DVT DAYS 79 & 80

DAY 64 Tuesday.

It’s Tuesday and it is also yesterday, so my memory of it maybe a tad augmented. I definitely got up and I had breakfast, that I know. I also know I went to the shed and moved my art bag and easel to it. The challenge now is to open them and screw up the courage to create. That’s quite daunting but I shall take inspiration from Grayson Perry who, on his last show, unashamedly designed a tea towel, a cracking good  tea towel mind you, but a tea towel nether the less.

I must have done something else in the morning, in fact I think I planted some more cosmos in the front garden before settling down to my one to one with the Enabling Environment programme manager. This went well and I came away with a manageable number of task to do. Lunch and then a return to the garden where I potted up purple carrots, and other veg in grow containers. I cleared the raised bed in the front garden and then replanted it with tomato plants from the green house. By the time I had finished the green house was looking quite bare so it’s time to start the second wave.

Being tired and hungry I retreated to the house where I ate dinner and watched some TV till I could live with myself no longer. I had not achieved my 10, 000 steps or walked and that could not be allowed to stand. I change and I go and walk to end the day with a total number of steps over 15,000. Go me, back on track. I run a bath and lay in it listening to a book at bedtime and then to a “conversation” between two gay women comedians and a trans man about life and relationships. Two of them were in a relationship but it was tricky to work out who. I got bored at the point where they started to compare tricky mental health periods of their lives  and went to bed. I do not think I lack compassion or empathy (well perhaps empathy) but when I am tired, under house arrest for being ill and have things to do, frankly I don’t give a fuck, I am too busy staying alive.

DAY 65 Wednesday

Up with the lark, or the rather over weight and quite pedestrian Dodo and down for breakfast. I sit my arse on the sofa and check my e-mails and by some bizarre twist of bureaucracy end up there till almost gone 11 o’clock. I do in fairness to me manage to tick of all my tasks from yesterdays one to one, so I do feel quite please with myself. Then I head for the shed and write a letter to an old colleague in response to her letter of a few days ago. Like all my letters when completed and signed and sealed they are delivered to my Hogwarts Owl who then posts them for me, although I think she thinks that I only do it to get her out of the house. I bring in the bins, take photographs of a bees bum up a foxglove and get ready for an on line open forum.

I sit in the open forum and take the odd note but realise I am uncomfortable with it today, not sure why but it feels sticky and I am aware that I did not blog yesterday, always a nag in my head when I do that but I was in the bath late listening to that conversation. I wonder if it’s on podcast, whatever that is. Clearly time to go to the shed to write the blog and think about what pictures I am going to use.

In a moment of… recklessness I open up the art box and take out a small blank canvas and start to make marks on it. I am thinking colours, pallet knives and daubing as opposed to paint brush dibs and daps.

Before I get to the colour stage I take myself in doors to send a couple of e-mails and then I settle down to a long Teams call with a friend, an afternoon coffee. It makes such a difference to be able to see people when talking to them and to be able to do this as a normal conversation and not a work meeting is a delight. Being able to talk about the ordinary things is a relief and being able to talk through the experience of lockdown and in my case being cancered is extremely generative.

Post Teams call it is dinner, TV, walk and sorting out the last minute additions to the Sainsburys order, life must go on.

DVT DAY 78

I wake up early to sunshine and head for the swing seat in the garden. I read Anger Management for Beginners and sip coffee to take my drugs.

After an hour or so I am joined by my partner and we chat for a while before we go in to the house and get breakfast ready. I continue to read on the patio, I am quite addicted to this book as it echoes so many of my own irritations. At the other end of the table my partner starts a jigsaw. Its midmorning and Amazon man delivers some goodies. My paint brushes and pallet knives have arrived alongside a contactless thermometer.

I continue to read until lunchtime when I finish off the one pot from the previous evening, and then water some of the plants and the seed trays. I read some more and then join in the putting the jigsaw together. A tricky puzzle but well worth the effort as the details are lovely.

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I continue to read and then set about mending the nonworking set of solar flowers that had stopped working. I rewire part of the array and will wait for nightfall to see if my work bears fruit.

Dinner tonight is light and I begin to write the blog before Grayson Perry presents his arts club after which it is Killing Eve for me and more reading if I am lucky, although I need to prepare for my work one to one tomorrow.

DVT DAYS 76 & 77

Saturday, Day 61. There is not a lot to say about Saturday beyond the word lawnmower. Most of my productive day was spent mending the now ageing Flymo, pac-a-mow lawn mower. I had previously diagnosed the fact that the power switch was knackered by the fiendish use of my circuit tester and had ordered replacement parts, all of which turned up except the actual switch, meaning I had o reorder from another supplier. The part eventually arrived Friday evening so you can imagine how excited I was to get going on my project on this Saturday morning. I set to work sitting at the door of my shed, my tool boxes opened next to me, and started the operation. All went well, I even remembered to take one or two photographs as I went along, just to make sure I wired it back up the right way.

These jobs never got smoothly. I had to re crimp the wiring connections with new connectors before could reassemble the power switch and its housing. The moment came to test the beast. Plugged into the mains and activated the switch. Nothing, I stand back in amazement. This is always what I do when at first I do not succeed. Fuck! I undo all my work and recheck the wiring and the circuitry, which is all tickety boo. So I have a mystery. I recheck the fuse, which I had done earlier. No problem there. Next option the power cable to the motor may be broken. So now I am taking of the motor housing which is fiendishly screwed on with counter sunk hexagonal screw heads. I have the very one to hand and whip the housing off to find a motor bay full of compacted dead grass.

I spend time digging the “gunk” out of the engine bay and even resort to hovering it out to get rid of it all. I check the circuit between the power switch and the motor connectors. Again the circuit is good so on theory the motor is getting power but it isn’t. My heart sinks for a moment at the thought of the motor having died, if that was the case then life would be either tricky or expensive. I reflect, I remember I had checked the mains plug fuse, which was good so I started to check the mains cable and could not find a circuit. I get a couple of extension cables from the tool shed and check them. Bizarrely one of them was good the other was no functioning and got dumped.  I set about replacing the mowers power cable with a modified extension cable. At last it is all in place and the moment of truth arrived. I press the power button, pull the power levers and the mower… springs into life! Genius, go me. I pack away the tools and tidy up, Dysoning the shed just for good measure in my tidy up mood. So most of my day is gone and I feel impelled to do something more creative. My answer to this is to plant up some of my grow bags with plants from the green house so that I can get everything off the grounds where the voracious snails live. Finally it is time to go inside and prepare for the evening.

I find German football is on and tune in on the computer in the office but it does not hold my attention so start to dig out my collection of art material from the cupboard. I reorganise my art bag and also fill my portable easel, however I am distracted by the fact that the football has suddenly disappeared and the screen is telling me that it is not receiving any signal. I am perplexed and check the line in to the screen and restart the computer. I retune to the football to find that I had missed two goals, isn‘t that always the way! I continue to wonder how I have accrued so many sets of coloured pencils when the football disappears again and I get the same “no signal” message. This time I unplug the myriad of leads from the tower and look behind it to find the monitor lead is not plugged in. I plug it all back together again and hope for the best but in doing so discover the external hard drive is not backing up as it should do. Life is never easy but I’ve had enough for today. I back up the system and leave it for today. We have a late dinner due to the families commitment to yoga and weight training and think about TV. We watch some of the Race Around the World but by 8 o’clock I have yet to reach my 10,000 steps. Its a change into my walking gear for me and I head out into the garden to walk for an hour. I end up with 15,000 steps so I am well pleased. I collapse into the sofa and we watch some of the Umbrella Academy. I am tired and my injection from yesterday os sore and quite prominent. Tomorrow is weigh in day, if come in under 100 kilos I’m having a day off from the walking. I am too tired to contemplate the blog, it will have to wait till tomorrow.

Its Sunday, DAY 62. I wake at three thirty in the morning and find my way to the bathroom and having evacuated everything I decide I might as well weigh myself now. 100.7 Kilos. Bugger, no rest day then for me. I go back to bed and wake up at about 7:30, I get up and find a friend has sent me “Anger Management for Beginners by Giles Coren. I make coffee, do yesterdays crosswords and read the first chapter of the book which I find very funny and a bit too close to my own irritants and angers.

I make my partner tea and take to her in bed and there we chat till joined by our eldest daughter, so we chat some more. By the time we are chatted out its gone eleven o’clock. It’s a late breakfast for everybody, which we end by ringing my youngest daughter. Isn’t Facetime grand? While we chat I drag out the bread making machine and begin to get the ingredients together. Thanks to a gift of yeast from a good friend baking bread has become a possibility again.

Breakfast over, daughter chatted to, and bread under way I start to sort out the baking cupboard, which is packed with odd bits and pieces and ingredients.

Finally I get it done, clear the kitchen, during which I find one of the Teflon coated pans is no longer coated and is showing shiny metal through its black coating. It goes in the bin. Kitchen cleared of breakfast, baking and organising I hit Amazon and buy a new milk pan and while I am at a new contactless thermometer. With the bread maker chugging along, Daisy dishwasher doing her bit, I turn to the blog and begin to catch up from yesterday, during which my partner brings me coffee and homemade lemon drizzle cake. I am so tempted to play hooky from my daily walk but unless I have lost 0.7 of a kilo since 3:30 this morning then a walk is on the cards at some point the only question is whether it is before or after I prepare chicken one pot.

A nice surprise the smell of fresh bread. Its been a long time since I made bread but now the smell will entice me to do it more often.

One pot underway and I am looking forward to soaking up the juices with fresh bread, before I go for my walk, or not. I am tired and sore still from Fridays injection, it really is like having a duck egg in my abdomen. Perhaps I will have a night off and give myself a break.

DVT DAY 75

Well what a sloppy start to the day, no muesli, no yoghurt, no honey so it’s a fried egg sandwich and coffee that gets me going this morning. Then it’s a shower before I don real trousers prior to going to the GP to get my monthly cancer repellent injection. These are the rare days I get dressed properly, shave and put on deodorant and aftershave. So I am ferried to the surgery for 10:40 for reception to tell my partner that they have booked me in for 11:10. We take a drive around the local villages and pop back into home where I find my face masks have been delivered. I try them on and I am pleased with them, these will be my post lockdown travel wear.

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With my appointment imminent I don my current “going to the doctors” face wear and get ferried to the surgery again. I get stabbed and let out the back door to return to the car and get my lift home. I retreat to the shed.

I spend the rest of the morning writing letters, some in response to received letters but also one in response to the news that a friend had had to call and report to the police what appears to have been an intrusion into their yard. I deliver the letters to my Hogwarts Owl and then its lunch time.

Post lunch I begin to get ready to do my walk around the garden for an hour. Today I include the patio and I can do more of the drive as we have moved the cars to facilitate our Tesco delivery later on. I do my hour and get my 10,000 step celebration after which I recover on the swing seat listening to Bette Midler and sipping cold coke. When I go into the house I find the new drinks bottle I could have done with earlies had now arrived. I’m going to try and monitor my hydration to help keep my kidneys healthy.

So I pack away the shed, change into lounge clothes and start to watch a German football match when the Tesco delivery arrives early, so a few minutes were taken up packing away the goodies and noting what was going where. For me it was back to football while my partner and eldest daughter prepared food for dinner. I spent sometime putting in the odd piece in the current jigsaw but was careful not to finish it as this would have been a major irritation to my partner who had done the vast majority of it and therefore had the right to finish it. Van Gogh is lovely but tricky as a jigsaw especially one that has “whimsies” cut into it.

So, I finally get to that part of the evening when I set to write the blog, tonight it is after Vera has concluded and the evening news bulletins are about to pump out more doom gloom and saccharine into the lounge. I try to ignore it and find a Russian world ice hockey jersey on e-bay which I hope is now winging its way towards me. It’s almost time for bed and I am wary of going due to the soreness of todays injection site and the fact that I appear to be one of those people experiencing poor sleep during lock down, it is true however that mine is greatly contributed to by my hot flushes, which wake me and drench me in sweat. It also induces a great deal of restlessness. In the good old days I would have downed a large brandy and slept like the dead, that is not an option now of course.

DVT DAY 74

It’s been a long day and I am tired. After a poor nights sleep I find I am out of yogurt and muesli and almost out of time before my first meeting of the day. From that first TEAMS screen till now it does not feel as if I have stopped doing things. Amidst the meetings, open forums, spare part ordering, note writing, GP injection booking, MOT sorting and re testing the lawn mower I went for my daily walk. Odd moments included the delivery of bamboo canes for the garden, downloading images for work and the last-minute changes to the Tesco delivery for tomorrow. Moments of reflection and connection like a favourite track post run and an unexpected telephone call with a friend lightened the day no end.

So after a long day I intend to try and sleep tonight as I face my 28 day injection tomorrow morning. A double edge sword, life-saving injection that leaves me sore for several days and the thrill of going beyond the confines of the house and garden for a short jaunt to the GP surgery. My life is grand, under no circumstances buckle.

DVT DAY 73

An early challenge, crystallised honey. Before I can get my usual breakfast I have to immerse the honey jar in hot water to return it to its flowing state. While I wait for the miracle to happen I empty Daisy the dishwasher and clear the kitchen. Once the honey was ready, I eat breakfast and prepare to go to the shed. However, before I do, I have to fill my weekly drugs dispenser and discover I have none of my blood thinning drugs. I’ve ordered some so it will be a day before I get more, but that should not be a problem.

Today I try to run a LAN to the laptop in the shed from the main Wi-Fi hub, it seems to go well until I actually try to surf the net and then the system is so slow the system times out and fails to get to the target site. I revert to gardening and plant put a lot of the runner beans, beetroots and tomato plants. Having got as far as I can I drag out the lawn mower. It takes a while to get the lawns down at the back as I have to keep moving wires and hose pipes. It goes reasonably well until I go to the front garden and then the mower just stops working. I am not amused so I drag the offending dead machine to the back garden and break out the too kits. I get the power switch out and test it and the handle mechanism, as far as I can tell it is working okay. My meter tells me the electrics are sound, so I reassemble it and check the fuse, that too is in working order. I leave the dead machine, eat lunch and log on to the Wednesday Open Forum for and hour. I take notes, chat and resist the temptation to swig non-alcoholic beer from the bottle during the forum.

Back in the garden I pack up the tools I was using by which time out porch is full of fruit and vegetables. I pack these away, clear away the lunch pots and ger ready to go for my garden to garden walk. A walk for an hour getting sweater as I go and taking a drink every quarter of an hour. I discover that the drinks bottles that we have are all useless for drinking on the move and make a mental note to order a proper sports bottle today. At the end of the walk I sit on the swing set and listen to my favourite Bette Midler track. I go inside the house and try to log on on my notebook and find that there is no electricity. I check the fuse box and find that the mains circuit for the front part of the house had tripped. I returned the power and then realised that the lawn mower stopped when I moved to the front of the house and used a power point on the main circuit. If it had blown before I tried to mow the front lawn then it would explain why it stopped. It would also explain why when I tested it in the back garden it did not work as the garden power point is run off the same circuit. So tomorrow one of my jobs will be to recheck the mower. All so annoyingly time consuming.

The blog gets started but dinner interrupts it and then I plump for a bath. Today no yoga as the walk was hard so I use the bath to breath for a while and relax my muscles. I emerge from the bath in time to catch the end the Great British Sewin Bee. It merges into news programmes full of virus news and I return to writing the blog. I’m tired and I think that this blog is becoming boring as I find it difficult to make the effort to think and observe beyond the mundane. Although I will say that the sight of a union jack flag flying in one of my neighbours garden stunned me somewhat, and made me wonder if we are about as a nation to slide into smug nationalism.

DVT DAY 72

It is a day that starts in a strange way. I get up and find plants in the kitchen. My partner has been out for her early walk and has cleared the village cooperative out of plants. One daisy plant and thirty petunias sit waiting. After my usual breakfast I head for the shed and set it up. Then I face the conundrum of where to plant thirty petunias. I have a quick look round and decide to take on the patio area where the flowers that had wintered were now seriously gone over and some of the pots were host to dead twigs. So, I set to and empty pots and planters and replant them with the new ones. This took me most of the morning and still I have new plants to find homes for. I move to the front garden and empty more pots and the odd hanging basket. The rest of the new plants go into the front garden. My garden goes on producing new blooms and providing beauty at every turn.

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Time for lunch and my partner makes me a ham sandwich and grapes, which we eat together on the patio, where we are joined by our eldest daughter. Lunch over and I open my post which consists of some LAN connectors and a letter from an old friend and colleague. I long chatty letter that takes me time to read a real pleasure. I check my work e-mails and find that I have work that I need to do for an hour. What is required is a summary of my work from April 2019 to the end of March 2020. An interesting period of my life that includes kidney failure, dialysis in Jamaica, an air ambulance home and then a raft of tests that ends up with me having cancer. Then of course there was the chemo therapy, so all in all a crap tax year, topped of with a DVT. Surely the tax man must owe me money!

Time for a walk, so off I go on my garden to garden walk for over an hour. Its hot today and I fix up a drinks bottle to see me through. I find four bags of compost have been delivered in the porch and need to be humped to the garden. I close up the shed and the greenhouse and retreat in doors. I tidy the kitchen and put out the bins for tomorrow while my partner rings her mother and then goes of to do yoga. Soon it is my turn to go and do yoga. I struggle so I know that I need to find a gentler session to do. Something that eases me into it more demanding routines. My shoulders are stiff and my right side pulls painfully. So gentle is the watch word at the moment.

Dinner is taken in front of the TV while I start the blog but it will soon be time for The A Word, a beautifully written and acted series about a family with young people on the autism spectrum. It is a pleasant interlude before the late evening news with its depressing stream of COVID related stories, speculations and encouragements. It looking to be hot tomorrow so I will spend most of my day on the garden. Growing and writing seem to be my major ways of coping.

DVT DAY 71

I wake up stiff from yesterday’s gardening and look to have a quick breakfast and get on with my day. Before I have a chance to eat two people turn up to collect the surplus weights bench, no receipt but I take photographs of them disappearing with the parcel.

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So breakfast done I head for the shed and set up for the morning coming face to face with our local squirrel, who I had not seen for some time. Once in my shed I set to and write letters all morning, stopping only to open my post. Surprise surprise the tax man wants me to submit my tax return as soon as possible. This years return is going to be grim reading given the crap year I’ve had, at least the accounts will not take long. All I haver to do is dig out my portal details and wait for my P60s to turn up.

Lunch is taken on the patio with my partner and eldest daughter and we chat about how we are faring. So far it’s okay but getting boring and there is a pressure to keep finding new things to stimulate us.  

Lunch over I have a rest and sort out my training gear and get ready for my walk. I walk my garden for an hour and twelve minutes. As usual I get my 10,000 step congratulations. I grab a cup of coffee and review a yoga video that a good friend sent me. It looked doable so I stick it in my favourites and go upstairs and set myself up. Of course, being the household we are there is a yoga mat to hand. So, I rollout the mat, set the notebook running and get ready to start. Off we go and it’s a straight forward siting position and it is instantly clear that I am stiff and my joints have seized beyond where I thought I was. So this was going to be demanding but I am not stupid, I know a 71 year old with cancer in the spine is not going to be bendy like Bambi but on the other hand I cannot wrap myself up in cotton wool and become a bent up excuse of an adult. I know my limits and I like myself so what will happen is my best approximation. Actually keeping a straight back is tricky, not when I sit upright but when I lay down. Starting out then was an effort just to sit cross legged and breath. So having established what I could manage I pressed on. Pleasingly things got much better and by the time I had breathed a few times and downward dogged I got into the rhythm. The crunch came when I was supposed to roll my weight on the outside of one foot and turn my hips to the floor. Nope that was not going to happen, but it will in the weeks to come. I catch with Adriene, the tutor, in the next move and continue in my best approximation till the end of the tape, I even manage the happy baby posture after a fashion. I was far far away like Donkey in Shrek a lot of the time but there was nothing that is not attainable given time. I felt better for doing it. What was disconcerting was the tendency of the mat to ruckle up leaving my toes to slip on the carpet whilst I was downward dogging. I will know next time.

Time to close the shed for the day and having finished I went and sat on the garden swing seat with my eldest daughter. We chatted for a while until my partner appeared and we all decided it was time to get inside and get the evening under way. For me that means beginning the blog and checking the afternoon windows. We eat dinner and prepared for this evenings TV which will be Grayson Perry’s Art Club followed by Ordinary People. Fun followed by intensity, I will see how I last as I’ve got the urge to rummage through my art materials and see what I can put together. I think I am inspired by the things that people have sent or given to me.

As I have no obvious artistic talent I am intrigued to see what if anything I end up producing. I have of course got a growing “to do” list, mostly to do with the garden, enabling environments, life admin and running a LAN to the shed, but I think I am beginning to relax into a pastime mode and dump the urge to be productive, maybe its being institutionalised by “Shielding”.

DVT DAY 70

GARDEN ALL DAY

DVT DAY 69

A late start moved sluggishly to a bacon sandwich and coffee. A meandering morning of odd moments like opening the post, opening the greenhouse and clearing things away. Very domestic. By mid-day my partner and eldest daughter are ready to go for their walk and deliver her brother’s birthday card so I have an opportunity to get into the office and install the video editing suite on the main system. I make a test recording and then settle down to record my work commitment. I like the excitement of playing with new technology even though it has its frustrating moments. You know the ones I mean, you push a button and everything disappears, which then provokes a stream of cathartic expletives. I had several of those but ended up with a front card, middle and end card, and that was enough excitement for me.

Time for a walk. Garden to garden for an hour plus during which my Fitbit gave me the 10,000 step celebration. As usual I end my walk siting on the garden swing seat, this time refreshing myself with an orange ice cream lolly. Such decadence. Before closing up the garden for the day I put hard wood tiles under the front end of the green house to stop the front of it sinking into the lawn any further.

Back in the house I change and watch the first half of a German football match played with out a crowd. Very weird and strange to hear every kick of ball. It was like watching kids on the local park playing without their overzealous parents jumping around and abusing the referee. I could not be bothered with the second half. Dinner time and the bizarre prospect of the euro vision non song show that was due to drag on till 10 0’clock.  Thirty second snippets of 42 songs and mini platitudes about corona virus. I think not so I wrote the blog and hope that the multi channels of “stuff” has something worth watching. It is the evenings that are the worse. However today brought out the blooming of my grandfather’s other iris type, the purple one, scented as exquisitely as the blue one. That makes it worthwhile.

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