Sunday and the usual early morning drink and a chat to plan the day, then its breakfast and then face time with the youngest daughter. She was in good form and a delight to chat to. I get a phone call from Coventry Blaze telling me the ice hockey shirt I ordered has come back with the wrong spelling of my name on it. The guy is very apologetic adn promises to get the corrected one to me as soon as possible. Yep its ice hockey season.Time to clear the decks and to put my washing away and get organised for the coming working week. We go to our local garden centre and buy vegetables. While there we visit the butchers to get bacon and while there we lay in a turkey breast for the freeze as an insurance against a tricky Christmas. It cost us £27 but there was a second label on £45! We have joined the butchers Christmas club in the hope that we will have some cushion against possible Christmas shortages and price hikes. On return to home I prepare a one pot meal and pop it in the oven on a low heat before we get ready to go to the gym.

The gym is tough as I do not usually train on a Sunday. I row for 15 minutes and cross train for 35 minutes, burning off 535 calories. I take a long shower and relax in the lounge while waiting for my partner. We drive home and settle down to watch Strictly while eating the one pot. As the dance programme melds into the world of nature and breeding I begin the blog. I shall watch the football highlights tonight as the Mighty Brentford have managed to sneak a late win against a top flight team. Then it will be bed for me. I am tired and when tired I turn to chocolate.

Saturday and its throwing it down with rain. Breakfast and its still throwing it down. We decide not to go to see the Tigers play. Its still throwing it down with rain. I rig up my laptop to the TV and we get to watch the Tigers match from the comfort of the sofa. An attritional game in the rain. Tigers win with the last play of the game 13 -12.

There are chores to do and things to be topped up but of most importance is the lack of chocolate. I go to the shops in the rain dressed in a parka coat that is used in only extreme conditions, like rainy days with no chocolate. I return with a bag of goodies including two types of chocolate. Its time for dinner and the joys of Strictly Come Dancing. I cannot believe I’m addicted to it, I think I’m jealous. When anyone asks me what I would have been if I could have my life over again my answer is always dancer. It would have been disastrous as I have no sense of rhythm and also I am pretty tone deaf. However the thought of being able to express being to music is very enticing. No need for talking or words, ideal for a dyslexic. It also means not having to explain oneself to anyone. Anyway by the end of strictly chocolate is eaten and the blog is started, and its still raining.

Friday and I crawl out of bed not feeling as chipper as I have done. I get breakfast and watch the TV morning show. In it there was a short piece on some woman who was having time away from her TV job to be with her family which included her father who has prostate cancer. During a conversation with him he revealed that a new drug that he is taking has reduced his PSA level to 2.5 from a staggering 1000. The medics told me mine was high as a justification for some of the procedures they used on me, mine was 147 maximum. How ignorant I was at the time, and there was me thinking I had read lots. How did I miss the possible range of PSA? Still better late than never I guess. I retreat to the Shed and spend my morning writing letters, it pours with rain. At some point I refill the squirrel feeder and bird feeders as the squirrels seem to be eating everything they can at the moment.

There is a bacon bagel for lunch and then I am back in the Shed writing some more and arranging some Amazon purchases. I go to the post box to speed the letters on their way. I visit the village chemist to buy Actifed to find they do not sell it so I buy my partners eye drops and return. At the end of the working day my partner and I set off for the gym. She will do her yoga class and I get myself onto a cross trainer and do sixty five minutes, burning off 712 calories and covering 8.22 kilometres. This is my best yet. I shower and wait for my partner to finish her class before we drive off to the local supermarket to get pizza for supper and Actifed. Home and we eat while watching a TV film, a rugged mad man abducting women film. Morgan Freeman of course and of course he wins in a super cool way. This time he shoots the psychopath in a gas filled room through a carton of milk to avoid an explosion. So cool but psychopaths always get such a poor press. And so to bed.

Thursday and after a poor nights sleep I get up in time to have breakfast and take a call from a friend before going to my first meeting of the day. The meeting was relatively brief but fruitful. I was left with some admin to do but most of the morning was used up by sorting things out and doing chores. At lunch I down a large dish of soup and then I am into my afternoon meeting. I join a group of therapeutic community people to talk about the issues facing them at this time. There were people from India, Japan and America as well as England. It seems that there is a resistance by the nhs to invest in the non physical or pharmacological interventions that vast numbers of people require. The waiting lists in some places means that many people are never able to access the services they need. It seems to me that currently the medical establishment is too burnt out to face the challenge of attending to the psychological needs of large numbers of people in the community. Logically the onus for the provision of such services needs to be moved from the current system to a much more co produced community based system that offers safe space where people can firstly find safety and then to enable them to evolve into milieus for change. It means applying relational practice to a wider range of spaces and people services. The meeting ends and I send a LinkedIn invite to someone who is battling to preserve a local service in Leicester.

Having exercised my brain its time to exercise the body so I head for the garage and the rower. My body aches from yesterdays session in the gym but I need to keep going. I manage the half hour and a reasonable distance.

I retreat to the sofa to record my session and to catch my breath. Not for long though as I drive my eldest daughter to her circus skills session. During this time I start to read Early One Morning by Virginia Baily. Its a Times best seller, so I had high hopes but I found it… overly wordy and implausible. I will of course finish it as it might pick up but I am not hopeful. At the end of the session I drive home and eat tuna pasta and settle down to watch English football teams either lose or struggle to hold their own. Its a depressing view and I am glad when it is over so I can get on with the blog for today. I am tired but tomorrow I have a day with no commitments so I can get some Shed and gym time. My biggest challenge is to control my diet and not to comfort eat, my biggest enemy is my sweet tooth.

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.