Its Wednesday and I am up and about quite early tucking into my muesli and coffee when a friend calls having read the blog. Neither of us have exercised for two days and so there is a conversation about rectifying this. I resolve to go to the gym and she resolves to go for a walk and test her new ear buds. As soon as the call is over I set the dishwasher into motion and change into my gym gear. I have decided to always now go ready changed in to my training gear as it saves a change of clothes, why did I not do this before? So I gear up and drive off. I make an impromptu stop at the garage as no one is there and they have petrol, so I squeeze another £15 into my tank. Suddenly I feel secure, such a fools paradise. I continue to the gym and head for the cross trainers. I spend an hour on one pumping away adnd noting my heart rate was purportedly 144. I check my pulse on my fitbit and find my pulse to be 117. I suspect that gym machines are over rating the pulse rate to try and stop people having heart attacks on the equipment and in the gym. Can you imagine the paper work? Any way I burn off 675 calories over 7.43 kilometres and feel satisfied. I work on a couple of machines to stretch my shoulders and the top of my back and then do sets of crunches on the crunch frame.

I pop back to the changing rooms and squeeze myself into a pair of trunks, my silver swim hat and googles and head for the pool. My body knows whats coming this time and does not panic like it did on Sunday and I actually manage to swim lengths of front crawl, not consecutively, but I do swim. I try to swim breast stroke, or at least my version, frog arms and dolphin legs, but my shoulders just rebel and refuse to play, I am so out of condition and practice, so I go back to crawl. I must get myself a massage to loosen the shoulders. I also notice that getting into the pool is tricky as I cannot bend down smoothly to ease myself in, its more of a jerky drop onto the pool edge and then a slither in. That needs to change, I’ll be fucked if I am going to use the ladder like all those hippos that are now flailing about in half the pool in something called aqua aerobics. It looks more like “staying alive in the water” than even my swimming does. I swim, I swim a bit more and at the point where I am knackered I talk myself into two more lengths. I manage them and haul myself out of the pool and head for the steam room. Its a ten minute slot I give myself and time it on my watch. Since my friend passed out in the showers a few days ago after being in a jacuzzi I am careful about taking my hot body into the relative cool of the pool area. I head for the showers and start hot and move to cold as I cool down from the mornings efforts.

Eventually I am in the club lounge with an americano black and a chocolate caramel shortbread. I drink the coffee but cannot face the sweetness of the shortbread.

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I drive to the super market to get cash and then to the garden centre where I find they are selling ten trays of pansies for a tenner. I cannot resist and load up. Back home I unload the plants and set them out where I want them and put out the compost bag and tools ready for garden guy who is coming today. My cheap reading glasses, 4 for £20, which are supposed to cut blue light from screens, have arrived and I test them out. I am very satisfied with them, in fact I type this wearing them and finding that they actually work. The 1.5s suit me. I now have a pair in my “office” backpack, a pair in the bedroom for nocturnal reading a pair on the stack of books that live at my end of the sofa. I think I am sorted. I also get the winter covers on the front garden arm chair and stack the back garden chairs and pop the new winter cover over them. I am beginning to wonder if I have an unconscious wish for winter to be here earlier that it is due. There is a part of me that thinks that as from January I will be able to go and visit the services I work with again. It is part of the work I really miss. Last winter was all lockdown, with a new heating system and a freshly decorated house in lieu of a holiday. It was cosy but very constrained, this winter will be equally cosy but with a greater sense of freedom and less of a sense of threat. I am officially not a leper according to the email I got from the government the other day.

My garden guy arrives so I make him tea and explain that today is a planting day and to have fun, pansies everywhere! I retreat to the sofa and begin the blog as I am being taken out for a meal tonight. Actually my partner is taking me because her friend cried off and a meal out seemed like a good idea. Its an early table so with luck I might catch the second half of a European match later.

After a really good meal I do make it back to see Ronaldo pull off a last moment win and then I finish the blog for the day, climb out of my dining clothes and head for bed as I have meetings in the morning and a therapeutic community meeting in the afternoon. At some point I need to train and follow through on todays effort although think I am coming down with a cold.