Wednesday and I appear to have slept deeply waking only once in the night which is very rare for me. No time to do the vitals, just time to check my messages and socials before getting up and dressed ready to take myself out for breakfast. I walk to the village shop and stock up on crumpets and a daily paper and move onto the local pub that now serves as a café during the day. I order eggs Benedict and a hot chocolate minus the crap on top and settle down to read more of Charles G Lauder Jr’s The Aesthetics of Breath. As I sit and read I enjoy spotting the local references that he makes and the fact that they are mixed in with his Texan background. My food arrives and I have the pleasure of good food and good poetry all at one time. As I run out of food but not poetry I order a second hot chocolate and sit until both both run out. A good way to spend a morning.

Back home I do the days cross words. They are the easy cross words that I do, requiring little high brow intellectual puzzling skills, nothing like a secret service entry test, but I like to think that it exercises at least some portion of my mind. The goal is always to complete all three without recourse to Google. Sometimes my dyslexia gets in the way as I can deduce what the answer is but have not got a clue about how to spell it. My knowledge outstrips my ability to turn sounds into symbols which is at the heart of my dyslexia especially when using pen and paper, not quite so bad when I am using a keyboard, and some times Spell Check helps or predictive text. Today is a good day and I give myself three big ticks of success. With the crosswords done I prepare to accompany my partner and her brother to see their mother.

I am going as an amateur electrician as the career has sent a picture of a hoover lead with an abrasion, so it needs to be checked. I gather up tools, tapes and a spare Henry just in case before my partners brother picks us up in his nice new car. On the journey we talk cars, in particular the one we are in. It is very nice and has lots of “toys”. I like it, my partner would prefer a smaller car by the same manufacturer. We arrive at the mother in laws and while my partner and her brother are visiting and doing what business needs to be done with the career I set about inspecting the abraded wiring on the Hoover (other cleaners are available). My inspection is thorough and I conclude that it is only the out cable layer that has been slightly damaged, the current carrying wires are in tact. I use insulation tape as a first layer to repair the outer layer and then overlay it with a heavier duty duct tape to give it a smooth finish. Job done, I test the cleaner and it works just fine so I join the others in the lounge where we chat beds ands and TV. I take a call from a friend who calls me on the fly as she dives from one task to another on her busy to do list on her way to collect her children from school. After our fleeting the call the career asks if I could look at the upstairs shower as it is not working. The ceiling mains switch is an odd configuration, however I work it out and after a couple of goes the power returns to the shower unit and it starts to work. An easy win.

Not long after my shower victory we are all back in the car returning home through the growing gloom of the evening. Once home I start to draft the blog and think about putting all the tools I had taken with me back in their allotted places, while my partner starts to prepare the evening meal. I respond to an email that is the cost of my planned operation for my Dupuytrens Contracture operation. I have to leave a message as the secretary to whom I am to respond is away from her phone. The evening is with us and I am growing tired already so I suspect I will seek something to read or some TV that requires little of me. Its been a day of normality really, leaving the house, reading, attending to family business, again out of the house, it feels a kind of useful, engaged day. Ordinary but important. I perhaps need more of these. At the back of my mind cancer nags and mutters that I do not get off the hook that easily, the fight goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on.