Thursday and I have another good nights sleep, so I am feeling quite chipper as I wake up and check my news feeds, messages and socials. I’m up and in my training gear before a crumpet breakfast and then its off to the garage. Its 2 degrees and a bit nippy. I set the session for 45 minutes and crack on. It is hard work but I get to the end mercifully quickly as I’ve got bloody Jeremy Vine in my ears. The session is not a PB but it has warmed me up.
I am pleased that I am managing to get to train again, there were months when it was not possible without pissing blood ,it was a major source of distress, so this run of being able to train is a real blessing. I record the session in my journal and then recover with the last piece of Christmas cake and some Lucozade. As I have changed out of the training kit I have another twenty minute session with my partners eye sauna whilst listening to one of radio threes relaxation sessions. Life cannot be all here and now relaxation so I gird up my loins and set about clearing the kitchen and emptying the dishwasher and getting it ready for whatever action it is going to see later. The secretary of the surgeon who is going to do my Dupuytrens contractor operation rings me back and says she has seen the quote that the private hospital has sent me, and that the other private hospital is sending me a better deal on the understanding that my after care will be extra from a specialist hand and wrist Occupational Therapist. It is a bizarre feeling having hospitals price matching and in effect touting for my sickly business. So I now await new paper work to accept the new offer and my January 30th hand job. Probably not the best way to describe it.
With the med admin done I set about checking the car tyres on the cars and making sure the pressures are up to speed. Its not complicated it just means jiggling about with the portable compressor. Fortunately our little compressor is quite bright so that once the desired pressure is set it gets on with the job and stops when the pressure is right. It neatly runs off the cigarette lighter port on the car. With the job done and the pressure measuring dust caps back on the tyres I retreat inside to the warmth of the lounge intending to write letters but instead I find myself reviewing the poems I’ve written lately and then with a Red Bull and Crunchie bar I start to write. Its a strange feeling, once I start there is no stopping it, it just gets going and I have to see it through, so I end up writing two.
426
Fuck me I am addicted to Crunchies
Chocolate covered honeycomb
A blast from my childhood
come back to haunt my adulthood.
Once big enough to satisfy
but now a weedy runt of a bar
the cunning confectioner
sells them in multi packs,
one for now and now
and now and now.
I could walk away
I could honestly
because I know
that down the aisle
Frys Turkish Delight
lays in wait.
This poem cost me a Crunchie,
my conscience a smidgeon
of guilt.
Compared to my
other sins
it’s a pleasure,
especially when washed
down with a
Red Bull,
diet of course!
426 09-01-2025
427
I idly read my last clutch of poems
and I see that cancer is not there,
have I become complacent,
a host with Stockholm syndrome?
It is true I am in awe
Of its fabulous cell chemistry,
Its ability to find a way,
Of how molecules stiffen,
bridges become rigid
and the constant flux of
what washes through me
as pill after potion is tried.
The measure of my metastases
by noisy magnetic tubes,
wonderous machines,
my only arithmetic of life.
For much of my time
I feel a fraud and think
“I should do better”,
be more fun, more adventurous.
Be the partner, lover,
I once was, and then:
then fatigue catches up with me,
my mental to do list
outstrips my available spoons,
my energy gone
and I sit on the recliner
trying my very best to
feed my brain
to retaliate and be something.
My friend said:
“he needs to be seen”
as I put poetry into the world
and seek the words
that will encapsulate
me before its too late.
Much of this life is mundane,
a routine, trying
to remain,
a life, unseen, new terrain
but it is a life,
and I cling to it,
for family, friends and
the endless wonders
that it brings.
It is a revel of the ordinary
amidst the exceptional,
a celebration of unique
ordinariness,
and I love it.
427 09-01-02025
I just about get to the end of my musings and I realise the night has arrived, winter night has gone quickly black and I turn my attention to drafting the blog for the day. The website analysis that comes with platform that I use gives me surprising information , apparently people from all over the world have a look from time to time, which might explain the spikes that occur now and again in the visitor and visit figures. Strangely the most views come from Hong Kong, America, Russia and from places like Mongolia. There are of course some European ones. Clearly people stumble over me in there browsing I hope they find the experience comprehendible, it must be a baffling experience for many or just plain boring and easily swiped by. No one ever leaves a message or comment so I assume they pass through and leave us family to get on with things. Either that or the traffic analysis I am getting from my platform provider is just plain wrong.
Tonight I am not sure what I shall do, there is no football to watch and I am tiring of Blindspot. Perhaps this is to be a reading night. What I do know is that tomorrow needs to be a letter writing day, even a Shed day. I have bought my annual correspondence diary and await its arrival so I need to get going on writing my first letters of 2025 to all my correspondents and recipients. It feels important that I do this as I have not seen many of my friends for what feels far to long already and I miss them.
STOP PRESS:
I have just discovered that my first book of poetry The Cancer Years: So Far was reviewed in the Lancet Oncology section! No one asked me or contacted me but here it is, I am flabbergasted!
The Lancet Dec 2024
Volume 25Number 12p1507-1676, e617-e704
The Cancer Years: So Far (Book Marketeers, 2024) is the first publication from Roland T Woodward, a retired chartered forensic psychologist who, since being diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer, has posted a regular blog that reflects on living with his incurable disease. A raw and powerful collection of poems, the self-described compilation of “light and wonder” gave Woodward an outlet for all the feelings of loneliness, fear, and defiance that cancer provokes. Woodward’s candid poems reveal the day-to-day emotions of a man who feels the helplessness of his condition and repeatedly rallies against it. The first poem in the collection, numbered 335, portrays that helplessness. With its speaker declaring that “Nothing now is real”, 335 laments that when living with cancer, the world “no longer gives us meaning”. A few pages later, number 339 expresses that life is like “sitting by the pool” with “No sun | No waves | No laughing children | Or ice cream cones”. However, the end of the poem signifies the shift to resistance that Woodward upholds through the rest of his collection: “This is where, in my woolly, | I make my stand”. The poems that follow depict a shared and vulgar defiance towards the prostate cancer that Woodward refuses to let rule his life—as the speaker declares in number 348, “don’t expect me to be nice about it”. Woodward offers readers an empowered position towards illness that they may find hard to come by on their own. Number 349, a poem that considers Woodward’s struggle for meaning and value in a world that “holds no interest”, ends with a sharp expletive aimed at the disease. At the extreme, number 355 takes a traditional English sonnet and fills it exclusively with expletives and the word “Cancer”. By embracing his resistance and challenging his disease, Woodward can reconnect with his own identity and realise the value that can be found in life when he is in control, not his physical condition; and, by proxy, he offers this method of resistance to his readers.
What can I say?
