to hear voices. It is a hang over from my working days when voices were all suffused with anxieties and anger, when I have my own stuff to process I do not want the distraction of all that other noise going on in the background. Voiceless music feeds my inner voices and helps me to feel my way through what ever is going on for me, words and voices just get in the way with all the other information they carry. The friends I most value are those I can be silent with. I go to the Shed to write for a bit. There is a poem in there somewhere trying to get out about spot welding cancer but it needs time.

I go to the Shed and settle down to write letters. The afternoon inks away until the light fails. I pack up the Shed and return to the house to find my partner returned from visiting her mother. I pop out and post my letters. Back home I get sofa’d and feel at odds with myself and click through TV channels. Yesterdays oncology review is still with me. I stumble across Legend showing old and original Star Trek. What a delight, back to back episodes. My partner and friend go out to eat so my eldest daughter and I indulge in a take away curry. I go for a spicy madras, craving something hot and challenging. I devour my treat when it arrives knowing I might regret this later but frankly I don’t care. I sip water as another classic old fantasy show passes. I’m bored (short hand for my needs are not being met) so I quit TV and read American Gods. That reading and finishing the draft of the blog will do me for tonight, I shall take my newly nurtured feet and go to bed with the intention of tomorrow being a gym day.