Friday and I wake up after a disturbed night. My partner is in the office talking to work colleagues and I can’t be arsed to get up yet. I open my phone and find loads of messages from friends telling me that they are thinking of me and wishing me the best. It prompts me to get up and reminds me I have a fight on my hands. So breakfast and more coffee get consumed and then its meds time. I hesitate but in the end take them as its the night cancer ones that are not working. I start my oncologist stalking. I ring the cancer nurses and leave a message in clear terms about what I want and make it clear I’m not waiting till bloody September to be seen again. There is no one there of course but I leave the message. Then I find some re-directed post that needs attention, so I draft a note to the solicitor and wander over to the post office to send it off.

Its lunchtime and my partner goes to see her physio so I go to the village shop to get a paper and then drop into the village café for a bacon and egg roll. Whilst devouring these these goodies I settle down to do the crosswords. My brain is obviously still functioning as I whip through them quite quickly, but then they are easy. As I sit back in the warm glow of success the cancer nurse rings me. To my pleasure she has already put the letter from yesterdays session in front of my consultant who has responded that he will remain in charge of my case and will see me at his Tuesday clinic. However it will be one to three weeks before he can see me. This is about as urgent as this guy (that’s a pun) can manage. So I will wait with baited breathe till Monday and then ring the appointment line. I walk home and moot going to the gym but I really do not want to. I do not fancy public spaces at the moment so I wonder what I can do to fill my time. In a stroke of reckless abandon I research car insurance quotes given that my current insurer thinks they are going to automatically renew my insurance for a cost that would not give me much change out of seven hundred quid. I try Direct Line who give me a quote of in excess of £700. I decide to give the Meerkats a go, why not? So I put in my details and up comes 129 quotes. Some of them are so cheap I cannot help thinking they must be shit but the Tesco Bank on catches my eye. I click on it and they recognise me as being a Tesco Club Card person and immediately offer me a discount. I go through the process, get my partner to check I’m not being a total arse and end up buying their policy, thus saving me over £267. Go me, and with RAC roadside assist as part of it the RAC can go whistle at renewal time. So for a few moment life is sweet again.

In preparation for the tomb raiding expedition tomorrow, i.e. the trip to the London House of my dead sister, I whisk my partner off to the garage to check the tyres and fill the tank, before returning to an evening of food, rugby, Bridgeton and Have I Got News for You. It will be an early night as the plan is to leave early in the morning for London. Despite my semblance of normality today I still feel numbed and driven back inside myself. I have to keep reminding myself that I have to deal with what is and not what I think it might become. Its not personal its just Nature.

Thursday and I wake up to a coffee and the thought of my radiotherapy appointment. I get up for breakfast, coffee and morning meds slowly and without enthusiasm. What I am buoyed by is the WhatsApp messages of support I get. My friends are being very kind to me and it is very much appreciated. I dress and start the blog to fill in time before driving to the hospital.

GUTTED. I am too much of a risk to do Radiotherapy on. My cancerous prostate is invading my bladder so that radiotherapy is too risky and would leave me with some very unpalatable outcomes. The doctor was clear, cogent and sympathetic, if lacking a sense of urgency. So I have spent 71 days waiting for an outcome on drugs that I know are not working and watching my PSA level double in less than 71 days. I urged the doctor to press for an immediate appointment with my consultant oncologist so that I can get onto a new medication. His response was that he would write his letter today and my consultant would get it early next week. For fuck sake have they not heard of a telephone or email. Its so ritualised and unresponsive as to be unbelievable. I shall be on the phone tomorrow to the specialist Macmillan nurses who I will recruit into my campaign to be in front of my consultant as soon as possible.

Back at the car I find I am hemmed in and cannot get out. Cars too big and parking spaces too small. I’m about to probably lose it when the guy parked in front of me appears and leaves so I can drive through and get out. The drive into town is silent, neither I or my partner can process what just happened in the clinic. We sit in the restaurant and gradually talk about options. There are some practical things that this frees us to do so we make a couple of calls. Having eaten we leave and drive to the gym where my partner cancels her hair appointment on Saturday so that we can go to London for the final visit to my dead sister’s house.

Once home I change out of my “going to hospital” clothes and don shorts and an ice hockey jersey. I go to the village shop and get some cash as the garden guy is coming today. Once home I find I am still stunned and immediately head for the garden. I spend the next few hours organising the pot collection and potting out the plants that were rapidly drying in the greenhouse. Its comforting to immerse myself in the plants and garden. I finish all I can do and just as I pack up the garden guy arrives bearing a gift of fresh rhubarb from his allotment. We chat, I pay him and he get on mowing the grass, while I retreat inside to start my evening of eating, blogging and watching football on TV. I will inevitably end up taking my useless night meds and going to bed.

I’m lost in no mans land. Its going to be a rough fight, and I need the tools to fight quickly and that in itself could be a battle. Now I make new plans, simplify, simplify diet, simplify my days, simplify my priorities. Today the wind blew and my clock lost some of its body.

Wednesday and I wake up for my second morning in the York hotel. I check my emails to find ,my missing PSA result is in. Its a real blow, Its 7.5, double what it was 72 days ago. This is what happens when you spend 72 days on drugs that are not working and waiting to be got to on a waiting list. I’m gutted. I drink coffee, eat a Kitkat and watch the squirrels in the trees outside and reflect upon the PSA score, the conversations I’ve had over the last two days and and further reflect. In some ways ignorance would be bliss but I am not. PSA velocity like this is not good, I am in for a rugged time. I had reached the point that I was more than my cancer and that it should not define me, I shoulded do stuff, but the reality of cancer has a way of coming along and making that difficult to believe. I reflect further and only move once checkout time comes around. I leave and drive home, a sandwich and bounty bar on the way.

Once home I unpack, try unsuccessfully to get my GP surgery to respond and mend my laptop (again). So frustrated with it that I drag out my dead sisters old laptop and endeavour to up grade it to Windows 10, that’s how desperate I am. I go to the GP to get an appointment sorted and drop into the village café. I will drift into the evening and the football. It’s all about tomorrow now and what happens at the radiotherapy oncology appointment. It will either be a big let down or a bums rush to action, I don’t hold out much hope that this is going to go anywhere at any pace. It will be night meds and bed to wake to the hospital appointment.

Tuesday and I wake up in a York hotel room. I do not feel on top form so make coffee and take my morning meds. I check to see if my blood results have come. They have but the one I am most interested in, the PSA is not there. Its sods law in action again, I go to breakfast feeling a bit disgruntled. Post breakfast I rest and then go into town for a stroll around town to look at pictures and what the tourists are up to. It also gives me thinking time to mull over the conversations I have had. There are huge queues to buy ghost tour tickets. I wander up to the minster past a bloke advertising mead.

Of course I end up in the York Fine Art gallery where I bought the Jay Nottingham paintings last time. I wander around the pictures and note there are now a lot of Jay Nottingham prints. He is also doing bigger versions of his night pictures and forests. I am not sure the bigger pictures work and the forests have naff couples in them .

By this time my feet are singing and I am tiring of thinking about stuff so I retrace my steps to the hand made chocolate shop in the Shambles. I get there at about 3:15 thinking that with all the tourists around it is bound to be taking full of advantage of a potential haul. To my horror they close at 3 o’clock! Really, are they mad.

I trudge back to the car park and return to the hotel where I start to update the blog. I settle down for a quiet night reading more of David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind. I will also watch the football on my laptop later on. The Chalmers book is a real challenge and extends me beyond my comfort zone. I can only do this in small bits. Try this snippet:

It would appear that philosophers cannot think about anything without there being other possible worlds based on logical deduction. Personally I find having just one (or is it) is enough of a struggle. But it is refreshing to have to think about what language actually refers to and beyond, but it is hard work. So I settle down to an evening of philosophical conjuring and if I am lucky football, meds and sleep. The thought that I carry most with me from my musings is that I am not my cancer, I am much more than that. I almost forgot that and nearly lost myself. I’m back.

Monday and I am due to go to York, so I get up and have breakfast and morning meds and then pack. I shower and then moves cars around so that I can take mine to the garage and fill it and check the tyres. This all went well until the tyre check. The tyre pump deflated not inflated my tyres so I had to resort to my temporary pump that plugs into my lighter socket. Not a good start. To add to this my partners mother was found to be unresponsive this morning and her brother had to dash across to her house to support the carer. Fortunately she recovered and did not need to go to hospital. I took my partners car to the garage and filled it. So with the chores done I drove off to York. At the first opportunity I pull into a service station and check my tyres. Feeling confident in my tyres and happy I continued my journey.

I get to my destination at 2:30 through some tricky road works and then settle down with my friend and mentor. For over three hours we talk about how I am and and how the world is, teasing out issues and taking time to think about some of the things that are facing me. I am fed chocolate biscuits and coffee but most importantly listened to and asked the difficult questions. It eases the no mans land I find myself in and I come away calmer and cleared about some of the things I can do. There is a lot going on at the moment and finding space to do what needs to be done is the trick.

Check in at the hotel is swift and I am soon in my room drafting the blog before I go out with a friend for a meal. Still no sign of the missing blood results but the issue with the house in London has been delayed. The funeral directors want to know whether I want my sister ashes in wood or plastic (no brainer) and have quoted me the prices and delivery charges. Apparently there are rules about sending dead peoples ashes to other people which appears is an expensive business. All in good time is my first thought.

Early evening I go and pick up a friend and go for a meal in town. It is really relaxing to be able to eat at leisure and to talk about TCs and work experiences. I note that tomorrow is the tenth anniversary of my retirement, My friend pointed out that when I retired I said that I was going to do absolutely nothing and that in fact I then spent the next nine plus years being busy with my own practice, the CQC, and the enabling environment project at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, plus of course a spell with the Barchester Group in Hull and a couple of lecturing gigs at Hull University. There were some Therapeutic Community reviews in there as well. So as my friend pointed out I failed miserably at doing nothing. My friend is suffering from long COVID so by the time we have eaten and chatted she is tired and needs to rest, so I take her home and then go back to the hotel to finish the blog and talk to my partner before taking my night meds and going to bed. As always my visit to York is proving to be vey useful and I feel that I have a lot to think about and process. All of it is so useful in helping me prepare for whatever is to come as a result of Thursdays oncology appointment.

Sunday and I wake up knowing the missing blood results are not in, but I check anyway. Still not there. I make my partner and I warm drinks and we laze in bed till we are ready to move in on the day. I down my trusty muesli, another coffee and my morning meds and head for the garden. Its a labour of necessity today as my front hedges have burgeoned this spring. I gather up my tools, which includes a heavy duty hedge trimmer. I start be dealing with the passage way down the side of the house. I cut back the hedge so that I can get the recycle bin out to the front garden, and then attack the front hedges. I shear my hedges and then gather up the clippings, compacting them as I go. Its a high spoon activity and it does not take long for me to work up a good sweat. After some hours of work I have run out of spoons so I pack my tools away and sit on the pation with a coffee and a scone.

Clearly scones and coffee are good for me as I have a burst of energy and plant out some of the bedding plants that were bought yesterday. By the time I’ve done that I’m ready to watch the rugby semi final on the TV. My team Leicester Tigers lose to the Sale Sharks, they clearly miss my season ticket support. As the sun abates I once again head for the garden and put in a couple of Lavatera (Mallows). My jasmine has died as has my long standing fuchsia so I put in my mallows to replace them. I am hoping that in due course the new plants will establish themselves. If I’m successful the new plants will flower from June all the way through to September or October. I really am out of spoons now and retreat to the reclining sofa and watch Country File. Tonight my partner and I dine on pasta and strawberries before we slide into the evening. Maybe the BAFTA awards, maybe more Night Agent, hopefully football highlights as my team won today. What is for sure I will not be waiting up till midnight to see if the rest of my bloods are in. Tomorrow I travel to York to see my mentor as part of my readying myself for Thursdays radiotherapy oncology appointment. It is the time to gather up my resources, check the resilience batteries and have options for all the possible/likely outcomes. At the moment I think I am in for a bit of a grind in the near future with the medical profession.

Its Saturday but last night I stayed up till gone midnight to see if my blood results got posted. The answer is partially. To my disappointment only one set of results are posted. The missing set contain the PSA result which is the crucial one. The ones that I have got are not brilliant but then again I had a crap cold when I gave the bloods, so perhaps the less than good results are to be expected.

So I crawl off to bed at 1am feeling less than gruntled. I sleep irritably and wake again at 8 o’clock the following morning. So Saturday starts with coffee and a lay in while my partner and chat and plan the day. My partner makes me a bacon sandwich and we both have a morning of tidying the house and getting our environment in order. By the end of the morning all our washing is done and our clothes are away. Beds are changed and the cars have full washer tanks and one has a new rear wiper. Having sorted the house we drive to our local garden center and top up our shopping. On the way back we drop in on another garden center and indulge in scones and coffee.

During all this I’ve been wrestling with one of my laptops which refuses to start up. My afternoon is taken up with watching a rugby semi final and keeping an eye on a laptop screen that occasionally changed which hue of blue it felt like. I slide into the evening and also into the Eurovision song contest. It is a tour de force of techno modern noisy irrelevance but in some respects fascinating. Its going to be a long evening mostly because I know I will not go to bed until I know whether the rest of my blood results are in or not. It is rumored that tomorrow may be sunny, if true I shall be in my garden trying to impose some sort of order on my rapidly developing jungle.

Friday and I am awake early as I am having bloods done at 9:10 this morning. I have time for a shower, a coffee and my morning meds before walking down to my GP and settling into the reception area. I am soon called in and in the blink of an eye I am walking out minus a couple of vials of blood. I return home to drive my partner to garden centre we discovered yesterday for breakfast. However we find the tea room closed so we shop for plants to liven up my pot collection and to fill some holes in the flower beds. By the time we had loaded the car boot with the new plants it was time for breakfast. Eggs Benedict for me and more coffee. My partner and I chat about hypnotism and pain control and wander into the realms of different types of consciousness. More coffee and tea are ordered. We leave and drive home to unload the plants and get them undercover in the greenhouse. I spend a bit of time filling bird feeders and skimming some of the floating weed from the pond. Its over cast and damp, in fact bloody miserable for May and further more its forecast to be this shit for the rest of the month. Apparently the Gulf Stream is “wobbly” and failed to rise to its normal northerly latitude, hence the crap weather from the north. I realise that I am in danger of “Pilgriming”. There is a John Bunyan line that goes “Whoso beset him round, With dismal stories, Do but themselves confound.” In fact Maddie Prior can sing it to you.

My point being that there is so much shit going on that its quite possible that we are making it worse by going on about it and confounding ourselves. Certainly I’ve stopped watching the news, in fact most programmes as there is an underlying tone of doom and gloom in them all. Even the stories meant to uplift arise from a traumatic or despairing start point. I do not find these uplifting, it might just be me but I’m not engaged. However I shall try to emulate the Pilgrim and “His strength the more is.” in the face of the a world and media that besets me with dismal stories.

A friend calls and we chat about the arrangements for her daughters birthday party this weekend and the myriad things that have to happen in order for it to go to plan. Its a lengthy chat as apparently there are many things to do and attend to whilst, at the same time, balancing a spoon economy that is still fragile in the face of long COVID, It seems that in general the world has forgotten COVID or at least that there are still many people that have been left battling the aftermath of it.

My partner and I go to the gym. For me its a kill or cure option to chase off my cold. I get there and get a cross trainer. I had forgotten to take my phone up with me so I could not capture the outcome screen and had to resort to remembering my figures. As it turns out they were identical. 5.08 kilometres and 508 calories burnt during the 50 minute session. I am well pleased with that and it seems to have done me good. Sometimes you just have to show your body who is boss. Another shower and then in to the lounge for yet more coffee and a cookie while I wait for my partner to emerge. As we sit sipping or coffee a rabbit appeared outside the lounge window and happily hopped around oblivious to the cars parking by it. It was a very Blaise rabbit.

We drive home and having dumped my kit I remove the rear windscreen wiper from the car as it has torn and order a new one to arrive tomorrow. So begins the evening. I’ve a watch to re-battery, I think, and then there is Have I Got News For You on TV and more of the Night Agent to watch. The issue for me is whether I stay up past midnight to see if todays blood results are posted or not. I know they will be worse than last time because I know the medication is not working. It means my PSA will have risen, the question is by how much and at what rate. Regardless I will at some point take my night meds and go to bed. Or I may just read.

Thursday and my third night in the spare room as I nurse my cold out of myself. I am getting there. I get up and make warm drinks for my partner and I, which we drink while forming a plan for the day. We decide to go into town for breakfast. We drive in to the Merchant of Venice and order our meals and then chat. I share that the family we know in Shri Lanka have been in touch again and sent pictures and a video. Things are tough in Shri Lanka at the moment, the government is bankrupt and the economy is dire, so for our fisherman family, life is difficult in the extreme. The daughter has sent me pictures of the notification of their electricity and water being cut off along with a video of how they have rigged up a car battery to power two lights in the night time. They are getting water from a neighbour. It is unimaginable that they are living like this, but having said that there are probably families right now in England close to this situation. I send some money and hope it gets them straight for a while. I wait to here how things go. We also chat about the possibility of going abroad for a holiday this year, which we both want to do but everything is so up in the air at the moment that it makes planning difficult to do. We finish our meal and pay after a long chat with the waitress about her experiences of working and being abroad. Apparently her experience is that we English are far more welcoming and good to be with than many other European countries. Go us! After a quick sortie to M&S we drive home to post, which includes a lovely letter from a friend and yet another (my last) ice hockey jersey.

I settle down to read my letter and then begin to draft the blog. After while my partner and I decide to go for afternoon scones at a near by garden centre in a village where I first lived when I left London. We wander round the new garden centre and size up the plants on offer, which are actually pretty good and reasonably priced. We head for the tea room and order our scones with me going for a strawberry milk shake as well. Sometimes I just can’t face coffee. We chat a while and then we head home. I settle down to read my David Chalmers book on Consciousness. Its really interesting but its such hard going, I have to read a bit then think and then read a bit more. Its going to take a while but I think the rewards will be large. I get to a point where something he says about the way things are defined can obscure the nature of a phenomenon. There is a graph that explains the concept. I suddenly realise that what is being said reflects the thoughts that were in the poem my friend sent. I present them here for you to think about.

It seems that allowing for questions, doubts and being curious might be a productive way to be. In essence allowing for phenomenon that are not “verifiable” by “facts” opens up some very interesting possibilities and philosophical questions, like what and why is consciousness. There is only so much of this that I can take in one go so I resort to watching football, followed by a new drama series The Night Agent. I finish drafting the blog, take my night meds and go to bed. My morning will start early with a set of bloods being taken, and so the run up to my radiotherapy oncology appointment on Thursday 18th starts.

Wednesday, the second morning I have woken up in the spare room as I quarantine myself from my partner with my lousy cold. That’s me who has the lousy cold not my partner. My partner brings me a coffee when she hears I am moving about. I sip it gratefully and check my emails and social media. Nothing pressing there so I get up and have breakfast. The post man delivers the usual recycling but this morning there is a letter form a friend. So I am able to sip more coffee and have the pleasure of reading my letter. No matter how often I get a letter or reflect upon getting letters I always get the same sense of excitement and gratitude for the writers effort. I read my letter slowly and then I retreat to the sofa to fill up my journal and to get a grip on what I might do today. My initial thought is not much. I drift for a while having half thoughts when out of the blue the solicitor’s office rings me. Apparently the house clearers and other folk have got as far as they can and it is now up to me and my daughters to make our final visit to take what we want before everything else goes.

Without thought I commented to my partner if she fancied a trip to London tomorrow. I do not know where my head was at, having ignored two rather salient facts, one, I have a cold and feel below par so driving would be a pain, and two my partner is on annual leave and the last thing she wants to do is be going off to London to a dead persons house to rake over old belongings. She made this point very clearly. Neither was too chuffed so a period of displacement activity occurred. My partner went to the shop and I went to the Shed to write bad tempered poetry. My partner returned and came to the Shed where we able to be the reasonable rational adults we usually are. There will be no annual leave trip to London nor a “I’ve got a cold” one. There are more important things to be thinking about right now, including the health of my partners mother and my up coming Radiotherapy oncology appointment next Thursday. I also need to prepare myself for that and will travel to York on Monday to talk to my mentor. This process helps me contain all the various aspects of managing my situation. Its difficult to keep making the right decisions when the oncologist keeps telling you there are no right answers. I’m not inclined to live the rest of my life on the toss of a coin on the basis that any answer or decision will do, my personal universe does not work like that. There are always options and some are better than others, the problem is that sometimes the better options are not and vice versa. Hence the need for reflection and hearing the thoughts of those outside the situation.

My partner goes off to collect her brother to visit their mother and do the weekly check in with the carers. I continue to use my inks to colour in an old board. I’m not n the mood for the Shed and its artistic possibilities so I pack up adn move back into the house for a soup lunch. I am not long back on the sofa when a friend calls from the very rainy York. we of course talk weather as Brits are honour bound to do and then compare our domestic to do lists before moving on to how we are and what lays ahead of us. It was an unexpected call and prompted me to get myself moving again. Going to the gym or training is not a today wise idea so the least I could do is bring the bins in. That done I settle down and start to draft the blog and as I do so I discover that Alexa will play me Scheherazade, so I am able to recapture some of last nights delights from the concert.

Tonight I want a quiet night of watching football and the last in the Race Across the World series. A bit of a misnomer as the contestants are just racing across Canada, which appears to have really shit public transport system. Apart from that I shall read my book on Consciousness, a small bit at a time before downing my night meds and probably quarantining myself for one more night. The tax return, car insurance and the house clearance can all wait.