Monday, and its one of “those” Mondays. Its a jab Monday. Having bathed last night my body is ready for clean socks and pants as is traditional when visiting a GP surgery, with which I duly obliged coupled with easy slip down waist and trousers to facilitate the jabbing. Peanut butter toast, coffee and pre jab paracetamol are taken. Without any more to do I walk down to the surgery. I book myself in and wait, occupying myself by reading the information board.

Its mostly joyous news that no matter what you are suffering from their are people to help by telling you that you are not alone. Does this help, I suppose it must. As a psychologist I spent my entire professional life trying to get people to talk about the difficult stuff and I have to admit that sense of Universality that Yalom writes about so well did appear to be a powerful factor in some peoples progress. For others not so much. My cancer is my cancer and knowing that others have it is little comfort to me, I’ve read the survival curves. Neither does it help when my malady is turned in to a TV industry of advertising. A campaign that has gone from one in four having cancer in a life time to 1 in 2, in just under three years. That cannot be right, so who is telling the truth and who is bending it to induce sufficient fear to donate?

I get called in and hand over my jab kit to the nurse and we chat about how shit COVID is while she makes up the solution to go into me. There is a lot of “stuff” to pump into me and it needs to be done slowly or it clumps and forms a lump in my abdomen, its one of the side effects. So nurse pumps it in, pops on a taped down fluffy cloud and checks the date and time for the next one. I am then dispatched to the world again and already I can feel that this is not going to be a good month.

Home and I fill my medication wallets for the next two weeks before tackling the challenge ahead of me. The dead tumble dryer is sitting in the facilities area doing nothing except support a swathe of filled washing baskets. How can one household produce so much? I do one load a week and that’s me done, what lays before me is the evidence of over fussiness and too many clothes to choose from. Anyway I remove the baskets and begin my surgery on the dryer. Diagnosis is not good as all the usual things like filters and water tank are okay. I check the heat exchanger and find it clogged with lint and damp fluff, no air could possibly get through that coating. I remove the offending layer of felt and then stick the hair dryer into the vent and give it a good blast. I am hoping that this will dry out the whole heat exchanger and the connecting pipes. I test the machine, no drum movement. It lights up and does all the digital noises for selection but when the go button gets pushed there is nothing. Its time for surgery. I don my head torch and grab my tool kit and I am unscrewing the back panel toot sweet. It comes away to reveal the impeller fan, which is linked to the drum. It appears to be stuck and my gentle probing of it is not doing anything. So as all good engineers do I give it a tap and voila it comes free. A judicious application of special silicone WD40 and it turns freely and the drum starts to move. I run a test on the mains and it works, if a little noisy. I put the back plate back on and test run the machine, it works, go me! I replace the laundry to its former glory and sit down for a coffee. By now my injection site is bloody sore and giving me gyp so I down more paracetamol. I once read the possible side effects of paracetamol and immediately stored it in a locked part of my mind.

I become restless with the soreness of the jab site and I am not quite sure what I am going to do. In the end I feed the hedgehog and retreat to the Shed. I write a letter as is my way and take a trip to the post box, moving my car so that Tesco can deliver later. Tesco duly rock up on time and the family scamper about stowing the goodies, I note that I need to tidy the “quartermasters” store where I keep all the back up goods, like toilet rolls, kitchen rolls and baked beans. I am done now. I have run out of energy spoons and I collapse on the sofa and very appreciatively eat the tuna pasta my partner makes. There is some NCIS but I am restless and sore so go for a bath using the unicorn poo bath bomb my son sent me for fathers day. I laze for over an hour with my ear buds in listening to music. Once out I find I have absolutely no energy at all and go to bed.

Tuesday, I wake up early and sore, I knew this was going to be a bad month for lumpy jab pain. I get up, do breakfast and then dress ready to take my daughter to a police station. She is collecting data for her doctorate this week and as the rail unions have decided to strike this week, (I am not sure how I feel about that yet) I have agreed to drive her there. The journey goes well and I drop her off and she attempts to use her “multipass” to get into the police station. She has not rung so I assume she is now busily coding the content of interviews. Beyond that I cannot say what is going on. I drive home, empty the dishwasher, make coffee and settle on the patio to catch up with the blog.

The post arrives and in it a lovely surprise. A friend has sent me a book in response to pleas for ideas of what to read. It is John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. I am really happy as this is a book that I read when it first came out. Of course being me I read all I could get my hands on as I like it so much. But this gift has prompted me to research him again and of course he has written many more books now. So I have the joy of rereading Owen Meany and then acquiring his more recent books. Its lovely to rediscover such an interesting writer. Its a super gift. I have much reading before me. It is also an interesting experience to find my reading history catching up with me. This book was new out and the trendy, on point, book to read when I first read it and here it is a gain. It is a peculiar feeling especially as at about the same time I was reading Herman Hesse and was recently thinking about rereading the Glass Bead Game. So is this what retirement is for; the rereading of ones literary history. If it is I am in for a treat and all those books on my shelves will be dusted down and appreciated again. I wonder what I will find new in old friends.

I eat lunch with my partner on the sunny patio and then it is time to wrestle the cardboard mountain that my eldest daughter has created. If I say it myself I am good at compacting the recycle bin and get the maximum into it. So I set to work on the mountain and soon I have the pile of packaging in the bin. Its a strange kind of satisfaction over coming the recycling, tomorrow it will be gone, no longer my circus or my monkeys. I top up the blog draft and contemplate more paracetamol prior to a walk. I must try to keep some movement in my day till I feel able to train again.

The village walk goes well and my partner and I do our steps and return home to put the bins out and settle in for the evening. We eat on the patio and I ring my daughter, who tells me how her day has gone. I then slip into the evening of blogging and reading Owen Meany. My jab site is still sore and hard so I shall take more paracetamol tonight but I have a rule that after day two I do not take anything. So I hope for a good nights sleep and to wake up less sore in the morning.