Saturday, breakfast, weekly drug wallet filling and off to the garden centre to buy pies and sausages. Home and food stowed there is tidying to do, some reading and a couple of crosswords to finish. My partner adn I spend time buying and sorting out birthday presents for our youngest daughter. All of them have to go to her partner before the day, so he will be getting some interesting parcels to hide. Before long its time to watch Leicester Tigers put in a rare good performance and beat Wasps. By the time that little miracle has happened its gone 5 o’clock and time for me to head for the garage to train. Today is a rowing day, I decide to row for 45 minutes but to up the resistance of the last 15 minutes to a level 6. My logic is that its a rest day tomorrow and I need to push a bit harder to take me out of my comfort zone. It works, by the time I get to the end of the session I am fatigued more than usual. I’ve said before my exercise is like a medication to me and I need to keep it affective, hence to day I push.

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Post training there is tea and films to watch, two tonight again. This is not a habit I want to get into when I have such good books to read. I write the blog to the sound of Eric Sartre as midnight approaches. Tomorrow is weigh in day and in a moment of optimism I bought my treat for Sunday; a white chocolate and fruit cheesecake, lets hope I earned it.

Not an exciting day, a run of the mill, a keeping myself on track day. In my moments of reflection I think about a meeting I have on Monday, a friend eating her birthday present and the quiet of space forming a mirror which reflects only what stares wonderingly into it.

Friday so an easy day in theory. I lazy muesli breakfast and then a quick read to finish volume 1 of the BI-BLE. Unable to stand the raggle taggle state of my beard any more I head for the bathroom and trim it, applying my newly acquired beard wax, as recommended by my son.

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I head for the shed and spend my morning writing a letter. During this I had a conversation with a friend about garden plants suitable for hiding fences and providing colour in the garden perennially. By lunch time I am ready to go to the post box and get the letter on the way.

A brief lunch and I head for the shed again in my training gear and put in an hour on the exercise bike. The last bike session of the week, it goes well.

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A long bath bomb bath followed. I lay in gold glitter water and read more of Lets Hear it from the Boys. It is a book written for the teaching trade but the content rings so many bells with me. What is so disturbing is that nothing has changed since the sixties till now. I guess working class white boys are as screwed as they have ever been, except back in the sixties there were apprenticeships and borstal.

Friday evening is February family film fun night so after tea we all settle down to The Martian and The Matrix, the later still being a good film. Of course there is popcorn. As my family disappear to bed I settle down to write the blog.

I am beginning to feel the effects of shielding for so long. It feels as if I am getting “distance sickness”. Sartre wrote Nausea about how isolation creates an awareness of the existential nature of life. It feels as if this is creeping up on me. Having said that its time for me to sleep.

Thursday is a working day and I am up and breakfasted by my first meeting at 10am. It is a meeting to discuss a specific training and how we should go about it. It is a lively and interesting meeting which moved us forward.There is still a lot we do not know but we a have a better understanding of where we are in our own position and thinking. At the end of the meeting I continue and chat to a colleague about the work and of course football. By the time we have exhausted the topic its time for lunch and to unwrap my latest book from Amazon. I eat lunch and and then it is time to host the Open Forum. It is a good hour and I come out of it with new ideas and some work to do. So I spend time emailing colleagues and tiding up the loose ends.

I need a rest and a smoothie and spend an hour reading my new book. As soon as I start to read it I am hooked.

I was a white working class boy who failed at school in the 1960s and here was some one asking why white working class boys are still failing in the education system in 2020. The answers are very interesting and includes a form of stereotyping and marginalisation that is extremely powerful. It has echoes of the same processes that marginalise and disadvantage bisexuals in the community.

I go to the garage to train and climb aboard the rowing machine. After half an hour of hard rowing my shoulders ache and I am tired. I now think of this training as part of my anti cancer medication,to be taken each day on a regular basis. So when the pain kicks in I remind myself that this is just swallowing the drugs and that I will feel better later and live longer.

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I clear the kitchen and go for a bath bomb bath and finish reading the first volume of the BI-BLE and more of Lets Hear it From the Boys. I am glad I am back to reading, it makes me feel I am still alive and engaged. Its Thursday and tuna pasta night, it is also European football night as well. So I am set for the evening as Leicester draw and Rangers fight out a win. All this and the entertainment of Death in Paradise brings me to writing the blog.

Friday will be a shed day for writing letters and training but also its time to trim the beard and try out my new beard wax as recommended by my son. Most important of all is the chance to keep on reading and thinking. I miss my friends. It was a friends birthday today and although it was possible to send a gift and send birthday wishes it somehow falls short of the opportunity to celebrate.

Wednesday, an empty day in terms of work so its a lazy breakfast and a tidying up of some work notes. I listen to Eric Satie thanks to Alexa and read some more of the BI-BLE, which continues to engage me. The post man arrives and so I receive lots of new recycling but amidst the dross was a surprise card from an old colleague and my final Arizona Coyote T shirt in the rather lovely retro design.

No sooner than I have admired my new T shirt the door bell rings again and there is a box for me containing the external outlet covers that I had ordered in the wake of my condenser outlet freezing and choking the boiler to submission. This springs me into project action. I get the tools I need and the “no nails” and head for the out doors to the condenser outlet. I find that I cannot get the base plate round the pipe work so I have to cut a slot out of it. Simple in theory but getting the vice out and the work space set up in the garage hampered by the growing number of charity boxes collecting in the space is a decided pain in the arse. I manage the surgery and return to the cold outdoors and endeavour to “no nails” the back plate to the wall. Learning point, “no nails” is crap at plastic to brick sticking. In the end I get the drill out and screw the back plate to the wall. Once that’s done its easy to screw the front on and congratulate myself on a good job.

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Time for lunch and then I head to the shed to train. I was going to write but sometimes I just know its not the right time and there is more processing to be done. I train on the bike for an hour.

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I get back to the house and find that two new books have arrived, volume two of the BI-BLE and Kae Tempests first novel, “The Bricks that Built the Wall”. I’m excited to read them both. It seems I have overcome my reading block, which is a relief.

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I head for the bath book in hand and throw in a seaweed bath bomb and soak for a while. Tea and I settle down to write the blog, read some more and maybe watch a bit more football. Tomorrow is a work day for me and I already feel slightly peeved that it will interfere with my reading time.

Tuesday, a work day, so a quick breakfast and then some pre-meeting preparation. I listen to Alexa play me music and tell me what the news headlines are. By the time I have scribbled notes I am ready for my one to one with the manager of the project I contribute to. I have time to read my new book of essays called THE BI-BLE. It’s a series of essays by bisexuals describing their experiences, such as their invisibility and lack of representation in society and culture. I find the accounts powerful and in some senses familiar or at least reminiscent of many of the clients I have worked with over the years. It also reminded me of the many LGBT+ colleagues I have worked with during my career, many of whom had histories that now I think about it would suggest that I had known more bisexuals than I had realised. The meeting is useful and contained a surprise, but I cannot share it or I would have to kill you. Meeting over I make a quick call adn then I am Zooming to a group of people and introducing them to the wonders of Enabling Environments. I made a poor start but took breathe and pulled it round by the end. I left them with homework to do before we meet again in two weeks time. At the end I felt drained adn jaded adn very dissatisfied by my performance. So I put the recycling bin out and had another mug of coffee.

I prepared a pork medallion one pot and stuck it in the oven before getting my training gear on and going to the garage. Today was a rowing day and the day I decided to row for 45 minutes, a longer row than usual. The outcome was good.

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Post garage I changed and got the one pot out of the oven. The family ate, politely, the dish was not good, in fact below par. I doubt I am going to cook it a gain as it is turning out to be a regular failure. So I settle down to watch football and Marcello, having checked my Amazon account and chased orders. A friend rings and we talk for a time about families and what COVID and its cloak of death is doing to us all, especially the children. It is a good conversation and one which leaves me with images that intrigue me.

Back to the sofa where I down my evening meds, eat ham and write the blog. It feels a vey mixed day and I look forward to a more reflective day tomorrow.

Monday and I’ve done bugger all so far today except procrastinate and distract myself from the terrors of training. There have been a couple of highlights the first being the delivery of my Hockey against cancer ice hockey jersey from the Arizona Coyotes. Its lovely, and of course I put it on immediately to pose in, not that I am vain or anything like that. The challenge is to wear it for the day without spilling anything on it .

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So I clear the place up a bit and attend to some admin work before lunch rolls round. I have time to duck tape a late birthday parcel going to Sri Lanka before having an omelette lunch. Kitchen cleared I set off to the shed and retrieve the outdoor camera that is set up on the shed wall. This was a Christmas present which has been sitting out in the garden keeping watch. I bring it in and hook it up to my laptop and behold there are pictures of next doors cat and a squirrel. The squirrel looking cute and also arse up drinking out of the pond.

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So as Alexa plays me coffee lounge jazz I get an early start on the blog to while away the time as I wait for the Tesco delivery. Once that’s done I can go to the shed to train. Tonight will be present buying for a family birthday and time to read a bit more in the comfort of a bath bomb bath hopefully. I go to the shed and train once the Tesco delivery is done. It a tough session and I get close to my personal best. Close but not quite close enough.

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The session is tough and I am glad to get back in the house and strip off and cool down. A meal follows and I up date the blog. I am ready to soak and to read and to rest.

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Sunday, weigh in day. Will I get a rest day? Will I get a treat today? I get up and get myself scales ready, you know what I mean. So I step onto the scales consciously trying not to cheat by hanging my heels off the edge. We all have done it at times, you know you have. So I step up and then it comes to the moment of looking down at the display and I give out a little “go me” and a fist pump.

91.6 Kilos

This means I have lost 10 kilos since last March and I am now, in old weight, 14stone 6 pounds. I am almost there. My secondary goal is 90 kilos at which point it will be time to add in the weight work to build some upper body muscle, strengthen the core and rip the gut. So a couple of weeks of discipline and hard work and I might get there. I’m hoping as the weather gets warmer I can up my general activity level. Of course as COVID dies out I will be able to roam further afield. The gym maybe.

I wildly celebrate my goal attainment with a full on bacon bagel for breakfast and fresh coffee. I like the idleness of my Sunday rest day and the meandering path through the day. Having said that, after breakfast (very late breakfast) my partner and I drive over to her mother’s house to do the regular loo flushing, heating check and this time the plant watering. No problems thankfully and we choose to drive back home through the Leicester forest.

An afternoon of face time call with my youngest daughter, whose birthday is not far off. Always good to talk to her and hear her experiences of working from home as she is working on Christmas goods for her company and that means sample boxes arriving from the worlds confectioners. Some stuff is run of the mill but I did like the look of the rainbow chocolate coins. As the call ends the international rugby starts and I watch it still unhappy that my beloved Brentford had just got stuffed by Barnsley two nil. The game was quite good but at the end of it I settled down to order some plants for the garden. It was a performance as I had trouble with the website not accepting my cards until I found I could use my Amazon account to pay it. Scary really how easy it is to spend money these days. So now I have plants due to arrive between now and the end of March and the beginnings of a vision for the garden in the summer and beyond. I also found a present for a friend of mine’s birthday which is coming up later this months. Of course I cannot reveal what it is as she reads my blog.

So an early evening blog writing as Alexa plays me jazz in the background. My partner does yoga, Alexa reminds me to do the Tesco order and to put the vegetables in the oven in fifteen minutes time. I feel like I ‘ve found a way to cheat memory loss, if only I could remember her name. Why a woman I ask myself, it feels stereotypic and wonder if I can choose a range of voices and gender identities. I shall ponder that after tea when I am in my bath bomb bath and between reading essays.

Sunday lazy Sunday, so nice without the TV background wall paper, just quite relaxing jazz in the background. I think that lockdown has taught me how easy it is to be overpowered by the visual media. It is almost as if watching together has somehow gained an ascendancy over listening together or reading together or anything together. This visual dominance is probably atavistic in evolutionary terms, but it does not reflect an inner world. Looking into oneself is not a visual thing, at least not a primary one, although I do have a symbolised vision of what constitutes me inside myself. The “looking into myself” is a much more complex and draws on all of my sense history and cognitive constructions. Perhaps the external visual world provides a relief from the internal and helps keep me physically safe to have my other world. I will ask my Pixies, they will know.

Saturday so up late and a cooked breakfast, but not before I have rung the gas service company and cancelled the plumber booked for Monday. Having sorted the frozen condenser outlet the boiler is working perfectly. I chat to gas services woman and find it is the sister of the woman I talked to on Thursday. We banter gently as I cancel the plumper and asked her to thank her sister for the good boiler advice she gave me.

So I do my ritual re-loading of of my weekly drugs wallet over breakfast and then set about the weeks recycling and bin emptying. Having sorted all this stuff I change into my training gear so that I can train at the first opportune moment between or after todays two international rugby matches. Two solid matches later I’m ready for the garage and the rower.

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This was a non joyous training session as it was very cold in the garage, not even my long track tights could keep the cold out.

So I emerge mildly sweaty to a fish finger tea and my latest toy; an echo dot thing that answers to the name of Alexa. So far it is keeping a shopping list, tells me what the weather is like and plays me Spotify. I’ve obviously got a lot to learn about my new chum. According to a friend his nephews and nieces think Alexa is hilarious because it will make fart noises. I’ve yet to try it. So with Alexa installed we watch a Tom Hanks film where he wanders the wild west reading newspapers to folk and acquires a young girl raised by Indians. An interesting film. Of course this is followed Match of the Day and the writing of the blog against the TV wallpaper of Gwyneth Paltrow and some Sliding Doors.

Tomorrow is weigh in day. So I am hoping for a rest day and the start of trying to work in a reading time each day. I shall enlist the help of Alexa to nag me and also I think she has audio book potential. I wonder if she plays banjo? I have to say I am not sure how my pixies are taking the introduction of an electronic entity, but if I know them they will be asking it to make farting or raspberry noises.

Friday and I over sleep till 10:30. It appears I am a confirmed night owl. I am at my best in the night and sleep best in the morning. I always feel I get the best sleep quality in the mornings. So I get up and find that the smoothies I ordered yesterday are already sitting in the porch. I unpack them and decide to try an Orange Energiser for breakfast. I had assumed that the main ingredient would be orange and I am a bit taken aback to realise how much carrot is in it. So I give it a go along with a black coffee. Its has a sting from the ginger and turmeric in it, not my favourite but it did not make me throw up. So I guess if I can keep it down its food.

I check emails and message colleagues and then head for the shed in my training gear. I settle down to write letters and spend a pleasant time at my desk. I decide to post my letters now rather than wait till after I have trained. So I strap on the trainers and jog to the post box and back. Yep you read that right, I jogged to the post box and back. I figured it was the only way I could get away with wearing a bright red camouflage track suit in public. I also learnt that jogging wearing cycling shorts is not the most comfortable clothes to wear jogging. Back to the shed and a training session on the bike. It went okay.

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Back in the house I start to clear the kitchen when my sister rings and we chat for a while about coping with COVID and having our jabs. Immediately after a friend rings me and we talk about work and holidays and the opportunities to get time to rest and recover from work demands. We talk about how not being drawn into commercial situations of making things for money and setting up a trading network is much more worthwhile and meaningful. After my calls I cook a pie for tea and while it finishes in the oven I retreat to the sofa and TV for a while. I change for tea and tuck into pie.

Its another evening of Death in Paradise and then the blog. I am getting increasingly irritated with myself for not reading so I intend to find myself a reading time each day. I’m not sure how I am going to do this yet but I have thought about enlisting the help of technology in the form of Alexa, apparently it can do reminders and also read audio books to you. For the cost of an echo dot it is worth a try I think. That can be my weekend project along with watching the international rugby.

DVT: NO MORE DVT DAYS

Its Thursday, a busy day so I am up and around quite early being careful not to invade my partners yoga space. I get to the kitchen and rustle up a bacon and coffee breakfast which I eat with my meds and my emails. I start to prepare for this mornings meeting and wait for the DVT clinic to ring me. I do not have long to wait. The consultant rings me at 9:20 and we have a five minute chat during which I tell him the vital statistics of my thighs and calfs. I reassure him that I am not bruising easily or profusely bleeding, and my kidneys are back in the normal range. The prophylactic dose of Apixaban, which he confirms is the best of its kind, is not producing any nasty side effects so there was no other sensible option other than to discharge me. I am duly discharged. After 440 days I am free of the DVT clinic. Go me. So as from today the DVT heading will disappear from the start of the blog. It is the icing on the cake of a good week. So all I have to focus on is my cancer, it simplifies my life and allows me to plan my future well being and lifestyle.

I go to my next work meeting and spend the best part of two hours discussing training issues and rationales along with other issues. It of course allowed my colleague Drew to tease me about how Scotland had beaten England in the Calcutta cup on Saturday. He even demonstrated how Alexa worked by asking it who won the Scotland v England match. Fun over it was time for a quick smoothie lunch, or so I thought. I was cold so went to switch the heating on. The boiler refused to relight and made a gurgling sound that I recognised as trouble. I tried several times and got no joy and it was getting colder in the house. I rang the company that had refurbished it and who provide plumbing services. I am told Monday is the earliest they can get to us, I plead a bit, the woman tries, we have a conversation and she asks if I have checked my outflow pipe as many of them are freezing in the current cold snap. I say I will try it and ring her back in due course thanking her for her suggestion. I’m late by two minutes for my Open Forum. Its a tough one. Tired people on the edge and being blamed by people in their organisation for perceived poor judgement. It feels like COVID is taking a toll across all levels of organisation functioning.

I finish my forum with a quick chat with my co host, we talk about the session, the paper that we are sending to be considered for a journal and out of the blue he asks me to be interviewed for a pod cast that he and a colleague are doing on people in the TC movement. I agree, so at some point I will be on the net somewhere.

No time to waste. I am out side with buckets of hot water trying to unfreeze my run off pipe from the boiler. The vertical stack just fills with water each time I plunge it with a piece of moulding and then pour water into it. The pipes are clearly blocked with frozen liquid. Bucket after bucket of hot water gets poured over the pipes with no joy. I add some windscreen washer liquid but to no avail. At last it begins to clear and there is a pleasing gurgling sound as the hot water drops down the pipes and does not back up. I add some antifreeze to the last lot of hot water that I pour down the pipes. Success. I go in doors and my partner makes me coffee and wonders if the pipes should be lagged. Of course I have lagging foam tubes in the garage and a foam cutter. With a roll of gaffer tape, a knife and foam tubes I head outside and begin to lag the pipes. The task is to get the job done before the temperature drops again. This needs to be done before I can turn my attention to the boiler itself. I press on and get it done.

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I return to the boiler and see if I can get the front cover off, I cannot but figure if I have cleared the blockage the boiler has a chance of firing up and clearing itself. I switch the system back on and set the boiler controls for the heart of the sun and behold it fires up minus the previous gurgling sound. I’m sitting here several hours later and the radiators are warm and the boiler working, so I guess the problem is solved. The key element is whether the lagging stops the pipes freezing tonight and the coming cold days.

I put everything away and have coffee. I notice an old colleague had tried to ring me so I return the call and have a chat with her. It’s time to make tea, Thursdays tuna pasta and to settle down to watch a cup match on TV while I sit and write the blog on my lap. I’ve not trained today but feel okay given the pipe problem that needed to be solved. Tomorrow I will make up for it.