Its a Wednesday I realise as I wake up at 7:30 and a loud voice in my head shouts “Bin day” and my outside mouth shouts “bollocks” as I realise I did not put the bin out last night. So its into a set of joggers and an ice hockey jersey to pad downstairs and put the bin out. While I am up I make warm drinks for my partner and I and return to bed. My bruised toes are a nice colour from yesterdays mishap but mobile. My partner goes of to see her mother with her brother while I breakfast and construct my “to do” list for the day. Its not ambitious and is mainly rest and ICEing my bruised foot. So I settle into the morning having taken my morning meds and eaten breakfast. Doing much with a ice an ice pack strapped to your foot is a bit inhibiting but by the time early afternoon comes round I have achieved quite a lot. All the door hinges in the house now run squeak less, the Rentokil insurance is paid, I’ve transferred information from my old journal to my new one and I have opened an ISA. The last being the scariest but it all seems to have gone magically well. My drugs are ordered and now I am free to give my hand attention and do the physio on it that is required at regular intervals. I also get a surprising quick response from the National Theatre at home website who I contacted about them taking for an order twice. They were very apologetic and have issued a refund. That was a result I was not expecting.

I eat lunch with my partner, after which I start to draft the blog while my partner cleans her car. I need to crack on with my physio and start to write my holiday list of things to do. I can feel myself getting short of spoons (energy) , I guess I jumped the gun this morning expending so much early energy putting the bins out. My GP keeps sending me messages about having statins and I keep ignoring him. I want no more medications than I am on thank you very much, I have enough trouble doing what I need to do to minimise the side effects of the stuff I am on without having to del with more crap going into my body. I am stable at the moment and apart from the odd bruise I am fine, I just get tired easily. Being handily retired means I can nap or rest when I need to.

The evening arrives and finds me feeling decidedly “off”. My gut is bad but I continue to regularly ICE my bruised toes and do the physio routine for the scar management on my hand. After a couple of episodes of Adolescence and a dumb film I call it quits as I have no more energy left, I take my meds and go to bed hopping to sleep quickly and deeply.

Tuesday, I think I start like this to remind me of the things I do on a Tuesdays, like today Tesco will deliver and the bins go out. However it is Tuesday and s usual I check my vitals and my messages. I send some as well as today is a friends birthday. My partner has already been to the shop, had breakfast and is reading a newspaper before going to an old colleagues leaving lunch. I write a poem on my new Notes App after a chat with my partner. Not like me to write early in the morning but it’s happened a couple of times recently.

438
I am like a drummer,
Someone who hangs around with 
musicians.
I just loiter around poets,
with their proper tunes and rhymes
and scribble soul notes,
random stuff with no effort to attend
to the niceties of metre or flow,
or whatever real poets do.
I listen to them in process,
I hear the nuances striven for,
the analysis of words and meaning,
and I realise I’m not even like a 
drummer, who at least keep time.
I guess I am a groupie,
because words touch me
and I am in awe of those that sculpt
them in forms that move me
to dance, laugh, sing and cry
inside my head 
or on my face.
Perhaps I’m just a lazy bastard
that just can’t be arsed,
fearing failure if I really tried,
like the dyslexic infant
who hid, played truant
and eventually escaped 
by ignoring the rules.
So now like that chid
I press my nose against a window
and wonder at the marvels
in the poetry shop window
knowing they are not for me
but for clever kids. 
This pen this ink refuses to lay down
and here I am scribbling on scraps
still looking for something
that says this is how my world is. 
Can you hear the word symphony
that’s playing somewhere
inside this private auditorium?
I’m neither stupid or uneducated
just put together different
with all the rough edges left
and unable to show my workings.
This pen this ink refuses to lay down. 	
									438 18-03-2025

When I do get up I find my partner reading he paper so I join her with my breakfast and my morning meds. I do the crosswords and then head for the garden with a club hammer intent on preparing the way for a new cold frame. As an initial step I propose to move a paving slab on to the lawn before putting the new incinerator on it to burn the old cold frames. I start to “walk” the paving slab to the lawn but it doesn’t want to go and trips my up with the result that one corner drops on my toes. Falling to the floor with a hearty “Fuck” I know I am going to have a bruise or two but need to crack on. As it turns out I am right about the bruise and the need to ICE it.

The incinerator is burning nicely as I demolish the old raised beds and redistribute the compost in readiness for a new cold frame. It a lovely sunny windless day and I am pleased to have made the effort when I hear some one down the road shouting about the fie and telling me to put it out. I carry one. The next thing I know is that my eldest daughter is standing at the bac door saying that a woman has been to the front door and been rude to her and is asking me to put my fire out because she does not want this woman back again. This is the first I hear about it. I am not chuffed but I am not going to pick a fight right now, I have cleared the area I need to put the cold frame in so I stop feeding the incinerator.

I clear away my tools and retreat inside just in time to meet the Amazon man delivering the new cold frame that I intend to install tomorrow. By the time my partner returns I am sitting feet up with icy chips strapped to my foot. After a chat I go for a bath to rest and see how my toes are doing. The bath is a real treat as I can sit back and listen to soft music and munch my way through a bacon sandwich. I languish until I start to reach the wrinkly stage so I get myself out and head for the recliner where I can continue to ICE my toes and start to draft the blog. I continue to ICE (Ice, Compress, and Elevate.) and blog till its time to stop and turn off my brain and watch TV.

The evening is slow and eventually after several ICEs and my night meds I head for bed to strap on my night splint. It would appear that my “frilly” bits are having a tricky time but come Sunday I head for a weeks break where I can rest by the sea.

Sunday and it is a birthday celebration day for my youngest daughter. so the household is up and around quite early including me. I check my vitals and then I am helping to do preparation and grandson entertainment. It seems the youngest grandson likes to feed the birds or at least throw bird feed around the garden. After a lunch every one is resting and we are getting ourselves up for going to feed the ducks at the local park when out of the blue my partners brother and youngest daughter arrive, so a big chunk of the family is under one roof. There is tea, play and family conversation amongst moments of quiet.

While the family gets on being family my partner and I prepare the birthday tea. Of course we invite our unexpected family so we juggle the table. With everything ready we invite every in.

Once every body has eaten all they want its time for birthday cake, singing and the blowing out of candles. These are the moments that grandparents like me really like and me in particular as many as I can manage.

There are presents and more tea and chat before the unexpected family return home and the rest of us settle into an evening of putting the grandchild to bed and then watching a film. One by one people drift off to bed at the end of a good day. I go through my night rituals and finally get to don my finger splint and magic latex.

Monday sees the household up as the youngest grandson and his parents prepare to leave for home. before they leave I take my eldest daughter to the hospital to meet a consultant who is going to provide her with the results of some tests. It turns out all of the results that he has examined do not need any from of intervention. One thing unrelated to the others can be contained with physio and lifestyle. As I drove home I get a message that my youngest grandson and his parents have broken down on the way home, so I change plans and drop my eldest daughter off at work, drive home and then with my partner drive to help the stranded family. When we get to where they are there is a handy Starbucks where we can keep the youngest grandchild warm, so we settle in until the RAC are able to repair the car. In a relatively short time the faulty ignition coil is replaced and they are able to continue on their journey home.

My partner and I return home collecting a paper on the way so that when we get home we can sit down and relax at last. The evening drifts into view and with it my partners singing lesson, during which I catch up with the blog. I am now looking forward to a chance to get back into a training routine, but looking at my diary it does not look like its going to happen for a while. I am beginning to wonder if I am on a fools errand and that a routine and regular life is not actually possible if I am relatively fit and trying to live a normal life, given that normal life is not predictable. My only constraints are my 28 day injection cycle that does affect me for two or three days and the current three month chemo cycles. Perhaps I should just allow those two as the framework and then not let myself be constrained by anything else. My problem is that I need thinking time and reaction time. It seems to me that I am trying to adjust to my partners retirement as much as she is. So its night meds, bed rituals and off to sleep, but not before the Tesco order gets finalised, just one more thing to fit in to the day.

Saturday arrives and there are things to do once my waking rituals are done. Once complete, I get up and get into my training kit and take my morning meds. Before I train I do a number of preparation chores for the visit of my youngest daughter, partner and son on her birthday tomorrow. Its mostly clearing the decks so they can stay the night without clutter around them. With things organised I go to the garage and the rower. I select a short session and get on my way. At the end of 30 minutes I am hot and sweaty having worked hard. I put the effort as I know that It will be a couple of days before I can train again.

With the session over I record it and change into what I am going to wear for the poetry stanza zoom meeting. I run off a missing poem and set the computer up for the Zoom meeting and then have a very late breakfast. When it comes logging in for the meeting I discover the speakers that I have tested will not work on Zoom so I have to rapidly change to a laptop.

When I read through the poems in preparation I was not moved, thirteen poems and not one of them grabbed me. It was to be omen for the session. All the usual people were there and the format was the same but as I listened to the group discuss and dissect the first two poems I felt like I did when I first attended a stanza meeting. The language used and the ideas and the interpretations just seemed alien to me. I felt lost and could not for the life of me understand what was going on, or the poems. As a result I just listened to the poems being read and discussed scribbling the odd note to myself. I neither read a poem for the group nor submitted a poem for the group to read. In fact I did not say a word for the whole session and logged out at the end with a sense of relief. The experience felt as if I had lost all touch with poetry, at least not the poetry of this session or the way it was processed. It begins to feel as if I have had a narrow escape, I had forgotten how alienated from the “poetry industry” I feel and I wonder if I have lost myself in something that is beyond me. These are erudite, educated and talented people who live for their poetry in the world of literature and its construction. Somehow it feels that I have lost something, I’m not sure what it is but I can’t do poetry like these people do, at least not now. Once again I feel the alien.

After the session I watch the international rugby that carries on through the evening to its conclusion of seeing the French claim the six nations championship. I draft a short blog, take my night meds and take myself to bed knowing that tomorrow I shall see my youngest grandson and youngest daughter on her birthday. What more could I want.

Thursday, I wake and once again got through my rituals. Vitals measured, meds taken and then into my training gear. Before I get stuck into the rower I putter around organising things for the coming week. Eventually I cannot put off the training off any longer, so I go to the garage and strap myself in. I decide to go for a 45 minute session. I discover that I am already tired so that the session is a real effort. Towards the end I am working really hard but I get to the 9 kilometer mark.

I record the session and them shower by which time I am desperately tired. I make lunch and then rest for while. There are few things I can do but mainly I rest. Occasionally I have days like this. By the evening all I am good for is watching football and then going through my night rituals. Mostly meds and strapping on my night splint to keep my finger straight post operation.

Friday arrives and there are things to do. This is my youngest daughters birthday and she is coming to visit with her partner and young son, so there is shopping to be done as my partner and I are going to do a traditional afternoon tea. After a brief breakfast my partner and I go off to the local monster M&S to get the goodies for the weekend. There is time for a quick snack before we return home and I start to tidy things away for the weekend but also prepare for Saturdays Poetry Stanza. I am only able to attend on Saturday because the group that I occasionally meet up with for lunch has been postponed. There are twelve new poems to be printed off and read. This preparation is a pleasure as there are always surprises in the new poems. I put them in a file and the settle down to eat tea and then catch up with drafting the blog. One of the things I did this afternoon was to equip my phone a note making App. What a revelation it is to have such a useful little App. This all came about by me wanting to capture something earlier in the day and being frustrated that I did not have anything easily available on the phone. What I wanted to capture was the thought that I was sufferings form NGS, or Nonspecific Grumpiness Syndrome, especially when experiencing MHF, Massive Hot Flush.

The evening passes with Death in Paradise and continued blog drafting until its time for my night medication and splinting up my finger, but I am taken by surprise. I get a WhatsApp from someone asking how I am and purporting to be a publisher. It must be a scam. And that is how the world is, no matter how much I’d like to think a publisher would like to publish stuff I shall block who ever this is.

Tuesday and today starts with my usual routine of taking my vitals and checking messages and socials. It always takes longer than I think it should but then I often get waylaid by the news feeds. Nothing of note to day in either my wellbeing or the world, which is a good day in that there are no personal crisis to be dealt with and my health bounces along holding cancer at bay. This is a day to celebrate the mundane. I putter about for a bit and then take my partner into town for lunch, parking once again in the most convenient but most frequented by the drug addict and down and out population by Leicester. In fairness we have discovered that much of this can be avoid by using the “hotel ” side of the carpark rather than the Addict Dance academy. We dine quietly next to a couple one of which has an horrendous cough and announces that she and her partner have been ill for ages. They have come all the way from forty miles away to enjoy the restaurant and a ball and presumably to spread their nasty little germs around. Thankfully the coughing abates and relative quiet ensues. Having fed its time to pursue the cancerous part of the day, a slow and measured walk down to the hospital pharmacy to pick up the next three cycles of my current chemo.

As I stand about to hand my appointment letter to the pharmacy receptionist my phone rings but I am not able to answer it, I am peeved as it is from a friend who I haven’t talked to for a while. After the briefest of waits my name is called and I collect my drugs, never have I been served so quickly, but I take it as proof that the new build pharmacy is paying off. Mission accomplished my partner and I return to the car and drive home.

Before going in I decide to walk to the post office to get a paper, my partner dumps my drugs in the porch and we amble off. Our next door neighbor is out sweeping his drive and we stop to chat. It is a moment I cannot let go pass without without once and for all find out what him and his partners names are. We have lived next door for year and often chatted but had clearly got to the stage where asking seemed rude. However I take the plunge and say something suitable and Englishly apologetic and say I still do not know their names after all this time. He is very good about it and immediately says “I am R and she is L” . What a relief. we continue to chat and it appears we both agree that there is a hole in our dividing hedge in the back garden and think we ought to either plant it or put a couple of fence panels in. This is a real win win situation, so after more chat my partner and I finally get off to the post office on our newspaper mission.

Returning home its eyes down to the cross words and the coming evening. My partner will suffer my watching the big football match of the night and then eventually we will both go to bed, me going through my new night ritual, which now includes applying the magic latex to my hand scars before donning my nocturnal finger splint.

Wednesday and I wake from a strange and restless night. I check my vitals which are surprisingly good, my blood pressure is tickety boo and my SATS joyously at 99. MY partner brings me hot water and goes off to see her mother with her brother with whom she is going to have lunch. I get up quite quickly for me and down my morning meds, noting that tomorrow is the day I get a large dose of vitamin D. I drive into town and collect my new face furniture, one pair of distance glasses and a pair of reading spectacles. In truth the distant glasses make very little difference to my vision but the reading glasses definitely do. I can probably get away with just wearing my reading glasses when I need them in front of screens and print, I will see how it goes. On leaving the opticians I stop for panini and a coffee in Costa to check out my new face furniture. It all seems to be okay.

Of course I wore the Ferrari’s to Costa and discovered that I could still miss-see things as my scribbled note on a serviette suggests.

I drive towards home and but head for the gym which has a beauticians attached to it, it’s where my partner goes. I sheepishly go in and say I would like my nails done and I am asked to to wait till the beautician has finished her current client. When done she calls me over and looks at her diary and says “when?” I think I mumble something like “soon”, I swear I can hear my inner pixies rolling around with laughter. The beautician says “Now” and I say very quickly “yes” before I change my mind and my inner pixies wet themselves.

The beautician sets about my nails and pretty soon I am popping my hands into the secret hand oven that bakes my several layers of builder gel. By the end of the process I have immaculate shiny nails and my hands are very happy and almost forget about their operation scars. The pixies have managed to stop laughing out loud but they are still giggling.

So having been nailed up I drive home and take my eldest daughter to the pub for a late lunch and as it turns out a discussion on the types of memory and it importance or not to the interviewing of traumatised, (or not), trafficked (or not) people by the police. Turns out its a tricky area. We are joined by my partner who swears that it has been snowing where she has been a few miles down the road. We all return home as the temperature plummets. I try to catch up with drafting the blog before attending an online poetry collection launch by the chair of the Poetry Stanza I belong to. IT means rigging up the computer in the office and I am not sure if it will work so I might yet have to resort to my laptop.

I attend my first online poetry collection launch for a collection by someone I know. Its a strange and moving experience that lasts an hour and then I am back to watching football. Out of the blue someone from the past rings me seeking information about a mutual acquaintance. We talk for a while and I give him some possible contacts who might know where the person being sort might be. I then return to football and ultimately my night meds and bed. Today is the last day of cycle 22 of my current chemo, its 639 days since I started it and I have another three cycles in hand before my next oncology review in May. I am desperately hoping that I can get into a rhythm over those months and feel well and normal for a while.

Monday rolls round again and I’ve had a bad nights sleep, not sure why, I guess there are just some nights that are restless. I take my vitals and they are all good, I check my messages and socials and they are all benign so eventually I get up as my partner goes to the gym. I take my morning meds, which today includes my atomic bomb size dose of vitamin D and then head for the garage and the rowing machine. Given that I did an hour yesterday I thought a short half hour was my best option today. So I set myself up and set off. Half way through the session my ear buds stopped feeding me music and I had to continue to the sound of the rowers creaks and my own occasional grunts of effort. By the end of the session I was tired but also discovered that my fitness monitor band had got low on energy and had not recorded all the data it should have done. As a result my PAI (Physical Activity Intelligence) score had barely moved from yesterdays level. The session was acceptable as I reached 6+Kilometres, what I consider to be my normal standard for the time and level set for the session.

I record the session and have breakfast before going for a shower. Although always a gratifying series of activities it is heavy on my spoon reserves and I take a breather before driving off to the chiropodist. I have said it before and I will repeat it, that going to the chiropodist every two to three months is a real pleasure, it makes my feet sing. The serious reason is to contain the damage that has been done to my nails by chemo and dropping heavy weights on at east one of them that has killed he nail bed and results in thick nails. It is a real joy to walk out of he foot clinic with a sense of well being that starts with my toes and get as far as my ankles.

I drive back quickly as there is a Tesco order to receive but I find my partner has already taken in the early delivery and is busy working out future plans. After a short time I gather up my picture hanging tools and set about putting screw eyes in the frame of the picture my partner was given by our youngest daughter to mark her retirement. All goes well until its time to put the hook into the wall. Being an older house it has solid walls and the picture hook nails are not up to the challenge so I have to doctor one to make it work, but work it does. So having discussed where it should go it is now hung between the Jay Nottingham’s in the lounge where we are able to see it properly. Its by the artist Nellie Hearn an ex dancer who now does all sorts of stuff including very colourful shirts.

With all the picture hanging gear away I settle down to draft the blog aware that I have few spoons left. I am trying to be diligent in my hand recovery exercises and massages but when busy doing other things it can be a bit tricky, but I am trying my best. I am hopeful that by the time I see the recovery therapist in a months time my hand will have improved greatly. There is one post operative ridge across the inside of my first joint on the ring finger that bothers me as it stops me being able to make a full fist, combined with the joint that is still enlarged from the operation I sometimes worry that the scar tissue will pull my finger back down but all can do is keep doing my exercises and applying Nivea crème as instructed. I am sure I will get there.

My evening is full of distant singing, and reading before my partner and I return to our binge watch of Pennyworth and ultimately my routine of night meds, splint and magic latex application t my hand and finally bed. Tomorrow is another trip into town to collect my next three months of the current chemo tablets. It sometimes feels that a great proportion of my life is spent managing my medical calendar and doing things that hopefully prolong it. Import that I break out occasionally and go off-piste.

Friday was a day of readjustment. I had risen early to prepare for a trip into town to visit the optician. Having made the effort to get up and have breakfast after removing my finger night splint and the magic gel strip that is supposed to be making my operation scars disappear, my partner and I drove into town. We parked up in a car park that must be the most urine smelling car park in the world, I suppose being next to a dance school called Addict should be a clue as to the numbers of ne’er do wells that hang around the stair wells doing drugs and pissing. The town centre is a forlorn and barren place really with its closed shops, nail bars and run emporiums. Lots of food and drink places that sustain visitors and the mageirocophobics (fear of cooking) but all a bit seedy, or maybe the people just look seedy and give the shops a bad look.

I check in at Vison Express and get shown to a sofa and asked to wait. This express might not be so express as advertised. I get called into the clever machine room that shines a very bright light into my eyes and blow air into them. I am then returned to my sofa to await the optician. I get asked all the usual stuff about age and health, drugs and family history and then she looks at my last eye test. 2015 apparently, I knew it had been a while but not that long but in my defence: I don’t have one. The optician plonks a viewer on my face and away we go with the “which is the clearest 1 or 2” and “which line of text can you read”. We go through it all and then she shows me the results from the clever machine room. I have heathy eye balls in almost every aspect apart from a tiny bit of cataract formation, (normal for my age), however I have gone from being short sighted to long sighted. My prescription is very different from my last one, but then am not surprised after ten years.

What follows could be a long drawn out process of describing selecting what new frames I am going to have but I’m a bloke I select my frames pretty sharpish, while my partner mulls over various options for herself, pausing briefly to comment on a blue pair of frames I was toying with. After having selected what I want came the paper work and the interminable sales stuff. However as I can get these over two years at zero percent interest and twenty percent off I sign up to the plan, which also means I can get free stuff in the future. I sign on the cyber pad and leave to await an email telling me my new Ferraris and Emporio glasses are ready.

After a lunch out I head for home where I learn that the opportunity to read poetry publicly has gone by the board as the organisers of the event have turned the proposal down but have put in an open mike session. I’ve no idea how that works so I will go and watch and see how it works and then consider a future one. I do some organising as the evening creeps up. There is Pennyworth to watch and then night meds to take and get myself to bed.

Saturday arrives and to be honest I do very little other than watch rugby and football, of course the garden guy arrives so there is flower bed planning to do. He also tells us that he is to be a father, which is lovely as he seems so happy. The sun shines and that means I get out to take the covers off the garden furniture and begin to assess the state of the patio and how much cleaning there is to do. But the highlight of the day was finding and booking a break away. Finding an apartment in our favourite holiday place was a real bonus. My partner and I are desperate for a break and to get ourselves by the sea. I will be interested to see if the summer time ice cream van comes out in March and whether the eating places are open, if they are not then we will be eating seagull for a week. The evening was the consumption of more Pennyworth, night meds and bed once I had clipped on my night finger splint with its magic gel strip.

Sunday and I wake quiet early and determined to train. After my usual hot water and meds I get into my training gear and get ready to row. I massage my operation scars with Nivea crème in preparation to row and head for the garage and the rowing machine. I strap in and set my session for an hour. Its a bit of a gamble given my hand but I feel I need to push myself and try and kick start some proper training and some weigh loss. So I start off slowly and just try to keep going. By the end of the session I am very tired but very pleased to get to the end. Only when I go to photograph the monitor do I realise that I have only rowed for 59 minutes! I am not sure how this happened but their you go as sessions go it was okay.

I record my session and then change into a pair of shorts and sit in the front garden to sip a drink and to recover from the session. I spend a lot of time sunning myself and hoping that doing this is topping up my vitamin D levels. I am joined by my partner and we sun ourselves, until its time to watch England against Italy in the rugby. Its a good match for the first half but England ran off with it in the second half. I realise that the blog needs to be brought up to date so I settle down to recall what I’ve done over the past two days. There are of course holes where I have pottered or puttered about. This Sunday evening I shall watch more of Pennyworth and head to my bed early as I can feel my energy running out. Tomorrow is the day I get the pleasures of the chiropodist as I move into a week of activity, somehow the days are becoming more spoon demanding.

Its Thursday and I am up early to get ready to go and see the hand, wrist and scar repair woman. First a shower and the taking of my morning meds, which includes another big dose of vitamin D. So clean and full of the sunshine vitamin I drive in the bright morning to see my specialist. She is bright and cheery as ever and looks at my hand and scars then measures them. Apparently I am dong very well. She tells me I am ready for stage two which means that I get a piece of magic silicon to wear on my scares at night under my splint. Each night I am to apply it and then in the morning I take it of, wash it and save it for the next night. I am not sure how this is going to help but i take her at her word and she gives me an instruction sheet with long words on it, over which she writes what it means in real English. She is pleased and so does not need to see me for four weeks, we set a date and I pay her. A considerably less sum than my previous two visits.

I drive home and set about moving pots around in the front garden preparing to turf over one of the beds. I use the sack barrow that I bought for the job and it works beautifully. I am able to move the big pots of irises ( my grandfathers) to around the bay window where it is the sunniest and warmest. Irises like heat on their rhizomes. The job is almost finished when my partner returns home from having her nails done. There is just some tidying up to be done and the jettisoning of old matting and lawn lights to be done and I am finished with the garden for the day. The bulbs are all coming through and there are patches of splendid colour that have survived the work we had done on the drive last year.

I continue to odds and ends that need doing like putting air in the car tyre that is showing low and throwing out all matting and then I am finally done in the garden for today. With everything packed away I return to to the house for a late lunch and find myself writing. In doing so I find my scribblings from yesterday, so I end up with two new pieces, which I share below.

436
It’s twenty-five years ago today
my father died.
A quarter of a century ago
before COVID and many other things.
Never close, I look inside 
and find a void,
rare glimpses of a man distant,
untouchable and untouching.
In the end left to die 
by wife and daughter
because they thought 
he’d be more comfortable 
if left alone.
Sounds like unconscious murder to me.
That conspiracy of the moment,
the easiest path the leads 
to a benign coroner.
A mother and daughter combo
in the night doing what’s right
given his condition.
I sit here with my partner 
and our eldest daughter 
still at home
and wonder if family stories 
echo and repeat across generations. 
Note to self:
Don’t get ill in the night,
especially now the partner
has retired.
					436 05-03-2025

437
I could do yoga – once or twice a week
I could eat less sweets – a ban
I could eat fewer cakes – a ban 
I could read more – less TV
I could write more – less lazing around
I could exercise more – everyday
I could communicate more – talk to people
I could play music – less fantasy time
I could do less “phone” – more real time.
All of this I could do
But on balance my cancer 
Wouldn’t give a fuck.
I just might be more knowledgeable,
And fitter with fewer
Side effects from my drugs,
But I am not curable,
I’m being palliated,
managed and consoled.
How do you think that feels?
Yep, like Crunchies, Red Bull,
Football and violent TV,
flat out on a recliner
watching my garden overgrow
and daring myself to be happy.
						437  06-03-2025 

Having typed up the pieces I draft the blog and throw in my days endeavours and the pieces. Before I know it 5 o’clock rolls round, its time to do my hand exercises, massage my scars and give them a good creaming. I note that the football tonight kicks off in 45 minutes so it will all be over in time for some more of the violent Pennyworth series. If I read this series right this is Batman’s butler prequal. Ingenious no wonder the lead sounds so much like Michael Caine. So I go into the evening mapped out as I head for my night meds and the joy of playing with my new magic night dressing for my scars. Tomorrow I go to the optician for an eye test. As I get older my short sightedness improves, so that I can drive without the need of glasses but I need glasses more and more for reading, so tomorrow is about getting a correct prescription, possible some new glasses. Then I will be equipped to move back into the office space and the opportunity to fire up the new incinerator.

Tuesday and I wake into “recovery” day, the day after my twenty eight day jab. I am sore and feeling the usual tiredness and pain. I take my time getting up and spend the morning and most of the afternoon taking things very slowly, but a friend has sent me a present. It is a subscription to the National Theatre at Home. It means I can watch Jodie Comer perform her solo performance in Prima Facie. It is an extraordinary performance, absolutely riveting and a tour de force. How on earth she managed to perform this piece night after night is beyond me. It is one of those pieces that has stayed with me all day and into the following day. By the evening I am tired, very tired, all I am good for is watching football on TV and getting myself to bed to try and get some sleep.

Wednesday starts early with my partner getting up to go and visit her mother. I take advantage of this and also get up early, this afternoon is the planned oncology review. I get into my training gear determined to get back into getting fit. Having taken my morning meds I go to the garage and strap myself onto the rower. A half hour session will be enough today, just to get me moving and making sure I do not leave it too long to train again. Its been five days since I trained so time is passing. It feels like a difficult thirty minutes, it feels like I am not moving smoothly and every pull is a real effort. At the end of the session I am just pleased to have got over the 6 kilometre mark. That will do me for a recovery session as this time in my twenty eight day cycle.

With the session recorded I take a breather and watch The Housewife of Willesden on the National Theatre at Home website. It is a modern reworking of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. A thoroughly enjoyable way of winding down. My partner returns from visiting her mother and we chat for a while. I now wait for my call from the oncologist. Its at least a two hour slot to wait and in the time I am waiting my partner and I examine the map of England and think about where we might take a break. Eventually the oncologist rings. (Perhaps a good play tittle).

It is not my usual oncologist (he who made a pact with the devil). There are the usual questions and I dutifully report my average blood pressure over the current cycle. I also feedback my GP putting me on a Vitamin D treatment. The chap I am talking to notes that I have been on Enzalutamide for almost two years and drops that most people do two years on this drug but that they think I might go for three years. Now that was a revelation. No one before had told me that so I end the call with the agreement that I will have another three cycles and be sent another blood form with a view to another review in twelve weeks time and that my PSA level will continue to be monitored as the slight rise this time is not seen as significant. So its carry on Roland and get back into the groove for three months.

The evening is slipped into and as my partner is out with a friend dining I cook myself pasta and settle down to draft the blog while watching a pulsating football match. I am flagging and take my night meds knowing that I have to be up early tomorrow to go to see the hand and wrist therapist. All over the last few days I have been exercising and binding my hand to get my hand recovered. I am doing my set exercises and regularly massaging Nivea Crème into my operation scars. It is a kind of background recovery programme that I have running all the time. When it comes to going to bed there is my splint to strap on, so its a twenty four hour process. I am assured that if I do not keep this programme going the scar tissue will pull my finger back down into a crooked shape, so it has to be kept up.