Its Friday and its a nine o’clock jab day so I get up and shower and grab a quick breakfast before walking down to the GP surgery clutching my hugely packaged injection. My usual nurse calls me in and we are soon agreeing which side I am due to have the injection in, right this time. Before I leave I book the next jab and for good measure I book myself in for my COVID spring booster during the coming week. On my way home I pick up the drugs owed to me by the pharmacy and some more paracetamol. I pick up a paper from the shop and return home feeling quite breathless.

With a fresh glass of water I set to on the crosswords of the day and to my pleasure do not need to resort to Google at all. On checking my emails I am taken by surprise by one from the Americans who have sent me a draft of one of the collections. I now have two collections to edit, so as my partner goes off to shop I star to flog through the tedious bit of the production. I find major mistakes in formatting, they have used first lines as tittles and not structured the contents page properly. On top of that they have used American spelling all over the scripts. Its slow work and being dyslexic does not help as I have to Google some things to check them. Eventually I get to the end of the task and email the Americans back with a length email about what I have done and my understanding of where we have got to in the process with the two collections. They want to sell me the idea and the reality of an audio version of the first Cancer Years collection, but I am putting them off and suggesting an audio version of a selection of all four collections when they are all out on all the platforms. Its a waiting game now. After all this I find an interim invoice from the builder badgers so spend a bit of time sorting that out, by which time my partner has returned and I am hungry.

A late lunch and start to feel my injection site getting sore, its the usual process and as yet I’ve not taken any pain killers so I settle down to start to draft the blog. Tonight I going with my partner to see Seven Drunken Night, a show about the Dubliners. Lots of diddly diddly music and traditional songs, many of which I will have heard in my folk club days. For now its about getting comfortable and conserving energy.