Tuesday and I wake up after a really crap nights sleep. Its seven o’clock and I get up, pull on some clothes and move my car off the drive so my partner can go to work. Its a real going to work day and my eldest daughter follows my partner soon after, leaving me alone in the house, so I go back to bed with my phone and book. I deal with messages, look up football coverage and send messages as I sip a cup of coffee. Its clear I am not going to go back to sleep so I get up and clear the kitchen, make another coffee and ring the hospital booking line. I am expecting an arm wrestle but I am met with a cheery voice, which once it had confirmed who I was, provided me with the date and time of my new appointment. So come next Tuesday (the 30th) I shall be seeing he who made a pact with the devil to see if he has got any pills, potions or herbal concoctions to offer me. Having burnt through the radiotherapy option without a a single radio wave being expended I’m hoping that there is something he can offer beyond leeches and pointing bones over his shoulder. These last two are the final throw of the dice before reaching the “Fuck off and die” stage for which there is morphine, hopefully lots of it. Anyway having got my early appointment (its as fast as you can expect the nhs to operate these days, positively lightening fast compared to the replacement hip waiting list times) I settle down with my coffee, tick off items on my to do list and start to draft the blog before gliding into the day. I was hoping for sunshine but so far I am being disappointed. Onwards.

A friend calls and we chat for a while. Its nice to be able to wander around the house while chatting, it is the luxury of having the home space to myself. It would seem that the bank holidays are coming thick and fast and with them the organisation to occupy families. After the call I go down to the village shop to get a paper and meet my partners brother. We stand and chat family stuff for a while then I go on to the village café for coffee and a sausage and egg roll. I while away time doing the crosswords and then return home to yet another box of trinkets and beads.

I spend a lot of time going through boxes and looking up designer and artist names who appear on some of the boxes. I find new layers. There is a real mixture of modern and old stuff. The modern stuff is fairly easy to identify adn to assess, the older stuff is more tricky and so I turn to my metal recognition set of fluids and the diamond identifier. I spend more time sorting out which of the trinkets are gold and/or contain diamonds. Putting all the objects back in some sort of order takes times, but eventually the collection is boxed. That is enough of that for one day. Its getting on so I prepare to train for the first time in ten days. It feels like the Real Life death stuff has caught up with me. I change in to my kit and go to the garage to set the rower up but find the display is blank. So I waste time putting in new ones and then set myself up to row for 45 minutes. It goes better than I thought it would after ten days. I manage to go over 10 kilometres and burn 600+ calories, so its a reasonable session.

I get back into the lounge and record the session in my journal. Its a FFY (Fend For Yourself) night so I make soup and a roll for tea and then take a call from my youngest daughter to talk about executorship issues. After the call I return to drafting the blog and watching the Night Agent. Its going to be an early night for me after last nights crap sleepless night, so I will be heading for the waves as soon as I feel my head nod.