Tuesday, oncology day, no more no mans land, something has to change. I get up as my partner brings me a coffee. I feel anxious and not at my best, but then who does when they are anxious? I drink the coffee and head for the shower. Time to feel fresh and splash on the scent. Before dressing I go and have breakfast and then think about what to wear for the day at the hospital. I select black shirt with skull cuff links and burgundy trousers. I like the way my clean bright white hair stands out against the black shirt. I am dressing in the bedroom when I tap my foot on the under bed storage tray and there is a metallic clink. I look down and I am flabbergasted to see the seal ring that I thought I had lost back in July/August of last year. I was so convinced it was gone for ever I had a replacement made. So it is a bizarre start to the day.

So having reunited the ring with my hand I drive with my partner to the hospital. We arrive on time and have the unusual experience of being kept waiting. Half an hour after my appointment time we get called in. The specialist nurse is in the room, not usual, so I figure this is not going to be straight forward. We allow ourselves a moment of levity and note how quickly we burnt through the radiotherapy option. So he who made a pact with the devil drops in the new medicine. Its name is Enzalutamide (Xtandi). It is clearly a toxic little potion as I have to have regular blood tests and I’ve got to start taking and reporting my blood pressure. I can only get by going to the Leicester Royal Infirmary on a weekly basis to get the beast. The oncologist jokes that if it goes okay they might trust me with a couple of months worth. I interpret this as if the beast potion does not kill you we will let you have your own supply. This is clearly chemical roulette, good old medical profession loves to roll the dice. The nurse takes me outside to weigh me. 100 kilos, I’m not having that I know I am 98K. I banter the nurse and we agree that she will tell him 98K. I also discover that I am still 5 ft 11 inches tall. Back in the room my partner had clearly been asking questions about my cancer. Its not got bigger apparently just more invasive. There is paper work to do. I have to sign a consent form that says clearly that this is not a cure only containment and palliative care. The usual extensive arse covering, but that is the game, what else am I going to do? Below is the top page of the drug info sheet and the list of side effects.

He who made a pact with the devil explains that there maybe tiredness and cognitive impairment, e.g if I do crosswords in 20 minutes now they could take me 40 in the future. That’s going to make reading Chalmers theory of consciousness a bit of a challenge. He presses two blood test forms into my hands and gives me directions to the hospital vampire department. That’s about it really apart from how much he stressed that exercise was the best (only) way to counteract the side effects. In my head that means thinking about exercise/training as medicine. It is now an essential not an optional nice to have. Exercise or die of heart shit or any of the other little side effects this beast of a potion has up its sleeve. We bid farewell and wait for a moment while the specialist nurse gives us a copy of my consent form.

The walk to the blood test department was quiet and quite long. I took my number, A38 and sit in the waiting room. Numbers 36 and 37 go in and so I am in quickly. Not only am I having the usual blood, testosterone and PSA but also a virology scan. Now I understand the oncologists reference to HIV. It appears this new beast potion comes with more scrutiny across the board. I leave the vampires with the usual fluffy cloud taped to my arm. The car is retrieved and I drive us to the garden centre nearest to home and eat lunch.

On arriving home I file my papers in the cancer file and make an Excel spread sheet for my blood pressure. I take pictures for the blog and up load them. Its time to take my new medicine: exercise. I really do not feel like it but its already five days since I trained so I cannot afford to snowflake about. I get into my gear and go to the garages and set the rower up for an hour session. My body is not happy with this development and resists to start with. The result is that by the 30 minute mark it looks likely that I wont make my basic standard of 12 kilometres in the hour. I pick it up a bit and in the end I make my standard and burn 600+ calories. The lesson is so clear, I cannot afford to lapse and my training medicine must be daily. Essential, not a nice to have.

I retreat to the sofa to record the session and then get changed out of my sweaty kit. I am back on the sofa drafting the blog when a friend calls. She is in the middle of lots of organisational stuff so we chat it through and talk about how tough it can be at times working ones way through all these processes while trying to maintain normal family life. After the call I eat tea and then return to drafting the blog, which I had finally decided what I would call this phase during which I drop one potion and prepare to trade up to something a little more toxic. I will soon put all the phases of the blog up so that people can see the journey to date. Now its time to watch the last episode of Steel Town Murders and get my self to bed minus one pill. Its been a tough day but there is worse to come, so I will endeavour to look on the bright side.

Bank holiday Monday and I wake up about 8 o’clock after a medium nights sleep and feel better than yesterday. My partner brings coffee and we figure out our next move. Breakfast obviously, but then what. In reality my partner needs to go back the shop where she bought a pair of sandals which when she walked up stairs in them broke! We ran through the usual “taking things back” scenarios. “Stroppy assistant” is always high on the list. We were prepared for any excuse that could be offered. Our killer argument was to be that the Roman army overran Europe and forged an empire wearing sandals so no excuse will do. Had the sandal not been made for going up stairs then ancient Britain’s would have built staircases all round Britain and the Roman invasion would have floundered. Every centurion would have flailed their arms in despair and told their legions “we’re buggered men they have built staircases , we just don’t have the foot wear to invade,” and retuned to plunder the rest of the staircase less Mediterranean. Anyway we were ready with our killer argument as we drove the garden centre where the shop is. As it turned out the assistant was lovely, offered options and did the rebate with out a single tut or grimace.

We drove away content and moved onto the next garden centre to buy more plants for my partner’s mother’s patio pots and for our front garden pots. The place was packed but we managed to park creatively and get in and out without too much bother. Bank holiday humanity at garden centres is not at its best. So once home its coffee and a relax. I set about recording and identifying the makers of the pottery that we brought back from London. I photograph it all and the makers marks and then go agoogling. I was able to identify all eight of the potters responsible for the items, three of whom are now dead. So I now have a computer file of images and have learnt quite a lot about modern ceramics along the way. Below I share a pot by Matt Horne, still alive, and a vase (I think) by Robin Welch, now dead.

Once I have satisfied my curiosity I go to the garden and plant the fuchsias that we got this morning. They all go into the pots at the front of the house except one that I reserve for the back garden. Its seems to be hard work and I am aware that I am rapidly running out of spoons. I judicially prune one of my small olive trees that is struggling but showing signs of recovery. I put my tools away and head for the lounge to start to draft the blog and to see if I can find the maker of a piece of glass. It is signed but it is unreadable so I am hunting the internet. As far as I can tell its by an Australian called Gerry Reilly but the signature on the piece is unreadable. Good with glass just never learnt to write his name properly I guess.

Its an interesting object that looks very much like the work of Gerry Reilly but the signature looks nothing like his name. So I guess there is an email and a picture to be sent. I eat dinner and indulge myself with a brandy in the hope it will settle my stomach. I sniff it and only wet my lips with it, it lasts ages. It lasts three episodes of Steel Town Murders by which time I am spoonless and beyond any sane or sensible thought, which given that tomorrow is an oncology review in the morning might not be good. I take my night meds, more paracetamol, finish the blog for the day and head for bed. Going to be a tricky 24 hours I think. Here goes.

Sunday and I wake in the spare bed as my sore gut had kept me awake last night and in an effort to get some sleep I changed beds. So I finally wake at about 9:30 and groggily return to the partnership bed. On the way to my return I weigh myself and to my surprise I find my 97.8 kilos represents a weight loss. Good start to the day. My partner and I drink coffee and chat for a while until we decide to get up for breakfast. To my partners dismay there is no bacon so she takes a trip to the shop. I run the hoover round before the family meeting on the patio for what turns out to be a very late breakfast. As we sit and chat we are joined by the squirrels who pop down to take peanuts from the feeder. They have clearly become accustomed to us.

We make the weekly face time call to our youngest daughter and make arrangements to visit her next weekend. My partner then goes off sandal shopping and I sort out the boxes of stuff that we brought back from the London house. It takes a long time to get things into groups and to photograph them. I send the pictures to my youngest so she can see what there is. I drop some stuff in the bins and note how good part of the front garden is looking. It seems this Spring is blooming beyond expectation, moving the iris last year was certainly the right thing to do.

I just finish my sorting and settle down to watch a football match. It is the last day of the season and demotion and European qualification is to be sorted out. The upshot is my home town Leicester get relegated and my favourite team the mighty Brentford beat the new champions but do not get European football next season. I take more pain killers as I’m not feeling so chipper still and wend my way to the evening meal. There is the usual Sunday stuff that forms the background wallpaper to my blog drafting. I shall watch the football highlights and put myself to bed hoping that by some miracle I will sleep.

It’s getting tiring and I am getting fed up with this state I am in. I am sore and irritable, lacking energy and inspiration. In fact thoroughly fucked off. I assume it is a mixture of my anxieties about my cancer, the coming oncology review, my lack of energy and inability to sleep well. The night sweats are continuing to be a pain. I thought I would throw that in for good measure. The problem is that it’s difficult to fight what you can’t fight, when its your own body that is out witting the medical profession, when your own cell biochemistry is adapting faster than the medicine can counter. Of course the medicine has no adaptive ability, it just does what it does until it gets out manoeuvred by my clever, adaptive and self destructive cell chemistry. So where is the battle ground to be? It always comes back to the same things; stay fit, eat reasonably, take the medicine, feed my brain, be kind and value family and friends.

Saturday and its been a long night, I wake up feeling shit and instantly know I am not going to make it to Birmingham to see Ballet Rambert dance Peaky Blinders. Fuck is the extent of my vocabulary for a while. After a cup of coffee it expands a bit to For Fuck Sake. My partner and I quickly agree that I am not going and that she and our eldest daughter will go instead. I print off the train tickets and go back to bed. My family Uber off to Brum. I lay there muttering Fuck quite a lot and eventually find a pair of loose shorts and an ice hockey shirt and get myself another coffee and a fried egg sandwich. I am so fucked off with myself and decide I can’t just lay around like some snowflake so I head for the garden. Slowly and gingerly I pot out some petunias and get the patio pots looking okay. I “nibble” at other containers, resting and muttering fuck to myself, which no doubt amused the neighbours who were sitting the other side of the patio wall. Eventually I can do no more and indulge in a cornetto from the freezer. My eldest daughter sends me pictures of Birmingham Pride going on. A friend sends me pictures of the beach in Whitby. I retreat to the lounge and think about what I would do as a poem for this moment and start to draft the blog. I write a sonnet to express today.

Too sore for Peaky Blinders a sonnet 
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck 
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck  
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck  
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck 
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck  
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck 
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck Cancer.

Well I seem to have captured the mood and the sense of inarticulate rage quite neatly in the Sonnet format. Shakespeare would have been proud and no doubt had Caliban recite it in honour of Prosper who nicked his island and bad mouthed his mother Sycorax.

Well I’m going to watch rugby and rest now for the rest of the day and imagine myself watching ballet and being enculturated. The rugby comes and goes, my family return from Peaky Blinders having had a good time and I eat pie and chips before Annika and a final bash at the blog. Night meds and its time to see if I can sleep tonight. I’m still sore and still feel shit.

Friday and I wake up eager to see the new painting in the morning light. I get up and stand on the stairs looking into the room with the ew painting. I feel juvinated and pleased that we bought the painting, it has transformed the room. I never thought in my wildest dreams I would buy big new art and that I would always be confined to collecting miniatures within my budget. However there it is large as life in the lounge a genuine Hamish Herd. I have breakfast and spin out time till it is time to walk down to the GP surgery for my monthly jab. I walk down in sunshine and log in on the new system and sit and wait to be called. I am almost immediately in the nurses lair and being jabbed with my potion. There is very little light banter to be had apart from have a good bank holiday. I leave and return home via the village shop to buy a paper.

On arriving home I find that the postman has delivered copies of the probate papers with a covering letter from the solicitor. It appears the estate owes the tax man more than I manged to save in a life time and that paying the tax is going to be a major pain in the arse until we can get the house sold. The tax man wants money up front or we don’t get probate, which would mean not being able to sell the house, talk about being had by the balls. I go through the papers and find an unanswered question which then sets me off on a hunt for data. I end up sending the solicitor an email with a bank statement attached to it. That done I sit on the patio with a coffee and cannoli and do the cross words until lunchtime when I share a bite with my partner.

As the afternoon looms I decide to go to the harden centre and buy more flowers and plants for the garden and also for my partners mother’s patio pots. Once at the garden centre its a bit like a trolley dash as I pile plants and trays of flowers into a cart, my buying is limited by the size of my car boot but I cheat and lower the back seats thus making it possible to buy loads of plants. On arriving home I set to on the front garden and add new things to old tubs and pots to add a bit more colour. Time passes quickly when I am doing this and the afternoon disappears. I sit in the chair that is part of our front garden and look at it noting what is doing well. Its a pleasing moment.

Having gardened and cleared away I become aware of how sore my injection site is getting to stop and have a non alcoholic beer with paracetamol chaser and read again Epitaph by Merritt Mallory. A friend pointed it out to me and said how it really helped. I include it here for those interested.

Epitaph 
Merritt Malloy

When I die
Give what’s left of me away
To children
And old men that wait to die.
And if you need to cry,
Cry for your brother
Walking the street beside you.
And when you need me,
Put your arms
Around anyone
And give them
What you need to give to me.
I want to leave you something,
Something better
Than words
Or sounds.
Look for me
In the people I’ve known
Or loved,
And if you cannot give me away,
At least let me live on in your eyes
And not your mind.
You can love me most
By letting
Hands touch hands,
By letting bodies touch bodies,
And by letting go
Of children
That need to be free.
Love doesn’t die,
People do.
So, when all that’s left of me
Is love,
Give me away.

I wish I could write this kind of good stuff. I have a similar short line and sparse word style but no where near as effect as this. Any way there are still things to do today. I book train tickets to Birmingham for tomorrow as my partner and I are going to see Ballet Rambert perform the Peaky Blinders ballet. Its a matinee performance so we leave in the morning with time to eat a lunch and then attend the show. With this done I think about training but already feel sore as it is so decide to draft the blog instead. I do this drifting towards the evening meal and probably TV that will end in Have I Got News for You, night meds and the hope that I find solace in the deep once again.

Thursday arrives after a varied nights sleep. My partner brings me coffee which helps to bring me round. I get up and have breakfast and then my day of art starts. I take all my sisters glass art into the garden to sort out and clean. What can be hung goes into the Shed and what cannot is cocooned and stored in the garage along with her stock of glass. This takes me all day and is only interrupted by the odd coffee and sandwich.

By four o’clock I am tired and settle to a coffee, cannoli and a cross word when the garden guy appears. Today is the day the hedge gets done but he needs the high steps which means I am on steadying duty. I move the cars off the drive so he can get a good run at the hedge and then we are at it, he with his hedge trimmers and me making sure the steps stay stable. It goes well and I am served my favourite tea of tuna pasta. The day has yet more art to come. I have just finished tea when the woman who owns the gallery where we bought a new painting arrives with it. We chat and she sizes up the hanging space and advises double raw plugs. She leaves and I gather up my tools and set about putting new raw plugged hooks on the wall. I am surprised at how well it goes. My partner goes off to a room to do her singing lesson and I retrieve the cars. With everything away and sorted its time to hang Hamish Herd’s Sanctity of the Deep on the wall.

I’ve not stopped all day and now with everything in place I stop and draft the blog, already it is 8:30pm and suddenly I am tired, spoonless in fact. As I slow down and get the blog done I remember that tomorrow is injection day and immediately feel bad about not training today. The rest of my evening I will be something mindless as I stare at the new painting and wend my way to night meds and bed, doubtless hoping for solace from the deep.

Wednesday and I am slugabedding till 9 o’clock when I get brought a coffee. Its very welcome and helps me come round after a reasonable nights sleep. I get up and fix myself breakfast but notice that the squirrel has abandoned the squirrel feeder for more tasty morsels in the bird feeder and in doing so is demonstrating its dexterity.

I have breakfast and then I start to prepare for the new painting to arrive tomorrow. I move the existing canvas print of a holiday photo taken in Kenya to the stairs and relocate the displaced fossil, that was a retirement present ( I do not think it was intended as a joke), on the stairs. So there is now a bare space awaiting the new acquisition. I hoover the room and get rid of the errant cobwebs to spruce the room for the new arrival. Having sorted that I move onto contacting the solicitor and formally setting out the executive signatory and checking the probate time scale.

Time to train, so as my partner goes off to see her mother I drive to the gym. I get a bottle of water and make my way to the gym floor where I set up a cross trainer for an hour session. I set off with Rammstein loud in my ears and the resolution to drink at each third of the time. I keep a steady pace and I am surprised how easy it comes to me, I’m tempted to press on harder but do not as this is what makes me piss blood, so I press on persistently. It goes well and I burn 600+ calories and I collect a lot of PSI points on my fitness calculator.

The last of my water get drunk and I head for the changing rooms to shower and get cool. Feeling better than I have done for days I treat myself to a coffee and a caramel shortbread before heading home in the sunshine. I arrive home at the same time as my partner. She has brought her mothers watch and a new strap for it so I sit on the patio with my watch kit and put the new strap on as I and my partner chat about our coming timetable and what we can plan and what needs to wait until I know what delicious cocktail of chemicals he who made a pact with the devil decides to dish up for me on Tuesday and how I react to them. Nothing worse than planning a long journey if your throwing up on the hour. Not that I ever had but you can bet your life its on the list of common side effects for whatever I get prescribed. I settle down to draft the blog as my partner goes off with a friend for a meal. I make my evening meal and settle down for the evening with a J K Rowling film, more wizardry nonsense no doubt or perhaps the new Sewing Bee series. I shall laze and think about what I am going to do with my sisters stained glass works tomorrow. They need to be cleaned and stored flat. I shall hang as many as I can in the Shed. I’ve already hung up the now mended Kiwi, a hedgehog, a cat tile and a delightful small circular one with a cat watching a shooting star. Once I have done what’s necessary I will post pictures of them. In the meantime I hope for a good nights sleep.

Tuesday and I wake up after a really crap nights sleep. Its seven o’clock and I get up, pull on some clothes and move my car off the drive so my partner can go to work. Its a real going to work day and my eldest daughter follows my partner soon after, leaving me alone in the house, so I go back to bed with my phone and book. I deal with messages, look up football coverage and send messages as I sip a cup of coffee. Its clear I am not going to go back to sleep so I get up and clear the kitchen, make another coffee and ring the hospital booking line. I am expecting an arm wrestle but I am met with a cheery voice, which once it had confirmed who I was, provided me with the date and time of my new appointment. So come next Tuesday (the 30th) I shall be seeing he who made a pact with the devil to see if he has got any pills, potions or herbal concoctions to offer me. Having burnt through the radiotherapy option without a a single radio wave being expended I’m hoping that there is something he can offer beyond leeches and pointing bones over his shoulder. These last two are the final throw of the dice before reaching the “Fuck off and die” stage for which there is morphine, hopefully lots of it. Anyway having got my early appointment (its as fast as you can expect the nhs to operate these days, positively lightening fast compared to the replacement hip waiting list times) I settle down with my coffee, tick off items on my to do list and start to draft the blog before gliding into the day. I was hoping for sunshine but so far I am being disappointed. Onwards.

A friend calls and we chat for a while. Its nice to be able to wander around the house while chatting, it is the luxury of having the home space to myself. It would seem that the bank holidays are coming thick and fast and with them the organisation to occupy families. After the call I go down to the village shop to get a paper and meet my partners brother. We stand and chat family stuff for a while then I go on to the village café for coffee and a sausage and egg roll. I while away time doing the crosswords and then return home to yet another box of trinkets and beads.

I spend a lot of time going through boxes and looking up designer and artist names who appear on some of the boxes. I find new layers. There is a real mixture of modern and old stuff. The modern stuff is fairly easy to identify adn to assess, the older stuff is more tricky and so I turn to my metal recognition set of fluids and the diamond identifier. I spend more time sorting out which of the trinkets are gold and/or contain diamonds. Putting all the objects back in some sort of order takes times, but eventually the collection is boxed. That is enough of that for one day. Its getting on so I prepare to train for the first time in ten days. It feels like the Real Life death stuff has caught up with me. I change in to my kit and go to the garage to set the rower up but find the display is blank. So I waste time putting in new ones and then set myself up to row for 45 minutes. It goes better than I thought it would after ten days. I manage to go over 10 kilometres and burn 600+ calories, so its a reasonable session.

I get back into the lounge and record the session in my journal. Its a FFY (Fend For Yourself) night so I make soup and a roll for tea and then take a call from my youngest daughter to talk about executorship issues. After the call I return to drafting the blog and watching the Night Agent. Its going to be an early night for me after last nights crap sleepless night, so I will be heading for the waves as soon as I feel my head nod.

Monday, awake, coffee, breakfast and more coffee to wash the morning meds down. I ring the solicitor and chat to her about my sisters estate and the state of play. There are some executorship issues to sort out. So that’s one thing off my to do list, now I need to decide whether to buy the painting that my partner and I saw last week, which we thought would finish the lounge décor.

I spend time sorting out more of the things that were brought back form the London house. There are boxes of jewellery full of odds and ends and it all needs sorting through. I go through it piece by piece. Some of it I test to see if it is silver, gold or base metal, other pieces I use my probe to test to see if the stones are diamond or not. Its something that goes on most of the day in fits or starts in between doing other things. Before long lunchtime comes around and I ring the art gallery number and get the gallery owners husband who promises to ring back. Before he can ring I email his wife and tell her I want the painting. I have time for a bowl of soup before the gallery owner rings me back. It turns out that she was a music teacher at my villages school around the time my daughters were there. Anyway we chat and do the business, so I end up the owner of a new painting which will complete the lounge. It is going to be delivered this week after the gallery owner ends her day. I ask myself why now and the answer appears to be that I want something fresh and alive, that is unrelate to the past that I am surrounded with at the moment. Here is a sneak peek of what is coming to our lounge live and direct.

Business done I head for the Shed where I spend time writing letters. A friend calls and we spend some time chatting and catching up with what we are doing at the moment. Its a welcome distraction and it is good to hear a voice from outside everything that I am steeped in at the moment. Time moves quickly sometimes when I write so soon its time to be walking over to the post box and sending them on their way. As I return I note that the sun has spurred the garden to flower. I pause to take some pictures. I never cease to be amazed by the way my garden keeps producing such blooms in such profusion.

Back in the Shed I start to mend one of my sisters stained glass pieces. Its a Kiwi whose bounding edge has become detached so I superglue it back into place and leave it to dry. I put my washing into do and then return to sorting through the boxes of trinkets adn nick knacks that remain to be sorted. I am in for a surprise, I find my maternal grandparents wedding rings and signet ring. I also find my paternal grandmother’s wedding ring and aunts signet ring. Then my parents wedding rings and and my fathers signet ring appear wrapped in a plastic bag. So within five minutes I have to hand the wedding bands of two generations. I am the last of my generation and here I am with the bands of them all. I’m struck by how sticky the ripples of death are when trying to move on.

The evening arrives and I eat with my partner. I start to update the blog while watching more episodes of the Night Agent. The evening passes until I droop and find I am spoonless and need to get sleep. Night meds and then bed. I’ve ticked some things from my to do list for today, the most glaring omission is the lack of training. So tomorrow my priorities are to train and to garden.

Saturday and I wake up at 8 o’clock, the time I want to leave for London today. Clearly my unconscious is running the show and being clear that this is something that I do not actually want to do. There is toast adn marmalade with coffee in bed to gather strength adn then there is a flurry of activity as I, my partner and eldest daughter dress and get ready to go to London. On the road by 8:30 ish. The drive was mostly good with one comfort break before we arrived at the London house to met by my youngest and her partner.

The house is partially cleared of furniture and stuff like clothes and bedding, the rest of the contents lay around in disarray waiting to picked over by us. In my head this is a Tomb Raider mission. For the next five and a half hours the five of us pick through the wasteland of my family history, finding unknown artefacts and familiar items. There is a conscious jettisoning of family history and memorabilia. Difficult it is to find that there are the remnants of my mothers parents in the house as they lived with with my family till they both died. My grandfathers army chest with his name and rank on it is unearthed as is a very old music cylinder box. We snack, we drink, we pop out to the café on the corner that was a chemists in my childhood. Next to it is a dentist which ironically was a sweet shop in my youngets days, where we would go and swap ration coupons for sweet treats if we were lucky. Down the road, the old Co-Operative store where I would be sent to buy forgotten food items and was taught to chant my families co-op number, double nine, two o five seven. The house is a mess and a shock to the daughters, this is the wreckage of a life, a family and the inability to ask for and accept help, to even recognise that help was required and available. It is also the wreckage caused by ignorance and bigotry of a mother who sewed the seeds of mistrust in social services and filled her daughters head with paranoia about being taken over by “do gooders” and people who know best. In the end my sisters “independence” killed her. We load boxes with the “essentials” but we all find ourselves slipping “one last thing” into our pockets and into the small spaces left in the boxes. I did at least find the deeds of the house and its documentary history from its very beginnings. At last we could do more than load the cars, hug each other and make our separate ways back to our current homes. I took one photo. It was not of the house, which I will never see again, where I spent my childhood, it was of the single flowering Iris in the front garden. The Iris that my grandfather brought from Kew Gardens when he was a gardener there at the end of the war. It was in full bloom, at least a hundred years old now. On arriving home in Leicester the self same stock of Iris was welcoming me home in a single bloom.

Once home the boxes were unloaded to the hall way and an Indian take away ordered. I am tired and know I am full of the day and everything that it has bought up for me. I eat, watch a film and football highlights. Finally after being alone for a while I take my night meds and go to bed numbed by the effort of the day, the driving, the sorting and the final departure. There are no more of my family left in the city in which we were born and raised. We have either died out or moved on.

Sunday and I wake and doze till 10 o’clock, still feeling tired from yesterdays efforts in London. I have coffee on the patio and chat to my partner about yesterday and then while she goes for a shower I start the blog as I do not want to leave it till the night when I think I will be tired again. My partner and I eat breakfast and then go to our local garden centre to buy weekend food and to get some ice cream treats as the weather forecast suggests some days of warmth. If this is true I plan to garden most of next week. I return to drafting the blog while the afternoon football match plays out on TV. My partner makes me coffee and a coffee and I sit on the patio to indulge and while there I take the opportunity to stitch the sleeves on my Shu Muttens Tigers ice hockey jersey up so that I can wear it as my gardening shirt over the coming week. The football slips into rugby on the TV and I start to unpack some of the boxes that are sitting in the hall. I start with the boxes containing ceramics and begin to replace my youngest daughters swimming trophies with them. The trophies are carefully packed in padded envelopes and I place the new arrivals on the window sill trying to produce the best array to show them at their best. When I have finished what I can I return to a small box of jewellery and start to see what is there. There is an assortment of ear studs, rings, necklaces and my sisters trademark self strung necklaces of polished beads and pearls. I label them all up and then set about verifying the metal in a couple of the rings I’ve found. The first one looks like gold and diamonds so I test it for gold first. It turns out to be at least 14 to 24 carat gold, however I cannot test the diamonds till tomorrow when the battery I need for my diamond tester arrives. The other ring is more straight forward as its hall marked. With the jewellery sorted I move onto the paper work and find the deeds of the house along with other house paperwork including the mortgage my parents took out to buy it. A huge sum of £1800 which they secured with a £200 deposit. It was a 15 year mortgage, which I think they managed to pay off early. My final piece of rummaging finds me going through a file in which my sister was plotting out the family tree By the time I’ve done all this it is time for the evening meal.

My evening drifts from good food to TV and drafting the blog, changing the Tesco order before I run out of spoons and take my meds prior to seeking my bed. Tomorrow I need to get back to some sort of rhythm and to bring some order into my no mans land life. It means writing letters, pursuing my oncologist, extravagantly buying a new painting and retuning to sensible eating and proper training. Most of all my garden calls and there is where I will seek solace. I have to be done with the past as the future is rugged enough with out the extra weight.