Friday; in theory a free morning just some odds and ends to do. So a quick muesli breakfast and I am on the sofa constructing my invoice for February. What starts as a simple one off task turns into an email stream and suddenly I am oiling the wheels of work. So with a lot of toing and froing I get to a soup lunch. How does that happen? What seems to be a simple straight forward bit of admin turns into a labyrinth of communication as I try to keep everyone in the loop. I end up watching a webinar on IR35 so that I know where I stand with the RCP and their attempt to make me an employee rather than a consultant. Interesting stuff. Finally I get to run off to the shed.

In the warmth of my womb like shed I sit at my table space and write letters. I am frequently distracted by the garden, those odd flashes of colour or the flitting of a bird. I complete the letters and head off to the post box. Its cold and I note that I have come out of the house with out a mask, but then the streets are all but deserted, in fact the most notable thing is how busy the roads are with traffic, so much essential travel. Back from my pony express trip I change into my training gear and get back to the shed. Its training time.

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As I pedal tentatively to start with I get a phone call from a friend and have the luxury of being able to chat whilst training. It is a rare treat and passes the session quickly. It is just what I needed a gentle session before the weekend. I finish the session and lock up the shed before heading for the house and dry clothes and ultimately a meal.

My evening is taken up with watching Leicester Tigers narrowly beat London Irish by a single point. Then its time to write the blog. It is troubling times, but this is the start of the weekend and who knows what that will bring. I do know that I have seeds to sow in the greenhouse and garden tending to do if summer is to be as colourful as I fantasise it to be.

Thursday and its another suit day as I have meeting to attend. So a smoothie breakfast with coffee and drugs. Dead on 10am I am screen locked talking to my colleagues about the meeting I am going to later in the morning and the state of the team. It is a lively and thoughtful hour. At 11am I am back in front of the screen with a grid of new faces. It is not consultative, it is a fait accompli and so its about extracting the information and sharing it with colleagues. Post meeting I am writing emails and arranging meetings to do the resulting work from the meeting. A soup lunch and there I am again in front of my screen hosting an open forum. It is a good session and I come away from it feeling tired but useful. I notice my nose is running and I sneeze, this is not good as I feel cold. There is only one thing to do, train. I get out of my suit and tie and into my training gear, then I head for the garage. It’s to be the rower for half an hour with a view to raise my body temperature and fight any virus I might have picked up. Its my standard response to feeling I might have a cold. So I get on board and give it a real go.

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Wow I’m good. I row a personal best by over 0.7 of a kilometre, that is a huge chunk. Go me. I instantly go for a hot bath bomb bath to keep me warm and ease the limbs. Still more emails to send before having tea and settling down for a quite evening. In theory tomorrow is free but I have an assessment to write, letters owing, an invoice due and of course training to do. I’ve also received the questions I am going to be asked as part of a pod caste next week, some interesting slants on some of the questions, but a surprise about a service I had forgotten I started after I left prisons. When I work like to day I feel I have not attended to my friends and I wonder if I am getting institutionalised in my own home.

Tuesday, One of those days were nothing runs smooth and you feel crap. I made the best of it and headed for bed as soon as I could as Wednesday was going to be long.

I was right Wednesday was long. I needed a lift and went for Jollity Farm by the Bonzo Dog Do Da Band.

Up and into my suit and tie and in front of my screen with notes on lap and smile firmly in place. The day is intense and requires concentration and a sustained bout of reasonable rationale adulthood. The day goes well but it costs me another chocolate orange. Half way through the day a man leaves a vegetable order in the porch followed shortly by Mr Amazon delivering my Sassoon hair brush. With my now flowing white locks I need my own brush, soon be time to start plaiting it. Nothing else happened and so I sit writing the blog as Brentford loose to Norwich and reinforce my urge to have a bath bomb night and run off to bed early, I probably wont because after a day of being sensible I’m unlikely to to maintain it.

Monday, jab Monday and I’m writing this late in the evening and I feel crap. Despite taking paracetamol yesterday and today I still feel grim. It creeps up on me as the day wears on. So this is going to be short and sweet before I head for bed. Once I returned home from the GP surgery early this morning I retreated to the shed intending to do some creative stuff and to write but I just stared at the garden. I quit the endeavour and went back indoors to review some evidence for an assessment on Wednesday. A brief lunch and I head back out to the shed to train in the bike for an hour. It goes okay. Back to the house for a bath during which we discovered that my partners mother was going to be ejected from her care home on Thursday with an inadequate care home. My partner takes to the phone and I cook the evening meal. I have the luxury of a phone call with a friend and then eat tea. By now I am feeling rough and it goes on getting worse as the evening carries on, TV is on but is not entertaining or distracting, its just noise, interrupted only by the Tesco delivery. So that’s it, I head for bed knowing I’ve got a busy day tomorrow. I might be getting fitter, losing weight and doing good work but this monthly jab is a real bastard.

Sunday, a day of rest and weigh in day, so my first call was of course to the bath room to do the Sunday weigh in. so I leap on the scales and Ta Da!

90.7 Kilos

Well that was a surprise, no wonder my personal bests popped up in Thursday and Friday. Go me, I’m chuffed, a little more and I will be ready to start the weights programme.

Breakfast is of course a bacon bagel, a real treat washed down with real coffee, another treat. Along with my usual meds I start to take prophylactic paracetamol to combat the flu like effect of tomorrows monthly jab. So time to head for the garden on this sunny morning. Its time to organise the greenhouse but on the way I am drawn to the bay tree. There amid the green are the bright red wing cases of lady birds lazing in the sun I was so impressed that I reached for my phone to get pictures.

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Having wondered at the little beetles I move onto the greenhouse. I move the overwintering pots out in to the garden and tidy up. First to get planted are the already sprouting garlic bulbs. I then fill seed trays with fibre pots, fill them with compost and set about sowing tomato and cosmos seeds. After some concentrated effort I have my first batch of sewing done. Tomorrow I have more seed trays coming and more cosmos seeds so next week end I shall sew my next batch. It looks like my green house is going to be full quite quickly and it will be time to move on to the outside raised beds and start on the salad sewing. So spring and the creation of the garden for the rest of the year begins. Soon the plants I have ordered will arrive and the garden will start to take shape around the abundance of flowering bulbs that we now have.

Greenhouse started its time to indulge and pamper myself on the Sunday afternoon. So I do my nails and settle down to read Kae Tempest’s novel with Alexa playing me Frank Zappa’s Hot Rats in the background. I indulge in a very berry smoothie adn order more. A truly do nothing lazy Sunday afternoon. By tea time I have started the blog, downed my second lot of paracetamol and organised some admin. Post tea I resume the blog, and get ready for Bloodlands and the football highlights. My final act of the day will be to take my drugs and the final dose of todays paracetamol. Tomorrow I get to see if “he who made a pact with the devil” was right.

Saturday, so a slow start and the luxury of a full breakfast while I fill my weekly drugs wallet. It seems that it has become a Saturday ritual. Once we are done with food we head for the garden. I clear away the winter fall of silver birch branches and twigs and then open up the green house and move some boxes of fencing to another shed. The greenhouse and the garden is already looking better. My partner cuts back shrubs in the front garden and clear some patches to seed bomb the border. The seed bombs were a present and are great fun. The top is unplugged and the whole hand grenade of seeds soaked. When the grenade is soaked it is split and thrown onto the flower bed. That’s it, garden bombed. In theory the seeds will now germinate and provide a profusion of flowers in the summer. We shall see. In the meantime I will wait for the plants to arrive in March that I have ordered.

Time for rugby. I watch the Leicester Tigers get beaten by Bristol Bears, then Italy demolished by Ireland. I change into my training gear and trudge off to the garage to row for half an hour. I amaze myself and row a personal best. Go me.

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I return to the lounge and sit in shorts to watch England get stuffed by Wales and a crap French referee. I ditch the training gear and sit down to tea before watching Bombshell a film about how the Fox CEO was eventually brought down in 2016 by the women he had abused. Good film. Ironically it won an Oscar for Best Achievement in Makeup and Hairstyling. I cant help thinking that this might have been a cynical dig by the academy. Time to write the blog to the accompaniment of the TV football highlight show.

Tomorrow is weigh in day but this weekend it is the day I need to start to take paracetamol to try and avoid getting the reaction to my Monday injection. So if I am lucky tomorrow I might weigh less, have a treat, have a rest day and feel no pain. What could be better?

Friday, nothing workwise timetabled in so a relaxed breakfast with coffee. I head for the shed with my writing gear. I spend a long time trying to create something, which leads me to practice some characters over. I finally get a version that is satisfactory. Time has passed quickly and I have a smoothie lunch and settle down to write letters. When I ran out of words I make a quick foray to the post box and return to my shed. I have a long phone call with a friend and chat at length about life pre COVID and the complexities of communications pre and during the lockdown. I face confinement until at least the end of March, which will be a year that I have hardly left the house, I am lucky to have the bike and the garage gym to keep me fit. My exercise has become part of my medication.

I change and clamber up onto the bike and go for an intense session.

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I am impressed with me, its not usual to set a PB at this end of the week and to smash it by 1.6 kilometres is good going. I return to the house where my partner has returned from her mothers house where she and her brother attended to some family business. We are all tired so we decide to have take out. So i order and we hang around till it arrives. What a good decision the take away was. I head for the bath with headphones, book and an orange glitter bath bomb.

There is nothing like lazing reading a good book while listening to Radio 3s Friday concert. In truth I ditched both after a while and just lay back and enjoy the experience of lazing in warm water. Such a luxury. Eventually the water cools and my wrinkles get pronounced so I get out and complete my luxury by washing my hair. Relaxed and feeling refreshed I return to the lounge to let television be the background against which to write the blog. Tomorrow is international rugby day so two matches to watch, although the green house needs to be sorted as I can feel tomato sowing coming on.

Thursday, a work day or so I thought. So I have a lazy breakfast and settle down to listen to music before my 10 o’clock meeting. A log on at 10am and sit and wait, and wait and wait. It turns out one colleague is puppy tied and the other thought we had stopped doing it. There are terse emails exchanged. I get on with other work till lunchtime when I down soup and settle down to get ready for the Open Forum I host. My partner tells me the downstairs toilet is showing signs of being blocked. I check the man hole and sure enough the drain is blocked. The Open forum comes first. Its a good hour, more relaxed than usual which is a good sign.

So I am free of the work commitments now its time to sort out drains. Its time to get the rods and the hose pipe out. I get to work with the rods and soon things are flowing again. I hose down and refit the man hole cover and wash up. Well that was fun.

I change into my training gear and head for the garage to the rower. I’m knackered before I start so the session is a real flog. I up the level and grind out half an hour. At the end I am just pleased to get out of it.

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No time to bathe it was straight to watch the Rangers match, eat tea and then be disappointed by Leicester failing to beat some second class European football team. Its times like this that I am glad to be a Brentford and a Honka supporter. So I end up writing the blog and watching Shaun Ryder trying to become a stand up comedian in aid of cancer, along with others. Not my favourite programme, I dislike the implied concept of being an object of pity.