Friday and I wake to find my partner preparing to go to the hairdresser, so I take my vitals, all good and prepare to get up for the day. After a hot water I get up and shower and then do breakfast with my morning meds. I get ready to meet a friend in town for lunch but before I can get going my partner returns having found her hairdresser was marooned in Ibiza. I go for my lunch date.
I arrive at the hotel in town where I have agreed to meet my friend, I think about a drink but before I can about ordering what would be an outrageously priced hotel lemonade my friend appears at the hotel entry. We walk to the near by Cosy Club and settle in. Having ordered we sit and chat about all the things that have befallen us of the last few months. My friend has suffered a recent loss and we talk about loosing people and the subsequent processing and grief. We catch up on mutual friends and we are doing as we eat our meals. It is the sort of conversation that only friends can have, picking up instantly on the issues that each has faced or is facing. At the end of the meal we leave and return to our cars as my friend continues her journey on to London. I return home.
On my return home I head out into the garden and gather up my two kneeling figures and my embracing couple and then spend a while repainting them. With that done I gather up all the solar garden lights and clean some of them and put them together to see which ones are still working. There is another group of old light that I just junk. With all this done its time for a football fest. I watch match after match as the home football teams lose hideously. Eventually it comes to an end and I sit back and look as possible new cars and then I draft the blog.
Its my birthday tomorrow, I am going to be 77. I can barely believe it given my stage four prostate cancer but I have lived far longer than I expected when I was diagnosed in 2019. I have lived to see all my grandchildren together, my partner’s retirement, my sisters death leaving me the last of my generation, I’ve survived a DVT, a bladder stone and an angina scare. I row the equivalent of 4 to 5 Boat races a week, I’ve continued to read and feed my brain, drive and write to friends. To add to this I now have six collections of published poetry and I am thinking about a new car. Best of all the oncologist is telling me they cannot find and evidence of the metastasis associated with my prostate cancer. That is so difficult to believe, I am having problems processing this but now I’m thinking 80 might be on the cards. So Moving On feels right, but where to and to what is a bit of a puzzle. So I go into my 78th year working on it.
