I was up early again today to get the train to London, it was still dark. I drove to the station and collected my tickets and clambered aboard the London train. I read on the train as the light came up which was serendipitous. As the sun was rising I was reading about a Japanese man who is a Radical Remissionist. He was diagnosed with cancer but as is the Japanese way neither his doctor nor his wife told him, however he underwent treatment in hospital for months and was extremely ill. At a critical point he developed a really acute sense of smell and could not stand the smells of the hospital so he managed to get up onto the roof and curl up and rest whilst breathing air that smelt as air should, fresh. The nurses who found him thought he was trying to commit suicide as did his doctor who became furious with him and said if he wanted to do that he could go home. So he went home and began to try and recover. He started with breathing and meditation and again found his way onto the roof where he would sit and watch the sun come up in the mornings. When doing this he began to ask questions about the birds that sang each morning.  He noticed that they began to sing at the same time each morning at exactly 42 minutes before the sun rose. Being a scientist this man was curious as to why this should be. So he measured the occurrence to confirm it and began to put together a theory. He kept canaries in a cage so he experimented on them, He got his brother to buy him a canister of oxygen from the chemist and waited till night when the canaries  were asleep and then gave them a burst of oxygen and surprise surprise they sang for a while and then went back to sleep. He found he could repeat this through the night with them and each time they would sing. What is more is that they continued to wake up and sing 42 minutes before the dawn. His theory is that the when the trees begin to breathe out oxygen under the stimulation of light it stimulates the birds to sing. Whether this is a health benefit to them or not is not clear but I thought that was an amazing thing to discover as the sun came up during a train journey. Each day I will now think of birds getting high on new oxygen each morning. The happy part for him was that he survived and is still around today many years after he was sent home for palliative and hospice care. In effect he was told to sod off and die and he sodded off and lived.

As you can imagine the journey flew by and I arrived excited to see my favourite Tracy Emin. A quick journey on the tube to Aldgate and then a short walk and I am at the Royal College of Psychiatrists. I head for the café and get breakfast, which I, of course, recorded in my new food journal.

A colleague arrived to chat and we were soon whisked away to our meeting. It was a long meeting and of no interest to anyone but the Enabling Environment chums in the room.

Back on the train on the way home I read more about radical remission and some of the elements that appear to be a part of the process.

I am home and feed and so tired that I am retreating to bed at a time that a recalcitrant child would be sent for their own good. I will post tomorrow.