Monday and due to my enthusiasm to get Tesco delivery done in the morning I am awake and up quite early for me, but not before I take my vitals. There is a brief breakfast and a lot of puttering about before Tesco arrive with my order. When it arrives its all hands to the pumps and some expert squirrelling of the goodies away. With that done my partner goes to the gym and I am left to make my own amusement. What I decide to do is train. The last session on Saturday was appalling so I need so up my game today and get back to something respectable. I get into my training gear and head for the rower in the garage. Its to be another hour so can compare my performance. I start slow, possibly too slowly but by the end I am going at it in a steady rhythm and pulling hard. By the end of the hour I am an infuriating 83 metres short of my personal best for and hour. This is a vast improvement over Saturday’s miserable row.

I record the session in my journal and cool off before changing to go to the garden centre with my partner to get a pie and other goodies, among them liquorice torpedoes, a favourite of mine.

Once home there is gardening to do, angelica to cut own, weeds to clear, watering to be done and Mallows to be staked. With that out of the way I do more life admin. There are emails to respond to and new skirmishes to be had. The Shed folk want to charge me to rectify their mistake, so that was fun email to send and then the response to my publishers. I am going to have a website just for poetry to disentangle this blog from the poetry work. There will come a point where this blog for family and friends will need to be short and informative so need to simplify things now in order to get where I need to be. I will still put poetry on this blog but the wider world will get poetry through the new website, so soon my publishers will be working on that along with an anthology of my work so far with and an audio book. It seems I have a direction again and a project to take forward.

I start to draft the blog and wait for tea before setting about todays crosswords. I intend a quiet evening, a shower and of course the humiliation of Only Connect, before night meds, finger splint and sleep. Tomorrow I go out with a friend for coffee.