CYCLE 2 DAY 11

I am not really obsessed with rugby, it is just that Japanese time means that the games are played in the early morning time here in dear old blighty. So when I wake in the morning early and know that I am not going to go back to sleep there is a game to watch. Today England happened to be playing. What was really lovely was that I got to watch with a bacon sandwich in one hand and a hot coffee in the other. It was good sitting on the sofa with the family just enjoying the game and having them around me.

We had talked about what we need to do this weekend and amongst the jobs was the need to go shopping for vegetables and fruit from our local garden centre. As I needed to get some sand and log roll for the garden project this trip suited me well. My daughters boyfriend offered to dig the hole required for our new pond to go into while we went to shop, so I equipped him with spades and saws and left him to it, having unpacked the preformed pond liner. On our return we found he had dug the trench required and was waiting for us to arrive with the sand to bed the liner in. So we spent time bedding the pond in and filling it with water so as to get it to settle into position. Once bedded in we left it to spend the night to further settle. Tomorrow we will finish the process and arrange the edging that we have planned. After that it will have to wait for a few days until the plants and solar pump arrive. I’m not expecting much to happen and just want it to develop over the winter and see what spring brings.

I was quite tired after tidying up the garden tools and puting things away and I took a bit of time out to rest and read Terry Pratchets Dimbleby lecture “Shaking Hands with Death”. I fell asleep and woke to the commentary of Liverpool versus Leicester on the radio. I still do not estimate well how much chemo therapy takes out of me, I seem to tire more quickly than I expect when doing ordinary things. One ordinary thing was wrestling the huge cardboard container the pond came in into manageable pieces which could be stored in the garage until the next recycling day.

Tonight the family sat together for a large roast meal. It has been a while since we did this. It was good to see everyone together and to hear the conversation flow again. When we do this we almost inevitably end up playing games. Tonight we played a new game called Selfish, which is basically a survival in space game. But as usual we ended up playing one of or favourites, Perudo, a dice game of prediction and bluff. I think it is similar to the dice game that was played in one of the Pirates of the Caribbean films. We played for ages until people got the pull of sleep and the need to rest. That kind of itchiness where you just want to disrobe and get to sleep. Tomorrow is a big day for my youngest and her boyfriend. Tomorrow is Glastonbury ticket day. They will be up and ready to do battle over the internet to get onto the website and book their tickets. It is highly organised and they belong to a six person syndicate (six tickets is the most you can buy) who all try at the same time and whoever gets through buys the tickets for the syndicate. When they were explaining this to us they also told us of people who had been in syndicates who when they got through did their own thing and excluded some people and included new people. Apparently one single male who got through bought tickets for all his mates but did not get tickets for their girl friends. The consequences were tricky to say the least but funny in the telling. I am guessing that tomorrow morning is going to be quite tense until the tickets are secured. I predict celebratory bacon sandwiches.

So my family have taken themselves off to bed and I am left to write the blog. Today feels like a bad dyslexia day, sometimes I spot my spelling and sequencing errors at other times I am blissfully unaware. I know that I can read things several times and just not see repeated words or even whole sentence chunks. So I am taking myself off to bed in the hope that Glastonbury ticket day goes well, that my pond settles and that I find the time to get to the gym. I am beginning to feel that tetchy gym withdrawal symptom where I need to be physically active and to make the effort to make an effort.

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