Wednesday and I am awake at 7 o’clock and ready to study. I get my laptop and watch the complete recording of the last training session that the team and I did. This is in preparation for the training session that the team are doing this afternoon. I note the things I want to carry over into the next session and then treat myself to a late breakfast bacon bagel. I read some Posttraumatic Growth literature before getting ready to train in the garage this morning. I decide on an hour long row at a lower level of resistance. Today I choose Radio 4, anything has got to be better than Jeremy Vine.

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I head for a post row shower and get into my latest outfit including a shirt and tie ready for the on line training session. A quick cupcake lunch and I am in front of the laptop eager to perform.

If ever there was a a disastrous non training session this was it. This is part of a national development training, a mandatory training; two staff turned up and clearly had no idea what the training was about and their changing role as a service. The team worked well to maximize what we could get out of the situation, including a new date and commitment to getting the staff there.

The team spent some time processing the aborted session and what we needed to consider for the future. After quite a long discussion we went our various ways. I moved the cars off the drive so that our garden guy could shear the hedges in the drive. There is just time to start the blog and take a call from a friend before tea is ready. and then I move the cars back to the drive. The evening is going to be a football match.

Tomorrow there are meetings to go to but I need to decide to get back on the bike otherwise my back will not take rowing every day. There is also Saturdays menu to be thought about as we have friends coming to dinner for the first time in over a year.

I started to write this blog as a way of dealing with my cancer diagnosis and the journey that this will entail. It was also meant to keep family and friends up to date without having to ask. As I wait for new scan appointments based on my last blood test and my oncologist appointment that has been brought forward I feel that this has become a strange time of a normality set in pandemic isolation. I have a sense of unreality that my blog reflects what must appear a normal life yet I experience it as one of constant threat that has to be considered all the time. Its now 735 days since my cancer diagnosis and 681 days since my first chemo and the start of the blog. My oncologist said the chemo would give me an additional 18 months or 548 days, so I’ve used that up and I am on my own time now. When I think about it like that it just makes me determined to do what I want to do regardless of any pandemic or restrictions.