Wednesday, and I get from bed to a breakfast bacon bagel with a youthful leap. Apart from a call from a friend nothing happens until I meet up on Zoom with the Elders group. The group spends an hour talking and exploring what we are about, what we think we can offer and the way we will offer it. The bottom line is that we are eager to meet in an embodied way later in August as we all feel that we need to do that to have the time and experience to move ourselves forward as a group. I like this group it is one of the very few places I get to share and explore with like minded people the issues we all face. Amazon deliver my new writing paper and envelopes along with an “Important dates” book. I of course head for the shed but not before a piece of Quiche, which was a surprise. I am filling in my new “Important dates” book when my daughter brings me a slice of walnut cake, life is full of surprises and this is a good one. I settle down to write a letter using my new paper and to play with my Chinese character practise book. Spring is literally the symbols for plants and sun.

I finish my letter and close up the shed before changing into clothes that are acceptable to go to the post box in. Errand done I prepare to train but I get a text about my bank account. I ring my bank and spend an inordinate length of time trying to talk to a human. I eventually get through and have it confirmed that the text is a scam, so I follow the advice and block the number and erase the text. So much later than I had planned I get in to the garage and load myself onto the rower. I am determined to go for a personal best today and choose to go for the one hour row at level 5. So from the off I am at it. The result? See below:

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Well Go me! That is a good PB and I am feeling it, but very pleased. I change and eat tea adn decide to write the blog early in the evening so that I can pay attention to the Repair Shop and also the excellent Great British Sewing Bee. Good old fashioned domestic repairing and creating things that provide a real sense of admiration for the people that can apply skills. Having had my fill of admiration I shall read and watch football.

Tuesday, Yalom day, or it will be at 7 o’clock tonight when I attend a webinar at which Yalom is talking. But first I get a smoothie breakfast and head for the Shed. Its a letter writing morning. That is exactly what I do all morning. I consume mini cheddars and a bag of chocolate buttons while writing. I reach a crisis point of running out of decent writing paper so immediately order new from Amazon. With luck tomorrow will see me with more pretty correspondence paper and envelopes. Its an indulgence but the people I write to are worth it. A friend rings and we chat birthdays and shopping, its nice to get a call while in the shed as I can chat while looking out over the garden while listening to the rain on the roof. At lunch time I cook noodles and take my letters to the post box along with my drivers licence that I’ve cut in two as instructed by the DVLA when I was renewing my licence. Back home I change into my training gear and return to the shed. I decide to go for a long session on the bike and see how I mange it. The answer was pretty well.

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I recovery from efforts and return to the house locking the Shed up for the day. Once in the house I record my feat and have another chat with a friend. My body was ready for the shower I treated it to. Its a fun packed evening as I watch Leicester beat Manchester United and make Manchester City this years premier champions and then I join a Webinar to hear Irvine Yalom talk about this experience of death and grief having lost his partner of some 75 years. As always he was very candid about what he was experiencing and how he was coping with it. I came away with quite a lot to digest. However no time to reflect as I had washing to put in the tumble dryer and a blog to write to the accompaniment of Mock the Week. All in all a good day. With luck I will get my clothes folded and be able to read some more of Helgoland.

Monday and its time to get ready for my hospital appointment in the afternoon. So I have lots of time to eat breakfast and settle down to write a letter. Its throwing it down with rain and clearly the plants I put in yesterday are appreciating it. I get my admin ready for the afternoon. By lunchtime I am all admin’d out so I take a shower and pick my outfit. Before I can get anywhere Tesco deliver. The delivery guy was soaked and had another four hours on shift to do. Before I can leave for the hospital Amazon deliver my latest Rovelli book Helgoland. Its basically about Relational Quantum Theory. I love his books and I am looking forward to getting into this one.

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Its time to head off to the hospital. The drive is straight forward and I am greeted with “Use the hand sanitiser”. I fill in forms and settle down to wait while reading my book. At precisely the appointment time the doctor invites me into his consulting room. We have a really relaxed conversation and he looks at my sebaceous cyst. We discuss my current medication and cancer and what effect surgery might have. This experience is worth every penny its costing me. We discuss a possible timetable and he goes off to check the cost. He returns and tells me the cost, which is in the ball park I expected. So he books me in for the 20th of May, just ten days to go. I go in on the Monday before for a pre-surgery COVID test then isolate till the Thursday. Post operation I will return to have the surface stitches out. My looks will be enhanced by a scar I shall palm off as an old bullet scar. “Luckily the bullet passed through my cheek, It was a narrow shave!” I drive home and walk over to the post box to drop my letter in the box. It seems appropriate to order take out tonight and relax after the excitement of the day. I change, order Indian and settle down to my new book. I am instantly hooked and read solid till the Indian meal arrives. As soon as the meal is over I am back to the book. I ring my sister to tell her that the mobile number she gave me is not responding so that she can follow it up. I go back to the book until I can read no more due to brain fullness and turn to writing the blog. Tomorrow I am attending an online conversation with Irvine Yalom in the evening, I am excited as he has been a hero of mine for years.

Saturday and it threw it down all day. So we ate a large late breakfast and hunkered down for the day. I read, not taking much notice of what anyone else was doing. At 2 o’clock I have a Zoom call with my son in Stockholm and we talk house maintenance, tool hire, job hunting and grandchildren. Life in Sweden under COVID is a different experience apparently. After the call I get on with stuff, somewhere in there I watch some rugby and then decide to train in the late afternoon. I changed and trudged down the garden to the Shed to do an hour on the bike. It was a reasonable session to end my training week on.

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I spent my evening reading and finishing Before the Coffee Gets Cold. It left me profoundly moved. I ended the evening staring at the football and going to bed without writing the blog.

Sunday and it is no longer raining. I head for the bathroom for the Sunday weigh in. The first after a good weeks training back.

89.5 Kilos

Well that was a pleasant surprise. I am back on track and ready to start some weights in the coming week. Nice to be getting fit again, now to build the muscle back.

So its a brief, but late, breakfast and we head to the garden centre to buy herbs and compost. Having got what we went for we return home and I head for the garden. There I stay until tea time having upgraded the herb area, planted ground cover plants under the trees and planted petunias all over the place.

I try to ring my sister but get no reply, I promise myself to ring again later. Tea and I sit down to write the blog against the back ground of early evening TV which no one watches. Tomorrow I see the surgeon about the sebaceous cyst on my cheek , I am of course anxious but more about “when” rather than “what”. I just want this thing gone as soon as possible so its one thing less to have to deal with. I suspect he will say “Of course I can do it” but how long before he can do it is the crunch and I suspect that no matter how quickly he suggests it will not be quick enough for me.

Friday and its a Shed day, a day of letter writing. A quick breakfast and I get myself to the Shed and settle into my chair, pick my favourite dipping pen and fill the ink well. I continue to write letters all morning taking the odd break for a drink and a biscuit. A friend rings and we chat new cars, new patios and horse grooming. Lunch comes round quickly, so a fried egg sandwich later I am back in the Shed writing more letters. I write solidly catching up with my correspondence until 2:30 when I give a lift to my eldest daughter to her circus skills session. Home via the post box I take time to take a few pictures of the brave flowers that are in bloom.

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I write another letter and return to the post box. I close up the shed and return to the house where I take a call from a friend and chat for a while about families, sewing and the continuing restrictions of COVID. Tea and then I watch Leicester Tigers lose to Sale. By now its heading for 10 o’clock but I have not trained, its one of those moments, I am either in the battle or I am not so I shift my arse, get changed and in to the garage to row for 30 minutes. It turns out to be a good session.

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I return to the sofa and write the blog before bed.

Thursday, 9:50, mild panic as I have a meeting at 10am. Coffee and log in. The ensuing meeting brought significant news as the programme manager has decide to move on. It will take a while for this to work through but we spent time this morning absorbing the news. At the end of the meeting I joined my family on a lunch time walk to cast my vote in the local elections. I got back to the house with enough time to have a smoothie and log on to host an open forum. For the first time in over a year no one turned up. I and my co host gave people 15 minutes to turn up and then abandoned the space. The spare time was spent drawing up my April invoices and sending them off. I find myself with time to train early so I head for the shed and spend an hour on the bike. It turns out to be a good session.

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I finish my session and clear the kitchen ready for tonight’s meal preparation. I record my training session and then make tea for the garden guy who has arrived. Rather than have him do the boring stuff like weeding and tidying I gave him artistic freedom to plant out a lot of the new plants that I’ve grown from seed. Just seems to me that a gardener needs to plant and grow stuff and not just cut stuff down and throw old stuff out. He seemed pleased to be doing it as he stayed over time. Tea eaten and I settle down to a football match while my partner has a singing lesson. At half time I clear the kitchen. When it was over I write the blog. I’m looking forward to tomorrow, it is going to be a shed day and a chance to write. I find that I have a compulsive part of me that needs to write, strange for a dyslexic.

Wednesday and its a “do the house stuff” day but before I do anything I get a call from a friend so I start my day with a chat about children’s birthday parties and the work entailed to come up with ways to keep young children amused. Then after a muesli breakfast I set about the list of things to do. First up is planting the bulbs and flowers that arrived yesterday.

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Well garden done I move on. Whilst doing the garden the splash guards for the bath arrive via Amazon. So I gather together my tools and take over the bathroom to fix the guard in place. It goes really well, I think,so tomorrow once the bonding has set it will be possible to take anxiety free showers.

Time for lunch with my partner and then its time to clear away the debris created by my daughters clearing out their old and unwanted clothes from their weekend reorganisation of storage space. I recycle a lot of coat hangers and deal with the cardboard mountain that had accumulated. With this done it was time to take the charity boxes to the Age UK shop in the next village, I nice break from the house.

Back home and I set about putting everything away that had to be taken out of the under sink cupboard to get Daisy Dishwasher better. I relocate the candles and the vases. Then I get a loaf started in the bread maker before going to the garage and sorting out the paint from the latest redecoration and reinstall the weights bench so that I can use it, I must be the only person who hoovers their garage. However the bench is back and I can get back to some weight training.

I get my weeks washing in the machine and then get ready to train. Today is a rowing day, so I will do 45 minutes. It goes relatively well and I feel I am getting back into the routine of training again. It will soon be back to having smoothies on a regular basis. The aim is to get back to 90 Kilos as soon as possible.

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I finish my session and retreat to the sofa to record it and to eat tea. I read for a while and then watch Chelsea beat Real Madrid to join Manchester City in the European cup final. At the end of the game I retrieve my washing from the tumble dryer and fold it ready to go away. Its blog time. Today has been all chores but there is a sense of achievement to have cleared the decks. Tomorrow is back to some work and some research on self publishing.

A post bank holiday Tuesday and I am up early as I am off to the hospital today for the result of my ultrasound on my sebaceous cyst. First a shower in the now non leaking facility followed by breakfast. On the drive to the hospital I have the company of a friend on the phone as she waited for her partner to emerge from a hospital appointment. I’m at the hospital early and have to wander around a bit before they can book me in. Once booked in I wait to be called. I am called and in I go. Two minutes tops to tell me what I already knew and tell me there is a three to twelve week wait before the cyst gets cut out. I walk back to the hotel car park and drive home. A waste of my time really, they could have phoned me and told me and save every ones time. By the time I got home the engineer had been to mend Daisy dishwasher and succeeded at a cost of course but it means I can get back to my nightly routine of setting the dishwasher off before bed. I contact a couple of private hospitals adn ask if they can do the surgery I need quickly. The answer was either that they could not get a consultant appointment any earlier than the nhs or the consultant that was available is now off ill. So much for the private sector. A brief lunch and I set off for the Shed to write letters and to train.

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Back in the house I find new plants have arrived which means that at least part of my day tomorrow is sorted. I also find the book that I ordered, the first book by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Before the Coffee Gets Cold. I found that the book that I read a couple of days before was Before the Coffee Gets Cold: Tales from the Cafe, was the follow up to the original. So now I shall read the first book in the series.

My evening is food and football before the blog. I want to read before bed but I am tired. Despite training I still feel less than activated.

Monday and its pissing down with rain, in fact it does so all day. The family gets up to bacon sandwiches and fresh coffee. Over the meal we chat and discover that my youngest daughter has never seen photos of my mother in her younger days.This leads to much rummaging in cupboards and the digging out of old photographs. We spend ages pawing over the pictures and retelling some of the family history. By the time we finish it is lunch time adn my youngest daughter loads up her car and sets off for home. The rain sets in even harder and I retreat to the sofa and spend all afternoon formatting my poems so that they are all in Arial 12. Its a pain of a job going through them one by one but necessary. I finally finish. Now they all have to be edited and prepared into a single manuscript. I have to decided how I go about self publishing them. It is a pure vanity project on my part, I am under no illusion about them but at least my family can have what I’ve produced over my life, at least all the ones I’ve got. I eat tea and watch a film before getting to write the blog. I still have “Before the coffee gets cold” peculating away inside me, I have order the book that came before it, once I find an author I like then I read everything that they have written. With most authors this is okay but I never managed to do that with Balzac, I swear he could write faster than I could read.

Sunday, its been a day of gifts but first there was bath resealing to deal with. I am not satisfied with the tap end of the bath and decide that it needs redoing. To be safe I take a trip to Wickes to get another tube of sealant. I arrive at 10:15 and have to QUEUE !

Its back to home to redo the tap end before breakfast with the family. I give it my best shot using a different shaping tool,and get a better result, not perfect but much improved.

Breakfast over a present arrives from Amazon. I open it and find an early birthday present from a friend. Its a book; Before The Coffee Gets Cold. Tales from the Cafe, by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. I start to read and go on reading and reading , I am gripped. For the first time in a long time I am truly hooked.

I go on reading and reading. I stop only to go for a walk with the family to feed the ducks in the local park. The walk is full of gifts that include, chaffinches, squirrels and a woodpecker. We also get to feed the ducks and geese and yet another gift, a pair of goslings.

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Back home I continue to read and read and read. No TV, no music just reading. There is something about Japanese writers that I love, they seem to have a sensitivity about relationships that gets expressed very elegantly. We reach dinner time and eat as a family, clear away and I read more stopping only for the final episode and season finale of In the Line of Duty, before returning to the book. I finish the book and feel drawn to coffee and reflection. Time to write the blog and to reflect. I know that I shall be thinking about the book for days to come, I’m tempted to start to re-read the book but resist. I want time for it to sink in and give up more of its subtleties. When I get a book like this I know I could be a hermit as long as I had books, pen, paper and ink.