
Its a Tuesday and that means I wake up to a training day, and this Tuesday I wake up to an evening at the opera. I make my partner a tea and we check to see how we are before getting up. We both grab some breakfast and my partner goes to the gym. I do some life admin and pay some bills so I can finally put my hand operation behind me as far as the surgeon is concerned. With that done I head for the garage and the rower. Today it has to be an hour, I need to push myself to do the longer rows, speed will come later. So with some opera in my ears I set off. Its seems a long time but I finally get to the end, not quite up to my normal standard bit its okay for a work out.


By the time I have recorded my session my partner has returned and we have lunch. I go for a shower and then my partner and I go off to the next village where I try to open a Nationwide ISA, it turns out to be a fools errand, I will not bore you with the details but the supposed advantages of technology are grossly over rated and pale into insignificant compared to the good old days when you went into a bank or building society, slapped money on the counter, filled in a form and VoilĂ you had an account. The upshot is that at the moment I have a myriad of codes and identifiers, account numbers and security codes and in theory have a current account and an ISA, except the current account is nowhere to be seen on my and but a defunct ISA account is, and if I go in via internet banking the same defunct ISA account is showing and there is no current account. No money has been able to be moved so at the moment its been one waste of time. I am assured by all those around me that it will all come good. Bah humbug!
The evening has been a far more enjoyable experience. La Traviata is one hell of an opera and it has the additional benefit of having two intermissions, which tonight meant two ice creams! I was struck in the final act, (spoiler alert), that when Violetta sings about her disease she has a line in which she says ” this disease robs me of all hope” and it struck me that my cancer diagnosis seemed to do that to me, it was assumed that I was incurable, the language of the medics was and still is all about containment and palliative care, in a nutshell “when and not if”. I note that I feel differently now, less overwhelmed by a sense of hopeless imminent death. I am not exactly bouncing around like a new born lamb but I do feel less constrained. I’ve held off this disease for over five years now and I continue to have a quality of life that many would envy, I do not feel a shadow or any sense of helplessness hanging over me, I do not feel that I have been robbed of all hope any more. I feels like I am moving on. On that thought I take my evening meds, don my finger split and go to bed. Tomorrow I have coffee with a friend booked.


