Monday and its time to get ready for my hospital appointment in the afternoon. So I have lots of time to eat breakfast and settle down to write a letter. Its throwing it down with rain and clearly the plants I put in yesterday are appreciating it. I get my admin ready for the afternoon. By lunchtime I am all admin’d out so I take a shower and pick my outfit. Before I can get anywhere Tesco deliver. The delivery guy was soaked and had another four hours on shift to do. Before I can leave for the hospital Amazon deliver my latest Rovelli book Helgoland. Its basically about Relational Quantum Theory. I love his books and I am looking forward to getting into this one.

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Its time to head off to the hospital. The drive is straight forward and I am greeted with “Use the hand sanitiser”. I fill in forms and settle down to wait while reading my book. At precisely the appointment time the doctor invites me into his consulting room. We have a really relaxed conversation and he looks at my sebaceous cyst. We discuss my current medication and cancer and what effect surgery might have. This experience is worth every penny its costing me. We discuss a possible timetable and he goes off to check the cost. He returns and tells me the cost, which is in the ball park I expected. So he books me in for the 20th of May, just ten days to go. I go in on the Monday before for a pre-surgery COVID test then isolate till the Thursday. Post operation I will return to have the surface stitches out. My looks will be enhanced by a scar I shall palm off as an old bullet scar. “Luckily the bullet passed through my cheek, It was a narrow shave!” I drive home and walk over to the post box to drop my letter in the box. It seems appropriate to order take out tonight and relax after the excitement of the day. I change, order Indian and settle down to my new book. I am instantly hooked and read solid till the Indian meal arrives. As soon as the meal is over I am back to the book. I ring my sister to tell her that the mobile number she gave me is not responding so that she can follow it up. I go back to the book until I can read no more due to brain fullness and turn to writing the blog. Tomorrow I am attending an online conversation with Irvine Yalom in the evening, I am excited as he has been a hero of mine for years.

Saturday and it threw it down all day. So we ate a large late breakfast and hunkered down for the day. I read, not taking much notice of what anyone else was doing. At 2 o’clock I have a Zoom call with my son in Stockholm and we talk house maintenance, tool hire, job hunting and grandchildren. Life in Sweden under COVID is a different experience apparently. After the call I get on with stuff, somewhere in there I watch some rugby and then decide to train in the late afternoon. I changed and trudged down the garden to the Shed to do an hour on the bike. It was a reasonable session to end my training week on.

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I spent my evening reading and finishing Before the Coffee Gets Cold. It left me profoundly moved. I ended the evening staring at the football and going to bed without writing the blog.

Sunday and it is no longer raining. I head for the bathroom for the Sunday weigh in. The first after a good weeks training back.

89.5 Kilos

Well that was a pleasant surprise. I am back on track and ready to start some weights in the coming week. Nice to be getting fit again, now to build the muscle back.

So its a brief, but late, breakfast and we head to the garden centre to buy herbs and compost. Having got what we went for we return home and I head for the garden. There I stay until tea time having upgraded the herb area, planted ground cover plants under the trees and planted petunias all over the place.

I try to ring my sister but get no reply, I promise myself to ring again later. Tea and I sit down to write the blog against the back ground of early evening TV which no one watches. Tomorrow I see the surgeon about the sebaceous cyst on my cheek , I am of course anxious but more about “when” rather than “what”. I just want this thing gone as soon as possible so its one thing less to have to deal with. I suspect he will say “Of course I can do it” but how long before he can do it is the crunch and I suspect that no matter how quickly he suggests it will not be quick enough for me.

Friday and its a Shed day, a day of letter writing. A quick breakfast and I get myself to the Shed and settle into my chair, pick my favourite dipping pen and fill the ink well. I continue to write letters all morning taking the odd break for a drink and a biscuit. A friend rings and we chat new cars, new patios and horse grooming. Lunch comes round quickly, so a fried egg sandwich later I am back in the Shed writing more letters. I write solidly catching up with my correspondence until 2:30 when I give a lift to my eldest daughter to her circus skills session. Home via the post box I take time to take a few pictures of the brave flowers that are in bloom.

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I write another letter and return to the post box. I close up the shed and return to the house where I take a call from a friend and chat for a while about families, sewing and the continuing restrictions of COVID. Tea and then I watch Leicester Tigers lose to Sale. By now its heading for 10 o’clock but I have not trained, its one of those moments, I am either in the battle or I am not so I shift my arse, get changed and in to the garage to row for 30 minutes. It turns out to be a good session.

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I return to the sofa and write the blog before bed.

Thursday, 9:50, mild panic as I have a meeting at 10am. Coffee and log in. The ensuing meeting brought significant news as the programme manager has decide to move on. It will take a while for this to work through but we spent time this morning absorbing the news. At the end of the meeting I joined my family on a lunch time walk to cast my vote in the local elections. I got back to the house with enough time to have a smoothie and log on to host an open forum. For the first time in over a year no one turned up. I and my co host gave people 15 minutes to turn up and then abandoned the space. The spare time was spent drawing up my April invoices and sending them off. I find myself with time to train early so I head for the shed and spend an hour on the bike. It turns out to be a good session.

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I finish my session and clear the kitchen ready for tonight’s meal preparation. I record my training session and then make tea for the garden guy who has arrived. Rather than have him do the boring stuff like weeding and tidying I gave him artistic freedom to plant out a lot of the new plants that I’ve grown from seed. Just seems to me that a gardener needs to plant and grow stuff and not just cut stuff down and throw old stuff out. He seemed pleased to be doing it as he stayed over time. Tea eaten and I settle down to a football match while my partner has a singing lesson. At half time I clear the kitchen. When it was over I write the blog. I’m looking forward to tomorrow, it is going to be a shed day and a chance to write. I find that I have a compulsive part of me that needs to write, strange for a dyslexic.

Wednesday and its a “do the house stuff” day but before I do anything I get a call from a friend so I start my day with a chat about children’s birthday parties and the work entailed to come up with ways to keep young children amused. Then after a muesli breakfast I set about the list of things to do. First up is planting the bulbs and flowers that arrived yesterday.

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Well garden done I move on. Whilst doing the garden the splash guards for the bath arrive via Amazon. So I gather together my tools and take over the bathroom to fix the guard in place. It goes really well, I think,so tomorrow once the bonding has set it will be possible to take anxiety free showers.

Time for lunch with my partner and then its time to clear away the debris created by my daughters clearing out their old and unwanted clothes from their weekend reorganisation of storage space. I recycle a lot of coat hangers and deal with the cardboard mountain that had accumulated. With this done it was time to take the charity boxes to the Age UK shop in the next village, I nice break from the house.

Back home and I set about putting everything away that had to be taken out of the under sink cupboard to get Daisy Dishwasher better. I relocate the candles and the vases. Then I get a loaf started in the bread maker before going to the garage and sorting out the paint from the latest redecoration and reinstall the weights bench so that I can use it, I must be the only person who hoovers their garage. However the bench is back and I can get back to some weight training.

I get my weeks washing in the machine and then get ready to train. Today is a rowing day, so I will do 45 minutes. It goes relatively well and I feel I am getting back into the routine of training again. It will soon be back to having smoothies on a regular basis. The aim is to get back to 90 Kilos as soon as possible.

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I finish my session and retreat to the sofa to record it and to eat tea. I read for a while and then watch Chelsea beat Real Madrid to join Manchester City in the European cup final. At the end of the game I retrieve my washing from the tumble dryer and fold it ready to go away. Its blog time. Today has been all chores but there is a sense of achievement to have cleared the decks. Tomorrow is back to some work and some research on self publishing.

A post bank holiday Tuesday and I am up early as I am off to the hospital today for the result of my ultrasound on my sebaceous cyst. First a shower in the now non leaking facility followed by breakfast. On the drive to the hospital I have the company of a friend on the phone as she waited for her partner to emerge from a hospital appointment. I’m at the hospital early and have to wander around a bit before they can book me in. Once booked in I wait to be called. I am called and in I go. Two minutes tops to tell me what I already knew and tell me there is a three to twelve week wait before the cyst gets cut out. I walk back to the hotel car park and drive home. A waste of my time really, they could have phoned me and told me and save every ones time. By the time I got home the engineer had been to mend Daisy dishwasher and succeeded at a cost of course but it means I can get back to my nightly routine of setting the dishwasher off before bed. I contact a couple of private hospitals adn ask if they can do the surgery I need quickly. The answer was either that they could not get a consultant appointment any earlier than the nhs or the consultant that was available is now off ill. So much for the private sector. A brief lunch and I set off for the Shed to write letters and to train.

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Back in the house I find new plants have arrived which means that at least part of my day tomorrow is sorted. I also find the book that I ordered, the first book by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Before the Coffee Gets Cold. I found that the book that I read a couple of days before was Before the Coffee Gets Cold: Tales from the Cafe, was the follow up to the original. So now I shall read the first book in the series.

My evening is food and football before the blog. I want to read before bed but I am tired. Despite training I still feel less than activated.

Monday and its pissing down with rain, in fact it does so all day. The family gets up to bacon sandwiches and fresh coffee. Over the meal we chat and discover that my youngest daughter has never seen photos of my mother in her younger days.This leads to much rummaging in cupboards and the digging out of old photographs. We spend ages pawing over the pictures and retelling some of the family history. By the time we finish it is lunch time adn my youngest daughter loads up her car and sets off for home. The rain sets in even harder and I retreat to the sofa and spend all afternoon formatting my poems so that they are all in Arial 12. Its a pain of a job going through them one by one but necessary. I finally finish. Now they all have to be edited and prepared into a single manuscript. I have to decided how I go about self publishing them. It is a pure vanity project on my part, I am under no illusion about them but at least my family can have what I’ve produced over my life, at least all the ones I’ve got. I eat tea and watch a film before getting to write the blog. I still have “Before the coffee gets cold” peculating away inside me, I have order the book that came before it, once I find an author I like then I read everything that they have written. With most authors this is okay but I never managed to do that with Balzac, I swear he could write faster than I could read.

Sunday, its been a day of gifts but first there was bath resealing to deal with. I am not satisfied with the tap end of the bath and decide that it needs redoing. To be safe I take a trip to Wickes to get another tube of sealant. I arrive at 10:15 and have to QUEUE !

Its back to home to redo the tap end before breakfast with the family. I give it my best shot using a different shaping tool,and get a better result, not perfect but much improved.

Breakfast over a present arrives from Amazon. I open it and find an early birthday present from a friend. Its a book; Before The Coffee Gets Cold. Tales from the Cafe, by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. I start to read and go on reading and reading , I am gripped. For the first time in a long time I am truly hooked.

I go on reading and reading. I stop only to go for a walk with the family to feed the ducks in the local park. The walk is full of gifts that include, chaffinches, squirrels and a woodpecker. We also get to feed the ducks and geese and yet another gift, a pair of goslings.

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Back home I continue to read and read and read. No TV, no music just reading. There is something about Japanese writers that I love, they seem to have a sensitivity about relationships that gets expressed very elegantly. We reach dinner time and eat as a family, clear away and I read more stopping only for the final episode and season finale of In the Line of Duty, before returning to the book. I finish the book and feel drawn to coffee and reflection. Time to write the blog and to reflect. I know that I shall be thinking about the book for days to come, I’m tempted to start to re-read the book but resist. I want time for it to sink in and give up more of its subtleties. When I get a book like this I know I could be a hermit as long as I had books, pen, paper and ink.

Saturday starts early as there are things to do today. As always Saturday starts with breakfast and the loading of my weekly drugs wallet. That done we go to the garden center to get some food and a couple of log roll edging lengths. Once home I wait for two things, the arrival of my youngest daughter and the foam rods that I need to reseal the bath. In due course both arrive so I set about resealing the bath. Looks easy on the videos but of course my walls are not straight, the gap is not equal and nothing comes away or cleans as easily.

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The pictures make this look like a stroll in the park but believe me this job was a pain from start to finish. Fortunately my preparation was good in that I had bought everything I could possibly need from tools to solvents. During the process I get to clean the surfaces with white spirit, upc cleaner, antifungal foam and of course soapy water.Between treatments everything gets dried using the hair dryer. Every stage also got hoovered to ensure no debris got left. So now I have a bath full of water to ensure that gap was at its largest when sealed so that when someone has a bath it does not distort the seal. Due to the depth of the gap that had to be sealed the sealant needs as long as possible to cure, the water will stay in the bath for one to two days to ensure it has the best chance of success. Then will come the acid test. Until then my box of sealing goodies will stay close by. By the end of the week the splash guard that I have ordered for the end of the bath will arrive and be fitted.

At last it is done and I can eat tea, watch a rugby match and write the blog. I find myself tired, disgruntled that I have not trained today and face a weigh in tomorrow that I know I will fail. Although I have finished todays job, I will not know if it works for a couple of days. There is always that moment when you have to face the prospect of failure and the need to start allover again. I need to start to get out again, I’m feeling dissatisfied with too many things, the garden, the work, my weight, my fitness, my COVID institutionalisation but most of all my own lack of motivation.

Friday and unusually a part work day. I get a bacon bagel and a coffee and ring the dishwasher mending company to ask if they got my booking on line. An apologetic receptionist tells me that the website is creating problems and takes my details to check their system. I’m not on it. She apologies and takes my booking. A few minutes later Chris rings me, the engineer, he’s busy today and away over the weekend so do I want him to refer me back to the company. We talk about how Daisy Dishwasher is and he seems to be aware of what the problem is likely to be. I decide that as having no dishwasher is not life threatening I agree to a Tuesday appointment. Once off the phone I surf the net fro information about rod use when sealing a bath. I discover that a “rod” in this context is a foam filling rod used to back sealant when the gap to be sealed is large. I hunt for the rods I need and to my surprise find them Amazon and available to be delivered tomorrow. I order the rods I need and tick them off my materials list. Having completed this task I gather some information and get ready for my meeting at 11 o’clock. I Also book a ticket for a conversation with Irvine Yalom my existential and group therapy hero. Its on May the 11th in the evening for an hour and a half with access to the video for some time afterwards. I recommend it. On cue I log on to my zoom meeting and have a useful conversation with one of the managers I support. Work is moving into a new phase and these conversations are really useful to keep in touch with how services are moving out of COVID restrictions. I come away and find that the information I had just discussed had come through so now the new work will start to come through.

I take a call from a friend and chat for a while and then go to the shed for a while. I write a letter and use my last stamp, always a tricky moment. Another friend calls me as I write so I have little time to finish the letter before I take my eldest daughter to her circus skills class. Its a relatively short drive away, and once I have dropped her off I head for the local do it yourself stores. I search both stores for a particular splash guards to use on the bath but neither of them stock what I need so I confine myself to buying the sealant that I need. This has taken a lot of time and I make it to my home village post box just in time to press my letter into the letter collectors hands, after which I pop into the post office and renew my stamp stock. I am about to drive off but realise two of my nieces have followed me out of the post office. We have a brief chat at a socially distanced distance and catch up with family news. We agree that it would be nice to have a family day in the summer to catch up and celebrate all the things the family have missed over the last thirteen months.

I get home and settle into my evening of tea followed by a cracking rugby match where Leicester Tigers clawed their way back to win a semi final which takes them to a Twickenham final. This was followed by a world boxing bout while I write the blog. My weekend is going to have the added pleasure of the company of my youngest daughter while I reseal the bath once my “rods” arrive.