Monday and I wake up aware that I can hear a small person chatting away downstairs. My youngest daughter and her family are still here and doing the early morning getting up routine. My partner brings me a hot water and I get ready for the day. The family breakfasts together and the youngest grandson gets picked up and hugged a lot as the family get ready to drive home. The elder boy is full of beans and helps to organise things to go into the car. Eventually its time to wave the family goodbye as they zoom off in there car. My partner and I star to tidy up and return the house to normal. There are several challenges like how to fold up the temporary cot and getting the sofa bed to fold away neatly. My eldest daughter returns from work and expertly wrestles the play gym back into its cover. Eventually and a toasted tea cake later the house is clear and much of the stuff is away.

My poetry collection from the Koestler Awards arrives and I avidly read it. There is some good stuff in the collection, I wish I could share some but copyright would have me. There are one or two gems in the collection but also a lot of the rhyming stuff that many beginner poets think they have to do. Some of it gets by, some of it is clumsy. Having read the collection and revisited one or two of the poems I complete the blog piece on Prison Poetry that I am writing for the poetry website. I finally get it all drafted and then post it at prost8kancerman.com. With that done I start to draft todays ordinary blog while I wait for Tesco to deliver. Tonight my partner will be doing her singing lesson and my eldest daughter will be at art class so I will have a chink of time to myself. Usually there is a football match to watch but not tonight, even tough my team is playing. So I might just indulge in a mindlessly violent film, its a while since I have done that. I might also plan a day out, I am toying with the idea of returning to a big second hand book farm that is close by.

I read my way into the evening finishing H is for Hawk by Helen McDonald before sharing tea and moving onto a film. The film was terrible and I was glad when my partner joined me from an abandoned singing lesson and we moved onto a Brokenwood Mystery. Being tired after the busy weekend I take my night meds and get myself to bed. I have a day to ready myself for my oncology review on Wednesday.