Wednesday, a minimal day, so here’s the list:

1. Breakfast
2. Booked GP call
3. Asked for a tree lopping quote
4. Checked Email
5. Read letter from post
6. Reviewed the slides for tomorrow’s course
7. Reviewed the resource pack
8. Retreated to the shed to write letters
9. Put in ten new solar lights into the garden.
10. Answered some work emails
11. Wrote my March Invoices and sent them
12. Posted letters
13. WhatsApped several messages
14. Had a 2 minute 33 second call with my GP
15. Watched football
16. Showered
17. Wrote the blog.

So a very average day and one that lacked any training because I could not be arsed today. So today was average but lifted by the odd image from afar. Tomorrow will be full on work with the rarity of a face to face meeting with my GP first thing in the morning, so I am off to bed having ascertained that my partners brother is safe and well after his hospital procedure today.

Tuesday and its back to work for the world. By the time I get up my partner is at work so I have breakfast and go to the shed to write letters. Its good to be back looking out on my garden and having a flat surface to write on. It takes me a while to get back into the swing of writing, but it came back to me. By lunch time I had two letters to post once I had grabbed a tomato soup lunch. I wander over to the post box in my Rupert Bear yellow golf trousers and bright red padded jacket. My now long hair is tucked into a beanie. Its cold and every so often there is a flurry of snow. I while away the time till Tesco rock up and deliver our weekly grocers, unfortunatley I forgot the eggs this week, perhaps a response to Easter. I put stuff away and change into my training gear. Before returning to the shed I prepare a baked cod dish ready to go into the oven to coincide when I finish training. I go to the shed and train. I decide to push myself today. I rowed a personal best yesterday so I thought I would go for a PB on the bike as its been a while since I set my last bike PB, the end of February in fact. I still do the first ten minutes wearing my aerobic training mask, which is meant to mimic altitude training. So I climb aboard the bike and start out.

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I am exceedingly chuffed with myself, I am without doubt getting fitter and stronger. I am hoping that this continues and I can move into some weight work. Anyway time to press on and eat the meal I prepared earlier along with the newly made salad. My evening will be watching Liverpool lose to Milan and writing the blog. I am getting twitchy about the arival of my new plants, about not getting out and the distance COVID creates getting bigger. Still I am confined untill I get my second vaccination and give it time to ferment into the biochemical guardian angel its intended to be. Tomorrow I will concentrate on work, imvoices and the practicallities of life.

Easter Monday and a lazy start with a bacon bagel breakfast. So my morning was taken up with altering our Tesco order, cleaning out the fish tank and having a long conversation with my sister. One of the interesting things that my sister pointed out to me was that the bee I had found in our garden and put on the blog was in fact a Tawny Miner Bee.

Apparently my sister has an identification card from the International Field Survey. I of course go to their website straight after the call and find they have identification cards on all sorts of things, such as moths, butterflies, ladybirds and caterpillars. Of curse I did, I filled my basket with goodies and now have several guides winging their to me. I am hopefully about spring and summer and curious about how my garden will flourish. A late smoothie lunch and its time to order some new lights for the garden before getting ready to train. I decide to row for an hour at my usual level, which I have not done to date.

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Time for tea and a film. I watch As Good As It gets (my third favourite film of all time). I find something new in it every time I watch it, and it never ceases to grip me at some point new. It is all the spaces that speak so loudly and the hesitations but most of all the struggle with the normal and the personal. At the end I always strangely feel explained. Its time to write the blog and prepare for tomorrow. Most of all I need to write, so it will be the shed for me.

Easter Sunday, weigh in day, so as always my first thought is weigh myself and see if my light training has affected my weight. I step on the scales and tentatively look down.

89.9 Kilos

I am amazed but will happily eat my treat this week. Its sunny, so straight after breakfast and a call to our youngest daughter it is out in to the garden. There I stayed all day weeding out the flower beds and planting summer bulbs and corms. While friends and family celebrated in a chocolatey way I busied myself shaping the front garden aware that this sunshine would disappear by tomorrow pausing only for a drink and a hot cross bun for sustenance.

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My evening is TV, Line of Duty and football highlights. Tomorrow its back to training and cold weather. At the moment we all wait for the outcome of Tuesdays assessment of my partners brother. Quietly we all wait.

Saturday, a lazy start to the day. Breakfast, fill the drugs wallet for the week and plan the day. I WhatsApp my partners brother and find he has been transferred to a hospital in Nottingham and that he has to rest before any planned intervention on Tuesday. My partner and I go to her mothers so some banking issues can be sorted out and deliver some flowers. I wait in the car and check my emails. On the way back we drive by the physiotherapy clinic that my partner has booked into to get some work on her aching leg. Home and we finish off the scones that were baked yesterday. I watch England women’s rugby team beat Scotland while my partner does her yoga. I prepare the evening meal to be cooked and then I go to the shed to train. An hour on the bike to ease out the tensions and frustrations of the day.

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I complete the evening meal and we eat before watching Leicester Tigers beat Connaught. Then football then the blog. At the moment it feels like perpetual waiting, a quiet grind forward waiting for something, but not quite sure what.

Thursday, a work day with lots of meetings and the open forum. It turns out to be a tricky day, a colleagues mother dies and my partners brother ends up being admitted to hospital over night. Its another day I do not train, sometimes there are more important things to do. In the end I retreat to a bath bomb bath and then watch a mindless American ice hockey film, which was not only violent for the sake of it but was based on appalling white working class stereotypes.

Friday, Good Friday, bit of a misnomer, my partners brother has been diagnosed as having a bleed on the brain and an aneurism in the neck area. He rings my partner in the morning from the hospital and tell her he is currently “nil by mouth”, so some sort of intervention might be close. He might have to go to another hospital, which has the equipment required. There is nothing we can do except wait and get on with what we intended to do. So we breakfast and head for a local park to walk and to watch the ducks. Its a relief to be out. On the way home we visit the garden centre where we pick up some food and a Broom of the shrub variety. I plant the Broom while my partner cooks scones. While planting the Broom I notice holes in the lawn and then spot the emerging tenant. Pretty amazing, see below:

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We sit down to eat the fresh scones, my eldest daughter having popped to the village to get cream, jam and a paper. It is a pleasant time as we chat and wait. After a while we set about our separate chores and activities. I set off for the garage to row for an hour to try and loosen up and work off some energy. It goes well.

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The family come to together for a late tea of lasagne and salad before I return to the lounge to catch up on the blog from yesterday and today. In the background Vera resolves a murder. We as a family wait for more news.

Alright I admit it, I have not trained again to day, that’s three days, but I am trying very hard not to panic and see it as a crisis. But I assuage my anxiety by noting that over the last two days I have done 10,000 steps, which I understand normal mortals consider sufficient to stay fit on. So having confessed I move on.

Today started with bacon and coffee and the arrival of the guy who helps keep our garden tidy. I head out side and as it is gloriously sunny I take the cover off the garden furniture and discover that the parasol is not working. Out with the new screwdriver set and into the guts of the parasol to find that the wired clothes line that I put in last time has rusted and then snapped. So no use using the same stuff again. I find with great surprise that Amazon actually sell replacement parasol cord. Is there nothing they do not sell? I found out later that they do not sell Hacienda orange masonry paint. So I order the cord for tomorrow delivery and turn my attention to the garden bench that has a stretcher rotted through. Well the next several hours are taken up with me fitting a new strengthening bar and re-staining the whole bench.

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In the breaks that I took while things dried or I needed to rest I took a phone call from a friend who had recovered her car, sat and wondered at my cherry blossom trees, stared at frogs in the pond and opened my post. All these moments provided wonder or surprise, and some provided photo opportunities.

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As the sun ebbs away and I clear my tools, close up the greenhouse and have tea before watching England struggle to a two one win over Poland in a world cup qualifier. Time then to write the blog and wonder if there is enough hot water to have a late bath. Tomorrow beckons, a parasol to repair, meeting to do and an open forum to host. We might even scone bomb some unexpecting friends.

Tuesday, and its going to be a good one. Things will turn up, get mended, be delivered and not be broken. This has sunshine day written all over it. So it is with optimism that I get up for breakfast and plan the day. Its going to be training between 11 and 13:30 over zoom and then some radical gardening. I try to join the zoom training but the link is dud. So I admit defeat, tell my colleagues of my failure and move on. I sit on the front step and I’m rewarded with several butterflies.

Its lunchtime and the family go for a walk to the village co-op to buy strawberry plants. A successful mission followed by me starting to garden while my partner and eldest daughter go for a longer walk. On their return I prepare the raised bed for the strawberries and leave my partner to plant them, a mission that went well.

While my partner does the strawberries I crack on clearing the heather bed and and getting it ready to put log roll edging round part of it. New pots of bulbs get planted and sited. I move some of our pots around to make a cleaner looking garden. While doing this I discover a small patch anemones that have come into flower.

My garden as full of gifts today as it soon presented me with a very plump bumble bee. Who could ask for anything more.

I beaver away and eventually can clear away the tools and sit back and look at the fruits of my labour. Well I can see the difference but I doubt if anyone else will. I’m banking on the summer bulbs being spectacular.

I am tired and sore from yesterdays injection and decide to call it a day. I retreat to the house and open my new Amazon package. Oh the delight. There is nothing like a new set of electronic screwdrivers.

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In my joy I put the bins out for tomorrows collection and moved onto re-siting the pond pump on a more suctionable base to stand it on. All the time I was fiddling around with my hand in the pond a very brave small frog sat in the middle of the pond and watched me intently. His or her friends had all dived out of site when I started but this one seemed to be unphased by me. I think tomorrow I’ll go down and see if he/she is up for a chat.

Its tea time and then I start the blog early as my intention is to soak in a bath adn get an early night. Its due to be sunny again tomorrow so its more garden time if I’m lucky.

Today is Monday and its a crap day, because this is injection day. Jab at 2:30. It would also appear to be a day for things to go wrong, go missing and generally be demanding. My day starts with muesli and moves onto taking solar panels apart and trying to get the pond pumps working. Hours pass as I get engaged with the project. Soon its time to think GP surgery, so its a long and enjoyable shower and then I am off to the surgery my fresh clean snowy hair waving in the breeze. I arrive full of paracetamol and phone into reception. I am admitted at the back door, I’m still a leper till the 1st of April. I get my gut jab and just for thoroughness I get a B12 jab in the arm as well. I drive home and find 80 plug petunias have been delivered. So my afternoon gets spent in the greenhouse as I plant up the plug plants.

Another satisfying time, however a friend rings me and shares the nightmare day she is having, stalled car, lost purse, daughter with a poorly foot requiring assessment, visitors arriving, and a work IT system that will not talk to her. It seems that out there in the real world days can still be a bag of pain and mishap. The life Admin will be a major pain. I retreat to the house for tea and an evening of TV and a wrestle to get in to my web page to write the blog. I’ve had several tries and only succeeded at midnight. So I’m now full of pills and drugs, sore and achy but it is all confined without real world interference. I’m off to bed and will go again tomorrow.

It’s Sunday, my day of rest so I get up at 11 o’clock. Decadent, depraved and delightful. My first thought is “Weigh In”, so I skip to the bathroom, prepare and jump on the scales.

89.8 Kilos

I am elated, I’ve cracked the 90 kilo barrier and I am setting new personal bests along with a decreasing resting heart rate. Now I can begin to get cracking on the weights regime. I love it when a plan comes together.

Breakfast follows, and the Sunday call to our youngest daughter. We spend quite along time chatting and talking about houses and mortgages. Its gone midday by the time we have finished. While this is going on I start to create a pair of crocodile clips so that I can begin to cannibalise some mini solar panels to drive the pond pump more efficiently. In the process of doing this I discover that the battery connector in my multi meter has eroded and the wiring failed. So as a sub plot I end up mending my multi meter before I can test if my crocodile leads work. Life is never simple. Success; when I test the crocs they work. Too late to start on the panels so I clear things away and get ready to deliver a birthday present to a niece that lives in the village. My partner and I walk around the village and deliver the present and saunter back the long way round just for the exercise. Its all I will get today as its my rest day. Once home I settle down to watch the second half of Leicester Tigers beat Newcastle and then move on to watch England beat Albania two nil. I pop out to the shed and check to see if the garden sculpture I had repainted yesterday was dry ad ready to be re-sited in the garden. The paint has dried well and so I return it to its place in the garden beneath the pampas grass.

Tea follows and more pain killers in preparation for tomorrows 28 day injection. It has become part of my monthly routine. I start to write the blog as I watch “Line of Duty and then continue as my washing tumble drys. I like to go into a new week with my washing done and my clothes sorted. Tomorrow will start with training before I go for my jab in the afternoon which will then go down hill for a while. To finish the blog today I have included my recipe for my favourite one pot, which I have in the past clearly mentioned as a friend who has asked me to share. So here it is:

Roland’s famous one pot recipe. The basic requirements are as follows:

1. Chicken 650 – 750grams – cut into cubes
2. Chorizo – half a ring, sliced into coin size discs
3. Bacon – one pack chopped up
4. onion – 1 chopped
5. leek – 1 sliced and separated in to rings
6. Carrot- 1 chopped.
7. pepper – seeded and diced
8. garlic – four cloves at least, sliced thinly
9. mushroom – half a dozen, quartered.
10. Cherry tomatoes- half a dozen
11. One tin of chopped tomatoes
12. One tin of chick peas
13. Mixed herbs
14. Smoked sweet paprika
15. 1 chicken oxo cube – dissolved in as little water as possible
16. Tomato paste- two table spoons
17. Red wine – cheap as possible
18. Virgin Olive oil- enough to cover the bottom of a sturdy large oven top pot.
19. For the luxury version- a couple of shots of Armagnac

The Method.

1. Heat the oil till a piece of onion in it bubbles
2. Throw in the chorizo and bacon, cook until the oil turns red from the chorizo.
3. Keep the heat up and throw in the chicken and smoked sweet paprika. Seal the chicken by keeping it all moving in the oil, bacon and chorizo.
4. Now throw in the pepper, carrot, pepper, garlic, leek and soften them. Keep it all moving as it heats through.
5. Turn the heat down and add the chick peas, stir in.
6. Empty the can of chopped tomatoes onto the top of the mixture
7. Squeeze a good two tablespoons full of tomato paste into the chopped tomatoes.
8. Add to the tomatoes and tomato paste a good tablespoon full of mixed herbs. Stir the tomato and herb mixture into the rest of the food.
9. Add the chicken oxo cube diluted in as little water as possible.
10. Add red wine till it just covers the food. Bring it to a simmer, slowly.
11. Add the mushrooms and cherry tomatoes (adding them now preserves their integrity).
12. Add a sprinkling of more smoked sweet paprika and stir in.
13. If doing the luxury version add the Armagnac.
14. Bring to the simmer and cover. Leave to bubble quietly for least an hour, or pop it in the oven on the lowest heat and leave for four hours, checking occasionally to monitor juice level. Should it show signs of drying add more red wine, never water!!! More Armagnac if your rich.
15. Serve with fresh whole meal bread to soak up the sauce.