Sunday and I wake from a deep sleep feeling slightly disorientated. Of course it being a Sunday I weigh myself. 99.3 kilos comes up, exactly the same as last Sunday, so at least I’ve held steady for the week which is good given that I have not been able to bring myself to train this week. Fear of what it might do to me is probably the reason, I can’t face the distress of peeing blood that often. Once in a while if I have trained to hard is almost acceptable but not when it is induced by very little activity. So 99.3 will do this Sunday.
My partner is reading her Kindle and sipping tea when I climb back into bed and begin to sip the hot water she has brought me. We fall to chatting, me reminiscing about my infant school days where all I can remember learning is some basic basket weaving and how to make a recorder from a length of bamboo and a cork. The woman teacher who had both pitch perfect hearing and the ability to cut the shelf of the recorder with a Swiss Army knife with unerring accuracy was the person who taught us these handy life skills. On the other hand a genial Mr Ballack instilled in me the wonder of science when he demonstrated the the strength of air pressure by getting us to try and dislodge a spread out newspaper by hitting a ruler slid half way under it on a desk. All those 28 pounds of air pressure per square inch was to much for our juvenile bodies to move. Out foxed by something invisible seemed magic to my child mind. Unfortunately learning in school was not all demonstrations and as it increasingly demanded that such wonders required the ability to read and write my curiosity got sabotaged by my unrecognised dyslexia. It meant I gravitated to art and ball sports and increasing humiliation at the hands of adults and peers alike. I suppose my delinquency was predictably, but I was lucky my delinquency was primarily of the mind and not of the physical violent or thievery type, give or take a bit of shop lifting or the collection of car club badges of the front of cars. My best one ever was a Butlins Car Club one with a diving woman on it.
Anyway my partner and I agreed that school years were not the best years of our lives. Of course on a Sunday morning this conversation turned to the meaning of life and what on earth we are doing here. Predictably we did not find a definitive answer at all and we wandered about in conversation like I guess millions of others have done. At the end of the conversation the only thing I got in my head was the possible reason that sea otters hold hands is that they are not doing anything attached to surviving the wind and currents of the sea but where in fact securing themselves from loss while in the ocean of meaning seeking. With that I measured my vital, all good, and then got up to have breakfast with my partner. I’m not at my best today but I help change the bedding on our bed and then clamber into my partners car and go to the gym with her. She goes up on the gym floor and I start to write todays blog and decide what poem to take to next weeks poetry stanza meeting. I have things rolling around inside me that need writing, as usual I am not sure what they are but I know its in there somewhere waiting to get out, I just need to be patient and let it arrive in its own time.
As for the rest of the day, there may or may not be a rugby international to watch, but I already know that I will not be staying up to watch the Super Bowl, a 23:30 kick off is too late for me, especially when there is so much tedious razzmatazz that goes with it that the actual game almost becomes an irrelevance. My evening consists of a roast dinner, a face to face call with my youngets daughter and then I sank into TV and the up dating of tomorrows Tesco order. As I carry out my Tesco chore I feel my energy spoons ebbing away so I know I am slipping into preservation mode, which means Call the Midwife and Death in Paradise, and then a retreat to bed. The reality turns out a bit different, in that my body clearly thought the activity of the day was too much and nudges me with its warning sign of a small amount of blood in my urine, so its back to downing a lot of water and seeing how things go. Tomorrow is going to be another see how it goes day.
