Saturday, coffee, fill the drugs wallet and eat a bacon bagel. Then its off to the garden centre to get cheesecake, crisps and lasagne. Home to watch Leicester Tigers beat Newcastle in a cup quarter final. During the match I get a delivery of a wisteria. I unpack the wisteria and put it into the greenhouse to overnight. With the weather that is coming I expect I will keep it in the greenhouse for a while. I return to the rugby and watch England women beat Italy by a vast margin. Its time to get ready to train. I’ve decided to go for an hours row at a higher resistance as I am not sure I am working hard enough in my sessions, either that or I am getting impatient with progress or lack of it. I get into the garage and before I start my hour I have a call with a friend who is out walking and getting some time for herself. It was good to chat but it left the sense of what is missing in life at the moment. That normal ability to speak face to face and weave a conversation following all the cues that are available, even the silences. We say our farewells and I start my hour at level 6; new territory for me. To my surprise it goes okay.

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I head for a bath bomb bath and soak my fatigue out of me. Tea is lasagne and salad followed by a film, Turks and Caicos starring Bill Nye. It was okay and was followed by football and writing the blog. In the holes in the day I acquired new cargo shorts in anticipation of the summer and an upgrade to my wardrobe. Alongside this I bought new bedding for both sizes of beds in the house and a new garden furniture cover. These moments of acquisition are semi spontaneous, an idea appears in my head and the IT takes care of it, it is quite disturbing really and why I like the shed with its lack of wi-fi. However it is a way of avoiding dithering. Need a garden furniture cover: done. What could be easier. Need an AK47, trickier, but probably doable, just not on Amazon.

Friday, yippee its a work free day and time for breakfast and retreat to the shed. There in the shed I write letters and nibble elicit chocolate root ginger. I like my shed because it has my only flat desk space where I have my pens, brushes, ink and sealing waxes as I want them. All around me are my favourite books, correspondence and art materials. On the walls the art that friends have sent me and on the book rest my file of poems. Behind my chair is my exercise bike. In this shed I can sit uninterrupted and in private, either active or in power save mode. It is in this space that I allow myself to think the unthinkable and find the words that come closest to expressing it, or the symbols, daubs and strokes that try to do what the words cannot do. This shed sits in the garden which surrounds me with green, growth and a myriad of creatures, resident or passing through. This space is laptop and wi-fi free, it is civilised.

So lunch comes and goes, friends travel south, post arrives and life churns on. In this break our youngest daughter messages to say she and her partners bid for a house has been accepted. We of course ring to say congratulations but of course there is a long way to go till they step through the door of their own house and being a sensible person my daughter was being measured in her joy. On checking my emails from work I find the first edit of the podcast I recorded a couple of weeks ago. I sit and listen to me talking about my life and my work with a sense of fascination and repulsion. It is a strange feeling I get when I think it will be public in a few days. I post my letters from the morning and prepare the evenings meal, a chicken and chorizo one pot that goes into the oven while I change to train. Back into the shed I try to find a radio station that is playing music but all I get is tributes to the dead Duke of Edinburgh who died at midday today, so I train to Spotify, which keeps playing adverts so I junk it and just train. Not a bad session, just one more session to go for the week.

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I return to the house and check the one pot, almost ready. I learn that my partners brother is being allowed home although the MDT has not met to decide on their next treatment options. Clearly they think the risk is manageable, he was waiting to be picked up by his son to return home. I guess they will contact him when they know what they want to do. The family eats, I watch football and then write the blog. No contact from the hospital regarding my referral for my face yet. I am feeling distracted and not sure why.

Thursday and its up early to get to the GP at 9 o’clock. Breakfast is provided by my partner, my favourite bacon bagel, grapefruit and coffee. I set up the laptops for the training workshop I am co presenting at 10 o’clock before getting myself off to the GP. I go through the usual routine of checking in and then hanging around at the back door to be let in by the doctor. I sit down in the doctors room on a socially distanced chair and the doctor brings up my records some distance away from me. We chat the usual how big, is it sore, how long conversation after which the doctor measures my facial cyst/boil/blocked gland/tumour/thingy, he then grabs hold of it to appreciate how solid it is. He goes back to his desk and asks me more questions. The outcome is that he refers me to the head/neck and throat team to check whether my lump is cancerous or not. I should hear in four working days, and he gives me a printout with contact numbers and the rules of engagement. I thank him and leave.

Back home I log into my training session and chat with my co-presenters before the sixty attendees log on. So dead on 10 o’clock we are off and running. That’s me until 3:45 in the afternoon. For me the training is only interrupted at lunchtime when I host an open forum for an hour and then return to the training session. So a full on screen day, and although we use cyber polls, word clouds and other techno devices it is still a struggle to sense what is going on in the “cyber room”. It is tiring and unpredictable, but like all things it passes. It comes to an end and the team do a quick debrief before we head off in our different directions. I get into my training gear and get into the garage and strap myself into the rower. 45 minutes on level 5 taken slowly and concentrating on rhythm, whatever the outcome it will be a personal best.

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Tea, live football and then the blog. An additional pleasure today is a letter from a friend that I save to read in the comfort of solitude as the rest of the household goes to bed. During the day I have dipped in and out of my WhatsApp messages to see how my partners brother is doing in hospital. Late in the day we find out that the procedure from yesterday was not totally successful and that the fistula has only been partially closed. The MDT is to meet and discuss what they need to do next and weigh up the pros and cons of further intervention. So my brother in law has to wait for a couple of days in hospital while while the team make up their minds what to offer. So the waiting will go on for a while. All the while the clock ticks, wanting to spend time with people continues and the ocean remains stubbornly far away.

Wednesday, a minimal day, so here’s the list:

1. Breakfast
2. Booked GP call
3. Asked for a tree lopping quote
4. Checked Email
5. Read letter from post
6. Reviewed the slides for tomorrow’s course
7. Reviewed the resource pack
8. Retreated to the shed to write letters
9. Put in ten new solar lights into the garden.
10. Answered some work emails
11. Wrote my March Invoices and sent them
12. Posted letters
13. WhatsApped several messages
14. Had a 2 minute 33 second call with my GP
15. Watched football
16. Showered
17. Wrote the blog.

So a very average day and one that lacked any training because I could not be arsed today. So today was average but lifted by the odd image from afar. Tomorrow will be full on work with the rarity of a face to face meeting with my GP first thing in the morning, so I am off to bed having ascertained that my partners brother is safe and well after his hospital procedure today.

Tuesday and its back to work for the world. By the time I get up my partner is at work so I have breakfast and go to the shed to write letters. Its good to be back looking out on my garden and having a flat surface to write on. It takes me a while to get back into the swing of writing, but it came back to me. By lunch time I had two letters to post once I had grabbed a tomato soup lunch. I wander over to the post box in my Rupert Bear yellow golf trousers and bright red padded jacket. My now long hair is tucked into a beanie. Its cold and every so often there is a flurry of snow. I while away the time till Tesco rock up and deliver our weekly grocers, unfortunatley I forgot the eggs this week, perhaps a response to Easter. I put stuff away and change into my training gear. Before returning to the shed I prepare a baked cod dish ready to go into the oven to coincide when I finish training. I go to the shed and train. I decide to push myself today. I rowed a personal best yesterday so I thought I would go for a PB on the bike as its been a while since I set my last bike PB, the end of February in fact. I still do the first ten minutes wearing my aerobic training mask, which is meant to mimic altitude training. So I climb aboard the bike and start out.

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I am exceedingly chuffed with myself, I am without doubt getting fitter and stronger. I am hoping that this continues and I can move into some weight work. Anyway time to press on and eat the meal I prepared earlier along with the newly made salad. My evening will be watching Liverpool lose to Milan and writing the blog. I am getting twitchy about the arival of my new plants, about not getting out and the distance COVID creates getting bigger. Still I am confined untill I get my second vaccination and give it time to ferment into the biochemical guardian angel its intended to be. Tomorrow I will concentrate on work, imvoices and the practicallities of life.

Easter Monday and a lazy start with a bacon bagel breakfast. So my morning was taken up with altering our Tesco order, cleaning out the fish tank and having a long conversation with my sister. One of the interesting things that my sister pointed out to me was that the bee I had found in our garden and put on the blog was in fact a Tawny Miner Bee.

Apparently my sister has an identification card from the International Field Survey. I of course go to their website straight after the call and find they have identification cards on all sorts of things, such as moths, butterflies, ladybirds and caterpillars. Of curse I did, I filled my basket with goodies and now have several guides winging their to me. I am hopefully about spring and summer and curious about how my garden will flourish. A late smoothie lunch and its time to order some new lights for the garden before getting ready to train. I decide to row for an hour at my usual level, which I have not done to date.

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Time for tea and a film. I watch As Good As It gets (my third favourite film of all time). I find something new in it every time I watch it, and it never ceases to grip me at some point new. It is all the spaces that speak so loudly and the hesitations but most of all the struggle with the normal and the personal. At the end I always strangely feel explained. Its time to write the blog and prepare for tomorrow. Most of all I need to write, so it will be the shed for me.

Easter Sunday, weigh in day, so as always my first thought is weigh myself and see if my light training has affected my weight. I step on the scales and tentatively look down.

89.9 Kilos

I am amazed but will happily eat my treat this week. Its sunny, so straight after breakfast and a call to our youngest daughter it is out in to the garden. There I stayed all day weeding out the flower beds and planting summer bulbs and corms. While friends and family celebrated in a chocolatey way I busied myself shaping the front garden aware that this sunshine would disappear by tomorrow pausing only for a drink and a hot cross bun for sustenance.

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My evening is TV, Line of Duty and football highlights. Tomorrow its back to training and cold weather. At the moment we all wait for the outcome of Tuesdays assessment of my partners brother. Quietly we all wait.

Saturday, a lazy start to the day. Breakfast, fill the drugs wallet for the week and plan the day. I WhatsApp my partners brother and find he has been transferred to a hospital in Nottingham and that he has to rest before any planned intervention on Tuesday. My partner and I go to her mothers so some banking issues can be sorted out and deliver some flowers. I wait in the car and check my emails. On the way back we drive by the physiotherapy clinic that my partner has booked into to get some work on her aching leg. Home and we finish off the scones that were baked yesterday. I watch England women’s rugby team beat Scotland while my partner does her yoga. I prepare the evening meal to be cooked and then I go to the shed to train. An hour on the bike to ease out the tensions and frustrations of the day.

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I complete the evening meal and we eat before watching Leicester Tigers beat Connaught. Then football then the blog. At the moment it feels like perpetual waiting, a quiet grind forward waiting for something, but not quite sure what.

Thursday, a work day with lots of meetings and the open forum. It turns out to be a tricky day, a colleagues mother dies and my partners brother ends up being admitted to hospital over night. Its another day I do not train, sometimes there are more important things to do. In the end I retreat to a bath bomb bath and then watch a mindless American ice hockey film, which was not only violent for the sake of it but was based on appalling white working class stereotypes.

Friday, Good Friday, bit of a misnomer, my partners brother has been diagnosed as having a bleed on the brain and an aneurism in the neck area. He rings my partner in the morning from the hospital and tell her he is currently “nil by mouth”, so some sort of intervention might be close. He might have to go to another hospital, which has the equipment required. There is nothing we can do except wait and get on with what we intended to do. So we breakfast and head for a local park to walk and to watch the ducks. Its a relief to be out. On the way home we visit the garden centre where we pick up some food and a Broom of the shrub variety. I plant the Broom while my partner cooks scones. While planting the Broom I notice holes in the lawn and then spot the emerging tenant. Pretty amazing, see below:

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We sit down to eat the fresh scones, my eldest daughter having popped to the village to get cream, jam and a paper. It is a pleasant time as we chat and wait. After a while we set about our separate chores and activities. I set off for the garage to row for an hour to try and loosen up and work off some energy. It goes well.

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The family come to together for a late tea of lasagne and salad before I return to the lounge to catch up on the blog from yesterday and today. In the background Vera resolves a murder. We as a family wait for more news.

Alright I admit it, I have not trained again to day, that’s three days, but I am trying very hard not to panic and see it as a crisis. But I assuage my anxiety by noting that over the last two days I have done 10,000 steps, which I understand normal mortals consider sufficient to stay fit on. So having confessed I move on.

Today started with bacon and coffee and the arrival of the guy who helps keep our garden tidy. I head out side and as it is gloriously sunny I take the cover off the garden furniture and discover that the parasol is not working. Out with the new screwdriver set and into the guts of the parasol to find that the wired clothes line that I put in last time has rusted and then snapped. So no use using the same stuff again. I find with great surprise that Amazon actually sell replacement parasol cord. Is there nothing they do not sell? I found out later that they do not sell Hacienda orange masonry paint. So I order the cord for tomorrow delivery and turn my attention to the garden bench that has a stretcher rotted through. Well the next several hours are taken up with me fitting a new strengthening bar and re-staining the whole bench.

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In the breaks that I took while things dried or I needed to rest I took a phone call from a friend who had recovered her car, sat and wondered at my cherry blossom trees, stared at frogs in the pond and opened my post. All these moments provided wonder or surprise, and some provided photo opportunities.

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As the sun ebbs away and I clear my tools, close up the greenhouse and have tea before watching England struggle to a two one win over Poland in a world cup qualifier. Time then to write the blog and wonder if there is enough hot water to have a late bath. Tomorrow beckons, a parasol to repair, meeting to do and an open forum to host. We might even scone bomb some unexpecting friends.