Its Wednesday and I am up and about quite early tucking into my muesli and coffee when a friend calls having read the blog. Neither of us have exercised for two days and so there is a conversation about rectifying this. I resolve to go to the gym and she resolves to go for a walk and test her new ear buds. As soon as the call is over I set the dishwasher into motion and change into my gym gear. I have decided to always now go ready changed in to my training gear as it saves a change of clothes, why did I not do this before? So I gear up and drive off. I make an impromptu stop at the garage as no one is there and they have petrol, so I squeeze another £15 into my tank. Suddenly I feel secure, such a fools paradise. I continue to the gym and head for the cross trainers. I spend an hour on one pumping away adnd noting my heart rate was purportedly 144. I check my pulse on my fitbit and find my pulse to be 117. I suspect that gym machines are over rating the pulse rate to try and stop people having heart attacks on the equipment and in the gym. Can you imagine the paper work? Any way I burn off 675 calories over 7.43 kilometres and feel satisfied. I work on a couple of machines to stretch my shoulders and the top of my back and then do sets of crunches on the crunch frame.

I pop back to the changing rooms and squeeze myself into a pair of trunks, my silver swim hat and googles and head for the pool. My body knows whats coming this time and does not panic like it did on Sunday and I actually manage to swim lengths of front crawl, not consecutively, but I do swim. I try to swim breast stroke, or at least my version, frog arms and dolphin legs, but my shoulders just rebel and refuse to play, I am so out of condition and practice, so I go back to crawl. I must get myself a massage to loosen the shoulders. I also notice that getting into the pool is tricky as I cannot bend down smoothly to ease myself in, its more of a jerky drop onto the pool edge and then a slither in. That needs to change, I’ll be fucked if I am going to use the ladder like all those hippos that are now flailing about in half the pool in something called aqua aerobics. It looks more like “staying alive in the water” than even my swimming does. I swim, I swim a bit more and at the point where I am knackered I talk myself into two more lengths. I manage them and haul myself out of the pool and head for the steam room. Its a ten minute slot I give myself and time it on my watch. Since my friend passed out in the showers a few days ago after being in a jacuzzi I am careful about taking my hot body into the relative cool of the pool area. I head for the showers and start hot and move to cold as I cool down from the mornings efforts.

Eventually I am in the club lounge with an americano black and a chocolate caramel shortbread. I drink the coffee but cannot face the sweetness of the shortbread.

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I drive to the super market to get cash and then to the garden centre where I find they are selling ten trays of pansies for a tenner. I cannot resist and load up. Back home I unload the plants and set them out where I want them and put out the compost bag and tools ready for garden guy who is coming today. My cheap reading glasses, 4 for £20, which are supposed to cut blue light from screens, have arrived and I test them out. I am very satisfied with them, in fact I type this wearing them and finding that they actually work. The 1.5s suit me. I now have a pair in my “office” backpack, a pair in the bedroom for nocturnal reading a pair on the stack of books that live at my end of the sofa. I think I am sorted. I also get the winter covers on the front garden arm chair and stack the back garden chairs and pop the new winter cover over them. I am beginning to wonder if I have an unconscious wish for winter to be here earlier that it is due. There is a part of me that thinks that as from January I will be able to go and visit the services I work with again. It is part of the work I really miss. Last winter was all lockdown, with a new heating system and a freshly decorated house in lieu of a holiday. It was cosy but very constrained, this winter will be equally cosy but with a greater sense of freedom and less of a sense of threat. I am officially not a leper according to the email I got from the government the other day.

My garden guy arrives so I make him tea and explain that today is a planting day and to have fun, pansies everywhere! I retreat to the sofa and begin the blog as I am being taken out for a meal tonight. Actually my partner is taking me because her friend cried off and a meal out seemed like a good idea. Its an early table so with luck I might catch the second half of a European match later.

After a really good meal I do make it back to see Ronaldo pull off a last moment win and then I finish the blog for the day, climb out of my dining clothes and head for bed as I have meetings in the morning and a therapeutic community meeting in the afternoon. At some point I need to train and follow through on todays effort although think I am coming down with a cold.

Tuesday, another early morning after a poor nights sleep. So I do breakfast on automatic. As I get ready to attend a meeting the alarm system engineer arrives to service our system. It takes less than 15 minutes, one battery check and a cursory glance at our hard wire system and I get a bill for £65. Basically I paid a fee to keep my house insurance in line. I go to my Teams meetings and after an hour and a half I end the meeting and get on with a lot of admin work to keep the wheels turning for my services. A brief walk at lunchtime and then more admin. I get a letter from a friend and settle down for a coffee as I read it. It is a lovely letter but I find I am struggling to read it. In fact I struggled to read the cross word clues in the paper today. I order reading glasses from Amazon, so tomorrow the problem is solved. I continue to work and sort out my sofa end office. By late afternoon I no longer have the motivation to train and watch a rugby match until tea time. After that its a sedentary evening during which BT Sport will not let me in and as a result I waste time trying to rectify the IT. Time for bed and the hope that tomorrow I get going again.

Monday, just another Monday, breakfast followed by some gardening time as I continue to put the garden to bed. A lunch time walk to pick up a paper and rediscovered hot cross buns takes me into an afternoon of reading, interrupted by the Tesco delivery driver tapping on the window to wake me up. Shopping stowed I return to reading The Fourth Shore. I finally get to the end of this tale of naive catholic Italian imperialism rape and female entanglement leading to later life discover of unlikely relatives, but hey what would you expect from leaving a blue eyed baby in the desert with your brothers native tattooed wife to raised while you piss off back to England to end up marrying a placid midclass bloke who then dies leaving you with a house and pension. Just a story of everyday folk I guess. Such bollocks, but not sure I’ll say that when I meet the author in November. I will of course read Early One Morning by the same author just to see what equally fantastic tale is created. I eat and watch TV exhausted by the demands on my credulousness. I watch Bill Baily’s Limboland before bed to return myself to some sense of reality. I’ve not trained and I wonder whats happening to my motivation, I’m sleeping less and feel tired a lot of the time, I guess there’s my answer.

Sunday and today is going to be different as my partner and I are determined to go to the gym today. Its a while since we went “in anger” and even longer since we swam. Its time to christen my new silver swim cap. Of course before we can do any of that there is breakfast to be had and the face time call to our youngest daughter to make. All of this goes to plan and by lunchtime there is time for some cleaning and tidying before we set off to the gym already in our training gear. So I stroll myself and my silver locks into the gym and get one of the good cross trainers. I go for an hour and I am mildly surprised at how it pushes my heart rate up, further than the rower, which is a big surprise, but I have reservations about the accuracy of all these machines. Any way I cross train for 65 minutes, burn 680 calories and cover 7200 metres. I am happy with this as a first proper session. I go to the changing rooms and promptly email myself the session figures so I do not to forget them having not taken my phone onto the gym floor, bad etiquette that. Then its in for a swim. My body was taken aback as I plunged into the pool and front crawled the first length as I turned to breast stroke back my body decided very clearly that it was not having that and made me lay on my back and drift for a minute while we had a chat about what was and was not possible. I had a while “mermaning” about until my body adapted and remembered a few basics like turning the head to breath on a regular basis. Once I had got acclimatised again I returned to the lanes and swam up and down a couple of times. My arms were confused as were my shoulders but they gradually got back together again. By the time my muscle memory had kicked in properly I was knackered and retreated to the steam room for ten minutes. Steamy and tired I went for a shower. On my way out I was miffed that there were no plastic bags to put my googles or my swim togs, including my new silver swim hat, in. I improvised, so for future reference plastic over shoes make great little bags for wet swim wear, so I solved my problem and now have a pair of over shoes. That’s what I call a genius.

I have a coffee and then drive us home and as we pass our local garage we spot that it has a tanker delivering PETROL! We get home and my partner starts the evening meal while I start the blog but once I’ve eaten I shall become petrol ninja man and go in hunt of petrol for my partners car.

Dinner comes and goes, One Man and His Dog is on TV but before it can come to a conclusion (England won if you were wondering) I set out into the night to hunt PETROL! I drive my partners car back to the garage where we saw a tanker earlier, hoping that I can get fuel. To my surprise I pull in behind a car at the pumps where the arsehole in front of me, having filled his car set about filing up a jerry can. I patiently wait and when free I roll forward and gleefully fill my partners car. Feeling a competent provider I drive home with my prize. I celebrate with a non alcohol beer and the Antiques Road show. So that is petrol and toilet rolls sorted all that remains to overcome is food shortages, but there is a solution.

Every so often I re calculate my cancer dates in order to try and keep track of my history and to keep reminding myself that I have won these days. I’m not sure why now but it feels that now is a good time to remind myself. It is perhaps a growing sense that my next set of blood tests and scans in December and the new year could herald in a new phase. So here are the dates and days that I keep an eye on to measure my survival.

1. DAYS SINCE HOSPITALISED IN JAMAICA 930
2. DAYS SINCE CANCER DIAGNOSIS 829
3. DAYS SINCE FIRST ONCOLOGY APPOINTMENT 776
4. DAYS SINCE FIRST CHEMOTHERAPY 754
5. DAYS SINCE END OF CHEMOTHERAPY 628
6. DAYS SINCE DVT DIAGNOSED 566

My oncologist told me that his chemotherapy would add 547 days to whatever life I had left. With a Gleeson score of 10 my expectancy according to the survival curves was 8 months or 243 days, so my total according to the science is 790 days from the end of Chemo. All I can say is so far so good, every day is the fight for the ordinary, that ordinary that has incredible generative power if you pay attention to it and at the moment I am giving my best shot. My dandelion clock is in good shape, the wind is not blowing. Tomorrow is another good day.

Friday,seems so long ago. I recall spending time writing letters in the Shed and watching the squirrels scamper around in the fallen leaves preparing for winter. I spend time on the phone talking to friends and catching up with them. It accentuates how infrequently I still do not get to see them. I still feel constrained by the restrictions of COVID and the limited nature of the work I’m doing. I posted my letters on the way to the GP surgery to get my first ever flu jab. I’ve always refused as I ‘ve never felt the need but for some reason this year I have decided to give it a go. I suppose I have a heightened sense of risk. Any way I get to the GP surgery in my mask and find I am second in the queue behind and elderly couple. It was a very perfunctory process. I am asked my name, told to roll my left sleeve up, sanitise my hands and wait, standing, by the screen before the nurse calls me round. I am asked my name and then still standing I am jabbed. Then she asks me me I have had one before to which I reply that I had declined. At this point I get a Bill and Ben chat about how my arm might ache, I might get a headache but it cannot give me flu! I leave feeling thoroughly patronised. FFS I retired as the clinical director of a hospital.

Back home via the co-op to collect ice creams and wine gums I head for the garage and the rowing machine. I figure that if my arm is going to ache from a jab I will exercise it for an hour on the basis that it will stop my arm from stiffening up. I go at it hard for an hour. I almost set a new Personal Best, almost, just 26 metres short.

My evening is spent watching Leicester Tigers beat Gloucester before watching Jesse Stone followed by and hour of Sarah Millican then bed at 1 o’clock.

Saturday: breakfast, rehang the lounge curtains and head for the garage to mend my broken storage units under my work surface. While I screw in new support blocks I watch the 12:30 football match on my laptop. The wonders of modern technology.

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Having sorted the garage work bench its time to clear my office area on the end of the sofa and to shred some documents. I move on to empty and clean the hoover before cleaning around the ground floor, emptying the waste bins as I go. I touch of shopping with my partner found that one of our village shops was closed due to a water leak. We go to the alternative co-op and gather our goodies. An evening meal and then a night of Strictly followed by watching the football highlights that included my team Brentford holding Liverpool to a 3 all draw. I catch up the blog as I watch. I’ve not trained today so tomorrow it will be a trip to the gym to swim.

Wednesday was a letter writing, exercise bike and Shed day with a prolonged (3 hours) particle physics, cosmology and astrophysics TV session at the end of the day thanks to BBC4. Two things were highlights, the first was a friend ringing me for a conversation and the second was a squirrel. Having spent the morning writing letters and trotting off to the post box I waited along with my partner for the doctor to ring her with some test results. The doctor did not ring much to the frustration of my partner. I spent the afternoon waiting too but in the end headed for the bike in the Shed and very gingerly pedalled away an hour.

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My partner continued to wait for the doctor to ring having planned to go for a swim in the gym, neither of these materialised. What did show up was a squirrel in the garden. It seemed to be busy preparing for winter.

By the time early evening arrived it was clear the doctors was not going to ring and we were not going for a swim.There was a collective slough and a lack of enthusiasm to cook so we order in an Indian meal, and damn good it was. I read for a while and then at 9 o’clock I started my three hours of particle physics and astrophysics. It was great so much more healthy for my brain than NCIS and Silent Witness. At midnight I went to bed with a head full of quarks, dark matter and dark energy quite pleased that as clever as we are humanity is still ignorant about what makes up most of the universe. I slept poorly.

I woke on Thursday morning, late for a meeting after what was a crap night. I occasionally have nights when my hormone depleted state produces hot flushes of such magnitude I cannot sleep and need to try and cool down. In this situation I decamp to the spare room and the bed with the much firmer mattress. For some reason this seems to help especially if I open the window to the cool night air. So for most of the night I sleep fitfully but it seems that once morning arrives I sleep better or in this case late. I dash to my laptop and log in to find my manager is “in the room” so she and I have a long chat. By the time we finish I am very hungry and indulge in a fried egg sandwich and more coffee. It has thrown my day out so I resort to clearing the kitchen and then reading I finish Paul Nurse’s What is life. It is brilliant at making cell biology understandable and a real revelation about just what drives life and living things. I now understand that I am full of “wet chemistry” pushing protons through little molecular turbines to create energy when and where I need it. I am amazing, but apparently the same mechanisms in my cells are the same in all cellular beings, e.g every living thing. Who knew that research on yeast cells could tell us so much about life. Its time for a late lunch and then some conversation with my partner as the doctor finally rang to say all her test results are normal.

I clear the kitchen and as I am emptying the dishwasher I spot not one but two squirrels in the garden using the new feeders. They are not adults but this years young. They appear to be siblings as they co-operate. Adults would chase each other off as they are so territorial. Interestingly one of them worked out how to open the lid on the feeder while the other one seemed not to get it. However the “dim” one figured out two things. Firstly that the “clever ” one dropped food when it opened the lid so there was food to eat. Secondly the “dim” one figured out how to get food from the nearby bird feeder that the “bright” one ignored. Somehow I think these sibs will get through the winter.

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I retire to the garage to row for half an hour, it needs to be hard so I grit my teeth and give it a good go.

By the time I get out of the garage the guy who does the garden has arrived and started to gather the fallen leaves. We chat and I make him tea and we discuss what needs to be done. Its a real boon to have someone just once a week do a couple of hours in the garden, especially at this time of year. I drive my eldest daughter to circus skills class. While she learns trapeze I read the novel I am struggling to get through, I really do not care about the characters. Fortunately a friend rings and we chat about work and families until my daughter reappears. We travel home to eat, I catch up on the blog whilst keeping an eye on the film my partner is watching. Hopefully I will sleep better tonight as tomorrow I go for my flu jab, my first. I figure I’ve got so much chemical crap in me more wont hurt, in fact if I can cram in a pneumonia jab I will.

Tuesday and I am up early but not early enough to get my first call of the day. Its a muesli breakfast to start and then I head for the garden as it is unexpectedly sunny. I’ve intended to move some iris to the front garden for a while now so todays the day. I dig up all the iris in the back garden iris bed and take them to the bed that has been made ready in the front garden. Its had manure dug into it and now some compost is added as I replant the iris. It takes time but eventually I get the iris in. I’ve done my best with my grandfathers Irises, I just hope they survive. I’ve moved them into the sunny side of the house as their rhizomes like the sun on them, so I’m hoping for success.

Having moved the iris I now have an empty bed to play with in the back garden. So I give it a good digging over and add a bag of manure before planting it up with the weekends plant buys. It allows me to put a wider range of plants into the bed and experiment with what will grow in this spot in the garden. Its much easier to plant these plants as their root systems are not as dispersed as Iris. There is room to add more at a later date but I want to see how these go first.

I finish the new bed and I am dripping in sweat. Having put the garden tools away I head for a bath with one eye firmly on the clock as I am tutoring at 1:30pm. I am lazing in the bath listening to radio 3 and the composer of the week, Bartok, who apparently spent a lot of his life gathering folk songs from Transylvania. Could not make that up. As I laze in my bath I get a WhatsApp from a friend explaining that the reason for her quietness was that she collapsed on Friday and had to spend six hours in A&E. She is recovering but it has been a bit of a shock. As she said in our conversation there is no telling what will happen next. A lunch of coke and hot cross bun and I am in front of my screen and tutoring through till 5 o’clock. Our basic message is “preparation” but the technology fails so I do not get to play the participants the video I had in my presentation. Here it is just for fun.

https://youtu.be/wDG6uItd6FA

During this time the bird feeders I ordered yesterday arrive. The team have a quick debrief at the end of the session. As I walk away from my session I get a call from a friend who is on an inspection and ending her day at the hotel. These inspections can be intense so to get a night away in a hotel can be a relief. As soon as I am free I head for the garden and put the new bird and squirrel feeder up and fill them with fresh seed and food. Another step to prepare the garden for winter.

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I just get the feeders filled and its time for tea, I’m tired now and settle into the sofa to eat and watch some TV as I rest after the days exertions. I start the blog and hopefully will get an early night.

Another Monday and I am up and doing breakfast at a reasonable time as the boiler is being serviced this morning. I’ve just about finished my morning round of email checks and work checks and Mr Boiler arrives. Of course he gets coffee and I sit and read as he performs the magic. It takes him about an hour and he then presents me with my Annual Service GAs Safety Record with the observation that my burner gasket fell apart when he opened the boiler up so he has fitted a new one. This is good news as a burst gasket on the burner could be nasty, but now it wont happen. I get some unexpected work emails and I spend time arranging meetings. It looks like business is looking up. I read a bit more of What is Life and like the author more and more.

I go to the garden centre and buy compost, manure and bird/squirrel feed to go with the bird/squirrel feeders I ordered earlier in the morning. I get it back to the house, stow it and dig a bag of manure into my intended Iris bed in the front garden. A friend zoom calls me, its the first time in ages that I’ve actual seen them and it is really good to be able to chat whilst seeing someone. It is a rare opportunity to talk about previous correspondence and to clarify some of what I’ve written as I tend to be quite oblique and metaphoric when I write with pen and ink. There are times when I think what I write is the equivalent of a Pixie stamping its foot, or in clear language let my mind run out onto the page. Anyway we chat for a while until Tesco knock on the door, as everyone else in the house is work tied I get to take it in and then get back to my call. In the end the real world intervenes and we said adieu. I changed into my training gear and headed for the garage. Today needs to be an hour session to get the week started right. That’s what I do and it is an effort.

At the end of the session I change and settle into my evening routine of watching TV, eating tea and then watching more TV till I write the blog. This evening my eldest returns with her friend from a weekend away. He stays long enough for a drink and a bite to eat before heading back home. I take time out to book tickets for the local pantomime on the day of my next oncology appointment. It seems appropriate and I might need a distraction. I return to the blog. I need to change my evenings, I need to feed myself with better brain food.

Saturday and time for a lazy breakfast before making the effort to go to the opening rugby match of the season. It is a calculated risk but there is a limit to how long I can stay locked away in the house. Before I get going the post arrives and there is a letter from a friend in Scotland, its a delightful letter which I know I will reread several times. I watch my childhood football team Brentford beat Wolves and then get ready to rugby. So I drag out my Leicester Tigers shirt, sniff it and decided that I could survive. Its the old routine of driving into town, parking and walking to the stadium. Its more or less the same, cashless of course, and there is a larger restricted area around the player areas. We get in easily as the season ticket cards work and we make our way to our seats. Its a feeling I have missed and in that moment of utter silence by more than 17,000 as the kicker prepares to convert a try there is that sense of something special. The game starts and by the end Tigers have won. Its a good start to the season.

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At the end of the game we file out happy along with the rest of the crowd and make our way back to the car. By the time we are home we have no desire to cook so order Indian in. Its a lazy evening and of course there is Strictly to watch. Its a strange compulsion but reinforced heavily by the fact that Bill Bailey won last year. Of course football follows and then bed.

Sunday is another lazy start which culminates in a bacon bagel breakfast and a chat. However before I can indulge I weigh in. 94.5 Kilos a drop of 1 kilo this week. At last the effort is beginning to have an effect. I need to have a carb less week to speed things up. Its a lazy morning during which I do some work on my training presentation before going to the garden centre to get new plants for the garden. Returning home with a boot full of plants I spend time in the garden weeding out the beds and preparing the way for the new plants. I realise now just how much work there is to do to properly prepare the garden for winter and the following spring so I think I will be spending a lot of time over the coming two weeks in my garden I hope the weather holds up. The guy who comes to help in the garden is going to find himself with a long list of things to do.

My evening is pie and TV until I catch up writing the blog. Apart from a letter I’ve read nothing for two days and need to create some time for me to feed my brain and I have a couple of books to finish. Tomorrow our heating system gets serviced so I shall be up and about early. It is a period of the mundane but in my minds eye I see my oncology appointment etched on my internal calendar. There is that thread of needing to persevere at the discipline of diet and training. I need to add more activity out of the house over the next twelve weeks just to raise my level of engagement and activity. The biggest concern is not knowing what I can do beyond what I am doing to reduce my PSA level. More research required .

Friday and I wake at 10:15! All I can hear is the Hippowaste lorry picking our bag up and my partners voice from the office leading a work call. I clearly needed the sleep,which on reflection does not surprise me given how un anything I’ve been feeling this week. Bacon bagel time with coffee and meds. Its that time in the fortnight to fill my pill dispensers. A fiddly job but worth the effort as it keeps things simple and means I do not miss my meds. I get unexpected work emails that mean I need to do so me admin and then I settle down to write a book proposal. A rough draft on behalf of the Elders group. It is a crude document but I think I capture the basics of what the group intends. I send it off to the group before retreating to the Shed to write letters. Some time later I make the trip to the post box and return to train. Today its the bike for an hour. Its okay but I’m losing motivation to do it, I think its because my weight has crept up again. Its no surprise really as I’ve not kept to my strict diet and given into the deadly craving for Mars Bar ice creams and chocolate digestives.

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I record my session and run a bath. While I wait I notice the same young woodpigeon sitting in the tree outside the back bedroom window. He seems to be snuggling down and to have adopted the tree as his home. Nice to make him/her welcome, if it stays I shall find a name for it.

My evening will be rugby, Jesse Stone and Bill Bailey at the Royal Opera House. Tomorrow poses the prospect of live rugby as the Tigers pay their first game of the season at home. So I may be one of several thousand to brave the stands again. If I make the effort I hope the team raise their game from last year.