DVT DAY 90

Today I hoovered, watched TV , watched German Football, cooked a curry and costed up a project to build my own tower PC. So this is life.

DVT DAY 89

Today I sat in the shed and wrote cards and letters while the rain and pigeons feet pattered on the roof. Most of the day was spent doing this with a brief interlude to unpack and install a rising stand at computer  desk in the office for my partner. Apart from a brief walk with my partner to post my mail the day was unremarkable until 11pm. It was at this time I notice I had lost my signet seal ring. There followed a search with all the usual irritating questions “like where did you have it last?” After an extensive search and a retracing of my days activities I found it. It had fallen off as I was putting my washing away in my clothes cupboard. So there it nestled at the foot of my shorts pile. Panic over and I am free to write the blog, short and curtailed by the dullness of my existence today. So I shall down my drugs and bid you all a good night. There must be more to life than this.

Oh yes there is there is my latest reading Mind and Cosmos; Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception Of Nature is Almost Certainly Wrong, by Thomas Nagel. I thought that I was in for a stimulating read but it has not materialised as yet, in fact the guys a bit of an arse given that he is a professor of philosophy at New York University which has a big reputation, he appears to think that the intelligent design  school have a point based on his difficulty to get over his own incredulousness at the thought of mutation and natural selection accounting for the world he thinks he lives in. In fairness I’ve not finished his arguments yet, but I am not hopeful.

DVT DAY 88

A restless night leads to an early breakfast and a settling in on the sofa for an early morning Teams meeting. Two hours we chat, plan, reflect and analyse preparing this weeks materials and planning how to conclude our twelve week programme. By the time we finish we have a plan and are prepared for out Monday meeting of the whole team. Bye the time we are through its time for me to take up the kitchen clearing and thinking about the open forum in the afternoon.

By the time the forum comes around I am aware that the probation service Teams platform is experiencing trouble so there may not be many attending. That is how it turned out, only two people turned up but it turned out to be a good hour. Usually I write the session up straight away but I wanted sometime to think. What I actually did was watch a lot of Tim Minchin YouTube videos, I had forgotten how much I like him. I’ve included a link to one of his YouTube videos below but they are not for the fainthearted.

I finally write up the session and eat an early tuna pasta tea provided by my partner. Its singing lesson night tonight so I clear the kitchen and prepare for a quite evening. I settle on the sofa to write the blog when a friend calls and we chat until the Sainsburys delivery, which was due as 9pm rocks up at 8 o’clock curtailing my phone call, just plain rude if you ask me. Lucky I had already moved my partners car off he drive.

So a quick fridge fill and I am back on the sofa, finish my call and then start on the blog. This evening is one I will fritter on the promise that I shall do things tomorrow. I shall read and indulge my childish like of NCIS and Gibbs rules, of which my favourite is “don’t waste good”.

DVT DAY 87

Todays the day the shielded teddy bear went down to the woods and posted his own letters. Todays the day he found he is getting fatter by the minute and very very unfit. Todays the day the sun did not shine but the garden got the drink it desperately needed.

Breakfast and butler duties before I check my e-mails intending to go to the shed and do something creative. However, I end up tiding up business and making calls to get things sorted. Once I had got through all the unexpected work I had time to sit and fill my drugs wallet for the week. It’s a regular ritual that I no longer think much about except having enough pills to fill the little daily boxes for the week. Today I stared at them and wonder about each one and whether they were necessary and concluded that I haven’t a clue anymore. I know far more about cell biology than I did and cancer in general and I have more than dabbled in kidneys but when I stare at the four pills a day I take I’ve not a clue really. None of them are related to cancer treatment, raised blood pressure (allegedly), a bladder relaxant (although I’m not sure any more why I am taking this) and two identical pills morning and evening to thin my blood to fought off DVTs. So, a heart that is pumping at the wrong pressure is now doing it with thinner blood, how does that  work? The problem is I do not think I care anymore. Alongside this my body is supposed to be reabsorbing the DVT but as the DVT clinic does not do second scans, I will never know if it has or not, or at least fully. So that leaves me with my monthly FIRMAGON which chemically castrates me and leaves me with the ambition of being the fittest castrate in the choir. That one is cancer relevant.

Any way after doing the pill popping I finally retreated to the shed to write a long letter. At lunch time a friend rang me and I had the pleasure of a long conversation before I attended my Wednesday Open Forum. An interesting one today which made the time fly by. I had planned soup for lunch but never got to it but instead decided to go and post my letters myself. Big moment this. I put on real clothes and don a mask and hat and set off looking like some weird cowboy looking for a bank to rob.

Posting the letters was easy, but the rest of the walk was not. I laboured and got very hot in my mask and jumper, both a mistake in hindsight. I trudged round the village for 42 minutes discovering that the village café had reopened to do take away food. By the time I got back home I was dripping with sweat and just wanted to take everything off, especially when I found the heating had been turned on! I lay on the sofa with a 0% beer and begin to type the blog. Bizarrely I am looking forward to the great British sewing bee tonight, I am fascinated by how people can create such amazing clothes from scratch in such a short space of time. It’s got to be better than crowd less German football, hasn’t it? Perhaps this is the chance to settle down with my new book.

DVT DAY 86

Today started with the usual breakfast and then a retreat to the shed. I am trying to cut down the amount of time I spend looking at a screen and so spent my morning finishing the paintings that I had started. I make no claims to any form of artistic talent, my art is just another way that I’m finding to use my time while I remain Shielded. I have to say I find the activity relaxing and when engaged in this I find that time passes quickly.

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A bacon sandwich lunch and I then return to the shed to write letters and to think about what future pictures I might create. I spend quite a long time creating my May invoices and getting them sent off. I also took delivery of my latest book. I am aware that I am becoming more prone to solipsism where I find it more difficult to see what is beyond my house and what comes through the TV to my living room is real. It is similar to astronauts who experience this if they spend time on the international space station, but then if you are looking down on earth then it is understandable. The question is whether isolation under lockdown for three months is a similar experience. My natural inclination is to think that solipsism is a desperate philosophy but I am reading what I can find on the subject to know what the arguments actually are. As a psychologist I am interested in people who exhibit this form of thinking and what the consequences are.

While doing all this I popped a loaf in the bread maker to bake before setting about preparing the evening meal, stopping late afternoon for a coffee and panettoni. By the evening there is a meal ready and time to finish writing my letters. An evening phone call with a friend is a welcome voice from the outside. It is then time to write the blog and watch “the A word”.  

DVT DAY 85

The first day of summer and the first day I could go out. I did not, I am not convinced by the figures. As an old colleague used to say “the logic is in the figures”.

So today, I painted, wrote letters, planted sunflowers and put up pea netting. I bathed, changed my ear stud and watched TV. I also ordered two books by Thomas Nagel an American philosopher who took the philosophy of solipsism to pieces. Relevant because being in isolation I think solipsism creeps up on me and I find it more and more difficult to see the world as real when what comes into my home is all through dubious technology.

DVT DAY 84

Sunday the 31st of May, the day Boris decided that it is now suddenly safe for me to go beyond the boundaries of my house and garden. On the 28th of May he was telling me that I would be in for another month of Shielding but suddenly with no warning it is now considered okay for me to venture out into the world on my own or with a single other providing I social distance. I can apparently go out once a day. I’ve just seen scenes of Bournemouth beach where it would appear that most people have not got a Skooby Doo about social distancing or as it is now know, doing a cummings! So do I want to venture out just yet, I am not sure.

Apart from a brief call over Zoom with my son in Stockholm I have ironically spent most of the day making a work video on the subject of Safety. Every time I thought I had cracked it the technology went awry and I had to start again. At one point I uploaded what I thought was a final video to my YouTube channel it processed the upload as a single picture. On the retake I discovered how annoying a single fly can be when your trying to film a brief chat. I eventually got to post the link for the final version at 10 o’clock tonight.

During the day my friend who was admitted into hospital last night with kidney stones was scanned and sent home and another friend was tending herself after being bitten on the leg. It sounds like a dangerous world out there, so I might be a bit cautious about going out there.

DVT DAY 83

Its Saturday and its a day of chores. First is the negotiation for a bacon sandwich and fresh coffee accompanied by my daily drugs. I get my tool kit out and start to get the water tank ready to have its inlet value worked on. So with a piece of string, a cut up bin bag and a selection of bull dog clips I disable the ball cock and put a cover over the water. Then its attacking the layers of silt that have built up and a liberal application of WD40. Although the valve frees up the leverage from the ballcock is not enough to close the valve. It is noticeable that the valve is leaking, so a new one needs to be ordered but in the meantime it needs a fix to stop the overflow continuing to feed the moss garden that has grown up on the roof below the overflow. So its a case of lowering he ballcock by an unsophisticated bend of the ballcock rod which I do with a a couple of pairs of pliers. It appears to work well enough to stop the overflow dripping, it will at least hold till the new spare part arrives. Chore one done. Time for a coffee in the garden and to smell the roses that have come out over the last couple of days.

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I start on chore two which is to clean out the fish tank and rescue my guppy community from the hair algae that has grown quickly in the warm days. It is time consuming clearing the glass of its green coating and cleaning out the filter system. Without fail I spend time fishing out the inquisitive fish who get sucked up the syphon when I start taking the water out. In a similar way there are always the athletic fish that find their way onto the filter sections, again its a game to net them and return them to the main tank. At last the new water is in and the tank is returned to running condition , now it is a case of waiting for the filters to clear the water. Once it does the scene should be much improved.

Time for a rest and a fresh cheese scone baked by my partner after a stint doing some gardening. While sitting on the patio nibbling the freshly butter scone I look at the overflow pipe I was hoping was fixed and note with satisfaction that it has stopped dripping, now perhaps the sun will get to work on the moss. The baaing of sheep alerts us to a delivery. We choose sheep as our back of house door alarm as it seemed right for sheep to alert us in the garden. It is Mr Amazon delivering my new art bits and pieces. As my shed now doubles as an art studio as well as an office I integrate the new bits and pieces into the shed.

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I have little time to spend in the shed today and make my way back to the house via some flowers to begin the blog while watching a German football match being played in an empty stadium.

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This evening will be a slow and relaxed one, I’m tempted to light the chimenea and wonder how dry the pines trees are that over hang it. It is strange but today feels short, and I have yet to got for my walk.

DVT DAY 82

Today was a work day and I spent most of it writing and devising materials for the Enabling Environment programme for which I am a Lead for the Royal College of Psychiatrists. The team have, since lockdown, been creating materials for participating services based on the ten core standards of Enabling Environments. We have all been working from home to make our contributions and week on week we have taken it in turns to make the materials for one of the standards. This week is my turn and my Standard is SAFETY. I created some information cards and will over the weekend create a video, but in the meantime I thought I would share the blog that I wrote for the Standard that will go out to the services who are part of the Enabling Environment award process.

SAFETY

A view from my toy cupboard.

Like ET being shielding in the COVID crisis it is like being an alien in an alien land. Nothing feels safe only the feeling of being anxious for my safety is familiar. Like ET when there is a threat I hide with what will not give me away, where what I am and how I feel is an approximation to “normal”. Its scary out there; give me what I know. I am not sure who or what is friendly, who or what I can trust and where I am going to be safe either physically or emotionally.  Who has got my back?

I have no Spock, I have an oncologist and a team of Enabling Environment colleagues and of course my family, who as much as I love can be irritating at times. These are the people who provide me with safety, that ability to express how I am and to have strange and fantastical ideas without feeling judged, spurned or thought to be losing my marbles. I am not made to feel that what I feel and think is bizarre or the signs of slipping into some kind of “Shielding madness”.  Even when I make a mistake, either something dumbly physical or inadvertently attitudinally insensitive it is these people that hear me and will be willing to explore what “this is all about”, rather than condemn or dismiss me out of hand.

These are the people that provide me with an emotional safety net, so that when I get tired and outraged of, and at, having cancer, or the frustrations of not going beyond the confines of my home since March, or … the list goes on… and on. They are my safety net.

All of this is detached from the real world of managing services with high risk residents and staff that are taking risks with their own physical safety and their emotional safety. The feelings of anxiety and anticipated guilt if they take COVID back into their families are now all part of the working environment so a sense of emotional security is an absolute priority at the moment. This is a time when everyone is talking the “new normal”, which means change and we all know that change is a challenge that brings its own package of emotions, mostly anxiety driven. More now than ever people need to be able to express how they are feeling, what their ideas of the “new normal “ will look like and how they feel about all of this. More now than ever we all need to be able to listen to each other without judgement or preconceived ideas of what the world and other people will be like in the future.

I think that right now is the time to ask once again “what makes me and others safe?” What goes into making things safe in terms of models, organisations and how that is applied to our new and coming world of work and COVID tinged futures. One model suggests that there are three domains that contribute to safety, the physical, emotional and cognitive elements and each has its own components, as shown in the picture below:

It seems to me that this makes quite a good checklist of things to pay attention to when thinking about safety on an organisational level. This is perhaps a handy addition to the management tool box or for use as personal reflection. Maybe even a guide for a focused supervision session or staff group? Of all the elements the one that I focus on in my isolated state is emotional intelligence, I find it challenges me to keep the layers of the world in proportion and to think from the personal to the wider world. I came across a table of questions that uses the different levels to set out the challenges of being emotionally intelligent, there are some tricky ones in there for me and I guess they maybe for others.

This is all very fine and dandy but at times I just hide in the fluffy toy cupboard alongside ET and hope the danger will just go away without me being found. I dream for something simple, quiet and nonverbal, something that just is…

Stay safe, stay aware and be kind to yourself.

Tonight I shall draft a video and think about what I want to do with it, I may just copy some stuff from the blog above. Apart from that it will be cooking dinner and hopefully spending a bit of time on the patio before my evening walk around the garden for an hour. How I juggle video and walking remains to be seen. But my garden goes on bringing me new flowers and a space to try out the new paints that arrived today. I am not short of things to do.

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DVT DAY 81

Its Sainsburys day, first thought, actually it wasn’t. My first thought was about the fat partridge of a dawn that had woken me up and what I was missing. It’s a thought that I filed away for later use once I had had breakfast and a shower. Having done both and opened the greenhouse up for the day I got ready for the 9 o’clock meeting with the EE team to discuss a colleague’s output for this week’s theme; Leadership. The meeting went well, light and shade, nothing outstanding so we did the business and wound it up at 10 o’clock as other had more meetings. Its my turn next week to do Safety. I expect I will think up something suitable or not by next week.

I head for the garden and start to mow the front garden lawn and then to weed the front flower bed. What a pain that was. It hasn’t been done since the now deceased Brain did it at the back end of last autumn, grass and weeds everywhere. So, I grovel around with trowel and bucket and yank out the invading forces. By the time I had finished I was knackered or at least my knees were. Time for a soup lunch with my now getting stale homemade bread. I had barely finished and it was time for my next meeting.

I listen to service managers talk about their COVID experience and exchange views and ideas. A good hour apart from my feelings about people who eat on screen during a meeting. They are just incapable of managing their food intake and work but that’s a judgement borne out of the belief that they do not value the experience (me) enough. Either that or they just fucking ignorant and have no emotional intelligence at all and have no idea how repulsive it is to watch someone fork in mouthfuls of fodder and then masticate bovine fashion for all to see. What about all those people with eating disorders who would find the experience traumatic? No empathy, just thoughtless.

I write up my notes of the forum and eat the last six jelly beans from Christmas and wash then down with a coke, sitting on the garden swing seat. I ponder the sprouting sun flower seeds in their fibre pots and decide to re pot them in to bigger pots but on inspecting them find they have put roots through the bottom of the pots. Nothing else to do but plant them in the garden as soon as possible. Four the next hour or so I plant sun flower pots in the garden.

Tired from my exertions I retreat to the shed and in a moment of curiosity I squeeze some burnt umber acrylic onto the pallet and before I know what I am doing I am scraping/scratching and moving the paint on the small canvas. Too much paint, will not go back in tube so start a second canvas board. I’m in shock, that’s enough for one day, time to let it dry and head indoors for blog and dinner. Its tuna pasta day as its my partners singing lesson tonight, but the tutor has cancelled so I’ve a quiet evening tonight. Time to walk.