Wednesday, bin day and the day I wake up still with a cold. I make coffee and watch the morning news. The bank of England is buying government debt as government bonds plunge. This means of course that pension funds and other stuff are watching the value of their balance sheets vanishing before their eyes. Mortgages are also going up, so the Tory government has started with a real bang. The morning is a patchwork of odds and ends. Some poetry stuff, some domestic chores, replenishing the hedgehog feed and reviewing the garden camera.
It gets to lunchtime and everyone in the house are cold. I decide to test the central heating. I know it’s a radical move, but I figure the system needs a run and be warmed through just to check the system is fully functional. While I wait for the system to warm up I do a bit more research on poetry publishers. During this I am engaged with WhatsApp arranging to meet a friend for coffee next week. He has suffered a cruel and fierce redundancy decision in less than a month after taking up a new post and moving to the area to do so. It is an increasingly harsh Real World out there. My partner gets a call from the GP who decides it’s okay to tell her over the phone that her recent x-ray is suggesting she has arthritis in her forearms. All the GP can offer is pain killers and a thought that there might be a bit of carpal tunnel syndrome. She offers to refer to a specialist but warns that it will take a long time to be seen. I ring our local Spire hospital and within minutes they reply to my enquiry and in the call, we arrange an appointment for a few days’ time, fix the initial fee and provide them with all the information they need to access the x-rays already done. All we can do now is attend the appointment and undertake the most thorough assessment possible and then see what options become available.
The rest of my afternoon is spent trying to sort out when I can go to York to see my mentor again. It feels the right time to do this talking. I also spend some time catching up with some life admin. By the time the working day comes to an end everyone in the house is feeling drained and without energy. It becomes a fish and chip night and my partner, and I go over to our village chippy to collect the goodies.
Back home its fish and chips and then we settle down for a quiet evening watching TV and hunkering down. I watch the news with a kind of morbid fascination as the financial situation unravels. I draft the blog and contemplate what I am going to do tomorrow. As always, I take my night meds and hope for significant sleep tonight.
