Tuesday and I am awake early because firstly my partner is going to real outside world work and secondly the builder badgers are coming to do a bit of preliminary work before the tree man comes to do some ground works tomorrow. So as my partner leaves for work I check my messages and my vitals and get up uncharacteristically early. I clear the kitchen and make my breakfast and then set myself up to do some videoing. Before I can get going the builder badgers arrive and so I go out for a chat and we run over the finer points of ground clearing and root disposal. We talk about latitude and ease of work as we walk the job and the badgers ask questions about services and electricity supplies. They appear to know what they are doing so I leave them to it with coffee of course, one black, one white with two sugars. Note to self to buy more sugar, what we have is so rock hard in the packet it is a feat of mining to get enough for the first coffee. The badgers get to work and I retreat to the sofa office to create a YouTube video for the new poetry collection.

First crisis of the day is when my cup of hot breakfast water falls off the coffee table that I am about to work from and drenches the extension cable with all the laptop and phone plugs plugged in. What follows is me being irate but together enough to switch the extension cable off at the wall before taking it all apart. I spend a long time soaking up water out of the carpet and then crawling around on my hands and knees giving everything a full blast with the hair dryer. It takes ages to get it all dry enough to resume working. I have just about managed to plug it all back together when the builder badgers wave good bye having cleared the way for Eddie the ground clearing guy to arrive tomorrow and crack on. It will be another early start tomorrow and likely to be for weeks to come now.

Finally I get to sort out making my YouTube channel video for the new poetry collection. I have a couple of goes and get a version that will do the job. I manage to get into my channel and upload the video, setting its release time for noon today. The video that I posted I have posted below, I hope people like it, I chose one of my less acerbic verses but I might make another video and see if it goes down any better.

Let me know what you think. I make lunch and then take a walk to the village shop to get some cash and to pick up a paper. The journey takes it out of me and when I get home I have to rest. However it is not long before Tesco delivers and I am busy unpacking and squirreling away the goodies. With that done I am almost spoonless so I settle down to do today crosswords and to watch some world snooker. As the afternoon progress so does my discomfort when I go to the toilet to the extent that I end up taking co-codamol to get away from the discomfort. At the end of the afternoon my partner return from work and the garden guy arrives to move pots out of the way of the builder badgers so they can get on with their work in the morning. I try to catch up with the blog as I wait for the co-codamol to kick in.

It is clear that my evening needs to be quiet so I plan to watch a football match and try to get an early night before the builder badgers get going in earnest. At tea we experiment with lamb burgers from the local butchers and are pleased with the outcome. I feel slightly odd as a result of the co-codamol so this is where I shall end the blog for today. Over the coming days and weeks I hope to be watching the garden project come along and finally to sitting out in the summer sun shine.

Today is the last day of cycle 11 of my current chemo, St Georges day. It feels like it should be a significant day but it just feels as if I am drifting further away from where I could be. My next oncology review will be on the 16th of May, it will be by telephone and I suppose the “onco boys and girls” will be looking to bung me another three months worth of chemo as long as my blood pressure has remained stable and my PSA is going down or is stable. Not exactly the level of interest I would be looking for at this point in my disease progression.