Tuesday, I am up early enough to make toast and coffee before my 9:30 1 to 1 with my programme manager. The meeting goes well and moves us towards my leaving. It is a secret accept here as a friend pointed out. I doubt anyone who works in the services I support read my blog so I think my secret is safe. As always there is post meeting admin to do so I send my emails, book meetings and generally tidy the desk and the virtual in box.

My partner and I walk to the village shop to buy a paper and get some cash. It feels like cash is coming back into fashion, in these days of inflation, commercial robbery and profit taking in the face of shortage I think there is something comforting about cash, a sort of sense of control and power over the economic tides. After all the banks are as avarice ladened as any other venture seeking to relieve us of our hard earned cash. Cash in your pocket can be mastered unlike banks who object to you having any control over your own money. We return home to bacon sandwich’s for lunch and the distraction of crosswords. Both sandwich and crosswords are successfully navigated and I was beginning to wonder what I was going to do next when Amazon deliver me rescue packages. The squirrels will be happy that there food has arrived which means they get the joy of real in the shell peanuts and sunflower seeds. I am happy as I have two new books by Muriel Barbery the author of The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Again I read the first page of one of them and I am hooked, it feels like I am being rescued from my intellectual slumbers and reinforced to slow down at the moment. To think a dyslexic is saved by reading is quite a journey.

I top up the squirrel feeder and then I clean out the hedgehog canteen and renew the food supply so my spinney friend is good for food tonight. I check my work emails one last time and send a couple of WhatsApp messages with the intension of reading for the afternoon. My progress to my reading is stopped by a phone call from the General Hospital responding to my GPs referral to them. They suggest a date I cannot do and we settle on June the 8th at 9:30am. The woman confirms the time and date and hangs up. I am struck by panic and immediately start to write the blog. This examination will be horrendous, this is the one the friendly medical profession will shove a camera down my already tight urethra to look at my bladder. The thought is just soul destroying. It is one of those grit your teeth and be British moments when being able to dissociate yourself from your body and to relinquish any sensibilities about being a person and giving your meat self up to the process. My partner makes me coffee and I write this. I am numbed at the thought of my body being invaded again and my drug induced shrinking manhood being publicly displayed and interfered with. The dread is palpable.

I read all afternoon, my partner goes to the gym and I read on. I read and read until 7pm, finishing my book A Single Rose by Muriel Barbery. My partner returns to find me in sombre mood but I am surprised as this is the first time for a very long time since I read a book in almost a single sitting. It feels like feeding myself and countering my fear of training. I know I need to be active and to train again, what I fear is passing blood again the way I did last time. There is only one way to find out so perhaps on Thursday I will go for a gentle row in the garage. But for now it is going to be an evening of Wanted and an early night as I have a drop in session to run tomorrow morning. My immediate wish is for a night of sleep.