Jab Monday rolls up and I am awake at 7:30. Today is the fourth anniversary of ending Chemo I back in January 2020. So here I am still having my 28 day jab regular as clockwork. I am not sure whether to take comfort from that or not. My partner brings me my morning hot water and I check my messages, emails and cyber litter as usual. I am reluctant to get up and choose to do my vitals. They are all okay, so the arithmetic keeps being right. I watch a couple of comedy snippets from my news feed and finally decide to get up. Having got dressed I have a clear out of old drugs and out of date COVID tests, before having breakfast. I put todays Jab on the radiator to warm through as an experiment. I am hoping it will cut down the viscosity of it so it goes in easier later in the day. I do not want to keep taking prophylactic paracetamol as I think it causes constipation and I can do without that. So on this jab I’m going to try and ride out the side effects. Not what I would ideally like to be thinking about on a Monday morning but there you go. I was think about what people with cancer do apart from having cancer. Of course I do a lot of ordinary stuff, life is full of that. I know some people go on a “mission” a sort of “fuck cancer” life statement but I am more into being in the ordinary. The ordinary of life for me holds a lot of wonder so I am content with that. Plus the fact that is what my energy levels (spoons) allows me to do most of.

So having done breakfast I cast around for my next ordinary and find that the tumble dryer has stopped working. It has stopped rotating so its a case of clearing out the filters and then when it still wont play nicely, takin gits back off. Of course that requires clearing everything out around it including lost socks adn other items that have fallen down the back of it. With it in a cleared work space I get the back off and inspect and then manipulate the drive motor. It has jammed due to the front door filter having been full, that’s the power of aggregated fluff for you. A little gentle teasing unlocks the motor and it is soon rotating and driving the drum. Having done this manually I test run it dry for a few minutes. All good so I add a pair of wet jeans on quick dry to check all is really good. On checking the garments are still damp so I pop them back in on a longer cycle to check the drying elements are actually working.

I while away the time drafting the blog as the window cleaner creates the illusion of rain outside. I’m not sure if the windows are any cleaner after they have been. I feel like I’ve entered into a collusion of some kind but I am not sure what. I’m not an expert on window cleanness and I am not sure I can tell the difference between the effects of the window cleaner and a bloody good downpour. I take it as an act of faith that the window cleaner is worth the monthly £22. I BACS the money with my usual text follow up as evidence I’ve paid and that’s it for another month. So I settle in for the rest of my day, looking forward to lunch, taking in the Tesco delivery and then going for my jab, after having my seeing a medic shower of course. After that the dark will set in.

I lunch with my partner after moving the car of the drive so Tesco can deliver an discover how cold it is out side. I settle down to read for a while. Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari is the book, a present from a friend at Christmas. I have read his other book Sapiens, but Homo Deus is a prediction of what humans will become. It was published in 2016 and has as its last section The Data Religion and it is now out of date in that the explosion of AI has gone far beyond the predicted dataism that Harari foresaw. He does however raise the interesting the questions of the future, the most interesting and challenging being “what will happen so society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?” One recent study, post Homo Deus, showed that Google based on a 100 likes was better at predicting what choices we would make than our closest and most intimate friends. So how has society, politics and your daily life changed? My own thought is to engage with the algorithms as little as possible but assume that the “world” knows everything about me anyway and to not give a toss. I have no Facebook or TikTok, my X account has never been used (I never really understood how to use it). My phone is my personal assistant, message taker and sender. Anything not a personal letter, a bill or a hospital appointment that comes through the post gets binned. Cold callers on the phone have it put down them, I buy nothing at the door or by phone. I am interrupted by my Tesco delivery.

The evening is front loaded with the Mandalorian and then moves onto the BBCs quiz evening and the new series of Silent Witness. As I watch and try oy relax I can feel my injection site getting sore and my spoons ebbing away. Because I had the jab later than usual I am going to bed knowing its going to get worse during the night and I will be waking up with it getting worse. I wash my night meds down with a 0%rum and coke and finish off the blog. Tricky times.