Tuesday and I had a crap night. My response to my injection this month has been to turn me into a shaky junkie. A wake up in the spare room feeling shit. I have no energy and my body aches all over. I feel so crap I do a COVID rapid flow test (remember them?). Its negative, so this is my injection reaction. I get some breakfast and then try to read for a while. I retreat to the garden swing seat to try and relax. It doesn’t work so I have a soup lunch and go to the Shed. I need to do something different. I decide to daube. I have some old acrylics and some boards so I spend time pushing paint around. I have no talent in this area but the process is relaxing. Here are my daubing’s;

They do not have tittles; I have no idea what they represent other than my need to push paint around and think of nothing else. I pack away my materials and return to the house. I go for a nap and take more paracetamol. A friend calls and chats for a while before I go back downstairs and watch football, eat tea, watch Ridley and then draft the blog. I have no energy at all, I am spoonless and go to my bed full of meds, more paracetamol and hoping for a night of deep sleep.

Monday, and I am brought a drink in bed and my phone at 7:45 so that I can ring the GP to get an appointment for my injection. As the system was down on my past appointment, I was unable to book then and I had to remember to book later. I didn’t, hence my early morning drink and phone delivery. So I spend a lot of minutes redialling the GP number. I eventually get through and plead a bit to good effect. I get an appointment (fitted in) at 10:10am. I get a shower and breakfast before I set out to the surgery. I feel crap as I walk down but I get there and sit patiently in the waiting room. The relief nurse calls me in, and I emphasise the need for slowness of ingress. She is very good and try’s to be as slow as possible. The system is up today so I am able to book the next jab for October.

Back home I settle down with a hot drink and watch the rain start to pour down. Today is a reading day so I settle down to read Before Your Memory Fades. It is the third in a series of books about a cafe where you can go back or forward in time but of course there are rules. The four rules mean that you can’t change anything so the way the stories of those that do decide to go back or forward are crafted are interesting and sensitive to the subtleties of relationships. Apart from reading a letter from a friend and taking in the Tesco delivery I did nothing else all day until the early evening when I completed the book.

It is always lovely to get a proper letter in the post. Today’s letter is very welcome and is well worth the break from the novel to settle down with coffee to read. I am particularly pleased by the fact that the letter is sealed with a wax seal, it reminds me that I am waiting for my new replacement seal ring to arrive. My hands still feel odd without my seal ring, and I miss being able to seal my letters with my own seal. It gets to early evening and I am beginning to feel the effects of my injection. It gets progressively sorer as the day goes on and I feel more and more rough. So as the evening comes I gather up my dwindling energy and start to draft the blog. I shall eat, watch the concluding episode of Capture and go to bed early with my other new book.

Sunday, another lazy start as the dead queen’s body start out to Edinburgh. A bacon sandwich for breakfast and I sort out my meds for the next two weeks. I watch a bit of the dead queen’s progress until my partner goes to the gym. I head into the garden and spend time tidying up my compost corner and loping some of the lower branches of the larger Acer tree at the end of the garden. Job done I watch a rugby match on TV and then settle down to read. My sister sent me a collection of love poems some time ago and I had not had a chance to read it, so today was the day.

The family eat tea and settle into the evening. I check my diary to see what time my injection is tomorrow and find I have not booked it. The GP surgery appears to be unable to book from month to month when the nurse goes on leave so its left to the punter (me in this instance) to remember to ring up and book it. I forgot. Unconscious avoidance or stupidity? I will never know but it does mean I am going to have to spend tomorrow morning on the phone to arrange it as soon as possible. A real pain especially as I have already started to take my prophylactic paracetamol. So it will be an early night for me.

Saturday and a lazy start made good by a bacon sandwich. Watched the king proclamations and observed the pageantry. I have to say we do the ceremony stuff really well. Having had my fill of this historic moment my partner and I go food shopping. Our usual fruit adn veg guy at the harden centre was chirpy and chatty as usual. He confided with us that he had no cauliflowers as they were charging £3 a cauli at the market. He thought outrageous and knew no one would pay that kind of money for their veg. We of course agreed and concurred with his outrage. Back home we unloaded the bags and headed off to the alternative garden centre fondly know to us as “Hagrid’s”. There was very little available on the shelves when we wandered around looking for possible additions to our garden for next year. In the end we buy to bags of daffodil bulbs and head home.

Lunch is very welcome and I settle down to watch the first rugby match of the season. My team Leicester Tigers, last years champions manage to lose the game to a last second try. It could be a difficult season. I meander towards tea and a lazy evening content to be resting. Tomorrow starts my prophylactic paracetamol regime before Monday’s injection. On these weekends I am not well motivated to train, and I am content to try and restart yet again on Monday to get back to an exercise regime. So, for now it’s night meds and bed.

Friday, Queen still dead. Toast and coffee with my meds, News is all dead monarch. I retreat to the Shed and spend the morning trying to recreate my own version of Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America. The IT will not play ball but in the end I get there. Its then a case of packaging it and getting it to the post office. The post person processes my padded envelope adn then drops in that I might be lucky. How come I ask. He then points out to me that as the Queen has died the post workers have abandoned their planned strike today so if I am lucky, they might actually pick it up today. He did not seem confident.

I return home and indulge in tomato soup while my partner gets ready to go and visit her mother. The moment she is out of the door I am a whirlwind of domestic cleanliness. My first task is to vacuum the Shed. For the first time in years the Shed gets cleaned up and finally looks reasonable. Then it’s on to the house. I am a blur of hoovering, dusting and shining. I empty bins and put clothes away. The real test was when I tried to finally get rid of the wad of bubble wrap that had been stuck in the bottom of our wheelie bin for ages. I get it out to discover a filthy, rancid sea of yuk at the bottom of the bin, Nothing for it but to clean the wheelie bin out. A lot of hot water, bleach and brushing finally got it clean. Not my favourite job. I go back to doing the house. The garden guy arrives and I feed him coffee and continue to busy myself with the cleaning. My final task is to throw yet more paperwork away, which leads me to write a quick letter and return a document. By now it is throwing it down and the gardener has left out of self-defence.

By now I am tired and return to the house to finish up tidying before my partner returns. We settle down to tea after watching the new king give his first national broadcast. I start to draft the blog as we decide how the evening will go. No football or rugby tonight due to the Queens death and no football over the weekend. Lots of reading time is my thought.

Thursday, and a disturbed night of sleep so I get up relatively early and have breakfast. Wash down the meds with coffee and then clear the kitchen. My remaining blood tests came in last night and they are all okay. Everything is in the normal range, apparently my kidneys and liver are in fine enough fettle. I clear the kitchen and then prepare my sample to take to the GP. Being an old hand at being a cancer club member I have specimen vials in stock. It’s just wonderful what Amazon will provide. Anyway, I wander down to the GP surgery and hand over my liquid gold and head off to the chemist to pick up my monthly drugs. Yep, it’s that time already in my cycle, Monday is a jab day. By 11 o’clock I am ready for coffee and a couple of crosswords before a light lunch. I recall Baumeister’s definitions of meaning in relation to the self. One of the key elements of making meaning of life according to him is the “efficacy” variable. This is the feedback that is received from the environment about the effect one’s actions, or lack of them, have on the environment. Of course, there are different kinds of environment but the principle in general holds true for them all. It occurs to me that this is one factor that is a major part of retiring, I have in effect divorced myself from what was one of my major sources of feedback about my efficacy in relation to my various environments. Hence the greater difficulty to make meaning of my life as I have severely reduced one of the major variables by which I did that. I suspect this maybe why entering poetry completions is such a soul-destroying process as anything less than prize winning provokes no feedback whatsoever. It set me thinking about what the variables in my environments are which do in fact provide feedback about my efficacy to me. My initial list is as follows, 1: the garden, 2: the rowing machine, 3: the bathroom scales, 4: the viewing figures for the blog 5: my cash book and finally but by no means least, 6: my WhatsApp account. I should include of course the people I live with as they of course provide feedback about my effect on them, sometimes. I was once told I wrote “boney” poetry; it would appear that I live a “boney” life. All this before lunch. Anyone interested in what Baumeister has to say can find it all in his excellent book Meanings of Life. In it he outlines what he calls his existential shopping list of the four needs for Meaning. They are Purpose, Value (Justification), Efficacy and Self Worth. So, I’m off to Amazon to see what they have in stock.

Lunch turns out to be bacon sandwiches, which is a favourite. There then followed a book harvest as not one but two books arrived. One was expected the other a surprise gift from a friend. So, I have reading for the days ahead. I am excited.

I go to the Shed and write a letter to a friend who had sent me a card. I do so in the middle of a thunderstorm with the rain beating down on the roof of the Shed. By the time I had finished the rain had passed and I was able to wander over to the post box and send my letter on its way. I return home to read a while and then watch an early evening football match and eat tea.

The queen dies at about 6:30. Long live the king, Charles the third.

Well, that buggers the rest of the evenings viewing. Every channel is full of it. By the second half of the football match English teams playing abroad were wearing black arm bands and the 8 o’clock kick offs all had a minute’s silence. I suppose this is going to drag on for days, thankfully my books will save me from most of it. It was clear something was up when she shook hands with Lis Truss, the back of her hand was badly bruised. As an experienced receiver of back of the hand catheters it was clear she was receiving some sort of intravenous drugs. I take my evening meds and go to bed with a good book.

Wednesday, I wake knowing the initial outcome of yesterday’s blood test. Just after midnight the first basic test results came in. My Haemoglobin, White Blood Cell count, Neutrophils and Heamatocrit/PCV are all good. I wait for the rest to arrive but that will not happen now until after midnight tonight. So, I move into today slowly with a lazy muesli breakfast to accompany my meds. It’s a toss up between the Shed, the gym and the garage today.

I go to the Shed and write letters until my partner comes to beg a stamp. At this point it throws it down with rain, so I stop for lunch. I have been feeling a bit off when going for a pee today so I do a dip test and find my Ph and specific gravity values are up, which makes me think it might be a UTI in the making. I ring my doctor and am promised a phone call later. IN a burst of optimistic life admin I book a ticket for a three-day conference in October. I also have some message conversation with a friend who alerts me to the fact that the author of Before the Coffee gets Cold, Toshikazu Kawaguchi, new book Before Your Memory Fades is available. I immediately order it from Amazon so tomorrow I will be able to settle down with a new book. Once the rain stops, I post my letters and then I fill more time doing crosswords until a late afternoon football match is on TV.

My partner goes out for dinner with a friend in the evening so my eldest daughter and I make chicken fajitas for tea and I return to watching football. So my evening passes and I draft the blog while deciding whether to stay up and see if more blood results come through. I probably won’t as when my GP rang back, she had the temerity to ask me to bring a sample to the surgery tomorrow morning for testing as she did not want to prescribe antibiotics unnecessarily. In the meantime, I am to drink a lot of water. Retirement is turning out to be a real joy.

Tuesday, an action-packed day with the excitement of my partner going into work, my eldest daughter going to the physio and me off to the GP for a blood drawing. Not only that but this afternoon someone is coming to service the boiler. I can barely contain my excitement. Breakfast of sensible muesli, equally sensible Greek low-fat yogurt and all topped off with indulgent blossom honey. I wash this down with coffee and drugs before pulling on jeans in deference to the rain. Cotton hippy cargo pants will not cut it in this weather. A friend calls on her way to play golf, or if it rains coffee and a swim. We chat about our respective ill relatives and a bit about our own ills. She is bravely making major life decisions about where and how is best to live with an ailing partner. After the call I ready myself for the GP. I leave a bit early as it takes me longer to walk to the GP now. As it turns out I arrive ten minutes early. I am prepared with my David Mitchel book, but I have no time to get going on it as I am called in immediately. I judge by the peeved looks on the others faces in the waiting room that they are no impressed. I am in and out in a flash. I have to say the nurse who takes the bloods is very very good at it. She is in and out of my arm in record time. So, I am out of the GPs and heading for the cash machine in the co-op to draw my monthly cash allowance. I no longer buy a paper as all I want is the cross word and I get that free on the web. On getting home its coffee and a start on the blog. Now to wait for the excitement of the boiler service.

The boiler service was not exciting, in fact it was brief, efficient and painless, not to mention joyless. Overcome by the mundanity of hedgehog less existence I decide to go for a swim. So, I clamber into my car and drive off to the gym. On the way I fill my tank (approx. 400 miles), check my tyres and drive onto the gym knowing that the world is my oyster. I swim, it is true that I swam relatively briefly, but I swam. There was a brief jacuzzi time as the steam room was not functional. A shower and a large americano later I am chilling in the club lounge waiting for my partner. She arrives and goes to train while I return home to watch football. Dinner of pizza and more football, England’s women thrashing Luxenberg 10- 0. Out of some sort of “keeping up ” I watch the new to see what Liz Truss is up to. New cabinet looks interesting. I think the next couple of years is going to be interesting. I predict polarisation and strive, but then I would. I continue to drat the blog and keep myself amused and will continue to do so just in case my blood results get posted after midnight. I note that there are Macmillan adverts for their coffee morning on TV. I have a better idea, cut out the middle agent and just send your money to me. Saves all the faffing about making cakes. Would we need charities if people cared directly, and governments provided adequately for its citizens? Its time I checked my bloods adn went to bed.

Sunday, its family birthday lunch day so I am up early and showered, after all you can’t smell when you’re with the extended family. I weigh myself and find myself over 1.5 kilos lighter than a fortnight ago, before I went on holiday. I’ve a way to go but it’s a good start. Realistically I need to set my targets for Christmas. Everyone is up and breakfasted in good order and much preparation has been done to get the food ready for travel. At 11:15 the starting gun goes off and we load food into cars and drive off to my partners mother’s house. We bound out of the cars ladened with food of all varieties including the gluten free goodies. Pretty soon all the family that can make it arrive and soon we are all making conversation or putting up the food table. There is conversation and catching up until it’s time to eat and to work our way to the birthday cake. We continue to eat and watch gifts being unwrapped. Inevitably the small children get restless or sleepy and parents begin to depart. With that there is a general exodus but not before we rally round the birthday girl (94) and have our pictures taken. We return home to have a coffee and then wave my youngest and her partner off home.

The evening is a blur now, I watched Lucifer, which is just running out of steam as a concept and a series and then watched two episodes of Capture. The house went to bed, and I watched the end of Stuart Lee’s Snowflake before taking my meds ands going to bed. I always find family days fascinating; the way different couples and generations mix and manage each other. It’s very ritualistic with only the children doing what they actually expressing what they want to do or or are interested in. In an L shaped room, I realised that there was a great deal going on that I had no idea about, it was almost like two different events, but I guess everyone went away feeling they had done their bit, made their contribution, avoided the Harold Pinter play.

Monday, and I cannot give a toss really. I get up have toast and then spend what seems like an eternity entering two poems for a Poetry Society Stanza competition. You can only enter if you are a member of a local Poetry Society Stanza group. I’ve spent a considerable amount of effort and time tracking down my local Stanza and making contact. I’ve finally managed to find the contact person and get the info I needed from him. The next meeting is on the twenty fourth and I am going so I consider myself a member. Thus I have entered two poems. I thought the theme was Nature, when I read the entry form it says Environment. Not a problem I tweaked the existing two and waved them off to cyber space. They too will soon be Herod’s Children and will appear on the blog as rejected strophes. Having sorted all of this it’s time for a lobster bisque lunch and an M&M bar lunch.

Post lunch entertainment was required so I finished the last remaining Wordle that my partner was wrestling with and then I found Stuart Lees Snowflake show recorded in York on the BBC iPlayer. I like the way Stuart Lee deconstructs what he is doing as he is doing it; I find it very appealing. Having been head fed I email to decline an invitation to present at an open forum in London later in October. I’ve just not got the energy or the wellness at the moment to do it justice. I complete the power companies’ letter to ensure I remain on their emergency list if there is a power cut in the future. Guess what they are getting ready for? I walk across to the post box and return to survey the hedgehog situation. I established yesterday when I reviewed the camera footage that the poxy cat from next door has been nicking the food making it look like the hedgehog is still around. It isn’t. I clear out the hedgehog canteen and leave a single dish of meat pellets in the canteen. The cat does not touch the pellets so if a hedgehog should show up again, I will be able to tell. I now have a dozen cans of Spikes meaty feast in the Shed. I am hoping autumn might drive hedgehogs to the garden again. I draft the blog. Listlessly. 5 o’clock rolls round and the evening beckons. The evening is filled with a romantic comedy film, yes really, not a single dead body or act of violence anywhere. The only interruption was to take the Tesco delivery in. Then a news catch up. I take my meds, finish off the blog draft for the day and go to bed. Tomorrow is a small matter of morning blood tests, and boiler service in the afternoon. Somewhere in there needs to be some exercise.

Friday, a tired day with no energy, so the day came and went. The hedgehog food disappeared again but no sign on the camera of the hog, Ninja is living up to his/her name. I cooked a curry for the evening meal, that was about all I could contribute.

Saturday and I wake up in time to be up by the time my youngest daughter. The family have breakfast together around the family table. After much chat and catching up the rest of the family go off to the local Bird Garden on the edge of the village while I set about relaying the excavated area of the office floor. It’s tricky to put the jigsaw together but I eventually I get there. Once again, the office is back in order. In putting things back I dump another bag of my old working life. I retreat to the garden seat to recover as I am dripping sweat from the effort. I further recover by watching England women football team qualify for the world cup next year by beating Austria 2-0. The family eat dinner together and chat further. By the end of the meal I am wiped out and need to go for a nap. I’m awake again by 10:30 in time to watch Match of the Day and Brentford getting a 5-2 win against Leeds. I try to catch up with the blog before taking my meds and getting back to bed. Tomorrow we are all celebrating my partners mothers 94th birthday so we need to up and away to hers by 1 o’clock.

Today has been my three-year anniversary since my first session of chemotherapy. It’s been an interesting and demanding three years. All in all it’s been a tricky three years with COVID sticking its nose in but I’ve survived. It gets tougher as time goes on as witnessed by my struggle for energy, my battle with my weight, my meds induced body change and the effort to remain in the fight. Still yet to get a poem published.