DVT DAY 156

Today was a lazy start and a bacon sandwich break fast which lead to a family chat on the patio. Tuesday is the day I fill my drug wallet for the week, a ritual like putting out the bins later in the day. Just another cog in the fight.

I spent the best part of a day filing a service self assessment tool for work to see whether we adhere by the ten standards that we promote as an enabling environment. An interesting exercise and one that created more questions about who and what tis was for. What followed was an interesting e-mail exchange trying to define exactly what we all thought we were doing in this exercise. I am still not sure I know what we are doing and as for why, that may be the nub of the issue.

By the time I had finished, put my washing in it was time to train. So I clambered on the bike and in the heat of the day ground out a forty minute session, by which time the garden guy had arrived and was busily rationalising the flower beds. My turn to make the salad to go with the protein at dinner, which I duly did and we ate dinner in the patio. Bins out, dishes cleared I settled down to watch Wolves lose one nil to Sevilla. So I come to the end of another day and time to blog. I bought a “thing” to make the website secure by so far I notice it is not activated. Another painfully interaction with IT is on the cards.

DVT DAY 155

Very tired today after a TEAM meeting, visit to garden centre amongst other things and a session on the bike in the heat. It feels a day of little achievement with a growing to do list. A poster that a friend sent me today summed it up for me.

At the moment I sit dripping sweat on a humid night having a hot flush and remembering that I must order my drugs for my Monday stabbing. The fight is mundane, routine and boring but nevertheless a fight to the death. I will try again tomorrow.

DVT DAY 154

Today I woke to find my partner doing yoga so I went to the patio to read and sip fruit tea. The family got to have breakfast on the patio and talk for a while. The garden is in that time of year when some unexpected flowers arrive but many are past their best so we decided on a trip to the garden centre. It was a disappointing visit as they to seemed to be between seasons. However we came away with a few plants to fill the gaps. Back home I spent the afternoon on my knees digging out the weeds from the front path and house front apron. Once that was clear it was time to plant the mornings haul. By the end of the afternoon I was dripping in sweat as much as a work out. It is always worth the effort as the garden rewards me with great beauty and inspiration.

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Thankfully I did not need to train today as at my morning weigh in I had lost weight. I was therefore able to rest a while before dinner on the patio. All very alfresco today. So this evening I have watched the end of season three of Stranger Things and then blogged , after reading a surprise e letter from a friend.

DVT DAYS 152 & 153

Yesterday was a writing day and most importantly it was snail day. I had retreated to the shed to write letters and ponder on ordering another laptop stand for the shed when out of the sky landed a snail. I thought it must have been dropped by a thrush, but no thrush arrived. It looked lifeless, which is probably no surprise, at the very least it must have one hell of a headache. Its shell was intact and covered in debris and cobwebs, but no sign of horns. I continued to write and have phone calls until I noticed the snail was moving. It precariously slithered itself up the electricity cable like a tight rope walker and headed for the shed. I took pity on it and got it to slime its it way on to a piece of cardboard, where it posed for me before I took it to a flower bed. It disappeared off into the undergrowth. Could have been nasty, a philosopher play writer, Aeschylus, got killed by an eagle dropping a turtle from the sky in ancient Greece about 500BC.

The rest if the day was taken with reading Isadora Duncan’s autobiography. An interesting read and a fascinating study in how people construct their own history. She wrote it when she was broke, again, and in the year she died aged fifty.

Today, Saturday, it was a lazy morning during which we organised our usual decorator to come and give us a quote to redecorate the house after the central heating has been re-piped. Then it was back to Isadora and her travels across Europe. By the afternoon Isadora is in Greece building her own Temple. I go to train on the bike for an hour during which Amazon deliver a laptop riser for the shed. So once I have recovered I test the riser in the shed and declare myself pleased.

A long bath while my partner clambered onto the bike and then I started the blog before dinner and picked it up again after the meal. So tonight I shall read and and dip into Stranger Things. Tomorrow is weigh in day and I will see if my changed diet over this week shows any result.

DVT DAY 151

Today has been a list of stuff: mundane mostly, except for the start when I woke up realising that Isadora Duncan died in the year Virginia Wolf published To The Lighthouse and wondered why, as far as I am aware they never met. So I searched Amazon and found she wrote an autobiography, so I ordered it. After such an interesting start it was always going to go down hill. So I spent the morning in the shed typing up poems, only 65 to go. At lunchtime I hosted my open forum alongside a colleague and then retreated to the shed to write the notes up. I felt mildly crap all day and it was an effort to get changed to do forty minutes on the bike. Apart from the weekly Tesco order check and the usual chores like putting clothes away there was not much to my life. My evening hit rock bottom when I found myself watching football and cutting my toe nails at the same time out of boredom. The most joyous thing in the day was a picture a friend sent me of what her children were doing with the play edition of “Who Gives a Crap” toilet rolls. They come in bulk and the play edition have bright design wrappers on each roll which can be used to build things like castles. Its a genius idea and I am wondering what other products could have play versions. The pretty covered toilet rolls from “Who Gives A Crap” make the cute koala on ours seem really passé. So on that note I am going to raid the cupboard for a snack as I am hungry and take myself to bed. Actually I am still pissed off with my oncologist, I seem to be making all the effort to try and keep myself well and fight my end and he just doesn’t give any sign of recognising that and even worse not willing to support me by giving me the means to get the feedback which would help me know if what I am doing is working for me.

DVT DAY 150

Today has been a day of domesticity, a day of mundane tasks that keep the world going, that provides. So by the end of the day my washing is done and hung, MOTs booked, garden watered and trimmed, dinner cooked and cleared, and new ice hockey shirt worn.

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Oh almost forgot, dead bird removed from pond before attending an open forum for therapeutic community clinicians.

The best part of the day was taking the time to take pictures of some of the flowers that are still coming out in the garden.

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It never ceases to amaze me that my garden goes on and on blooming throughout the year with such spectacular beauty.

My evening post meal gave me time to read an e-letter from a friend and watch some football before writing the blog. In the midst of the mundane there was no time to train, so tomorrow I will give myself a new target and push on a bit. I’ve eaten no sweets for two days now, which is a feat for me, so I find myself distracting myself to avoid the sweets I have stashed away. Its a part of the battle to get my weight down and to not feed my cancer with more sugar than I can help.

DVT DAYS 148 & 149

Yesterday, Monday, was a bit of a duff day really having started with the dentist ad moving onto the aggravation of my partner being told by the garage that they wanted £600 to replace two seat belts and tensioners. Without working seat belts there will be no M.O.T. So a lot of my day was spent watching videos of a wide range of iffy blokes doing things to cars. However as life is perverse the one thing these videos told me was that I did not have the right lubricant for the job so it meant a quick trip to Amazon to order it for the next day. The rest of my day was on board the bike and watching the end of series two of Stranger Things before going to bed dog tired.

Today Tuesday has been a day of achievement. I managed to retreat to the shed and write letters this morning. I even manged to get them in the post early before I settled down to a late morning meeting to discuss the Open Forums. A productive morning and one that will hopefully bear fruit in the near future.

Its car time. I empty out my partners car and examine the rear seat belts that were laying around like lazy snakes on the back seat. Very little if any recoil on them so I try to take the interior panel off but although they pop out at the top they are pinned in at the base. No way in there. I can see the mechanism though a grill in the panel. I am able to get a screw drive through the slots and very slowly rewind the seat belt back onto the spindle. The first belt has a bit of recoil in it and although slow will rewind very slowly. The second one is far more obdurate and difficult to rewind and shows no sign of recoil at all. I get as far as I can and have to pack up and wait for my lubricant to arrive. I thought I would climb on the exercise bike but before I could change into my kit Mr Amazon delivered my special lubricant.

Back out in the car I push the lubricant nozzle through the grill and give the first belt drum a squirt and gently pull the belt and let it recoil, I do this over and over again and add lubricant to the belt as I let more of it wind onto the drum. Within a couple of minutes the belt is running in and out on recoil as it should. One down, one to go. The second one was more of a problem as it had no recoil at all so I pulled it out as far as possible and then tugged it hard till it clicked as it should when in an accident. I did this three or four time while adding lubricant and slowly the belt. started to rewinds as it should. I lubricated the mechanism more but also lubricated the belt itself. In no time at all the belt was running smoothly and the recoil working as it should. So job done, £600 pounds saved. The MOT will be done at the garage that looks after the Wolf. So everything is back in place and now I face an evening of anxiety as Brentford play Fulham for a place in the premier league. I shall distract myself with Stranger Things.

NEWSFLASH: BRENTFORD 1

FULHAM 2. GUTTED

DVT 147

Here is todays learning tip; when the car key battery runs out using it trips the car alarm. Second learning point: the bloody alarm keeps going on Mazda even if you disconnect the battery! Third learning point: A back up car key that has also got a spent battery makes the situation worse. Fourth learning point: there is no fuse for the alarm system. Fifth learning point: if your lucky the car will start on the twenty fifth attempt and stop the alarm. In the meantime as you frantically try to stop the alarm get a family member to ring the BBQ hosts to tell them you are going to be late.

So after much aggravation and the pleasant surprise of a neighbour taking the trouble to check the car is not being stolen we make it to our friends to spend the afternoon in their garden eating barbequed chicken, beef, lamb, sausage and accompaniments. Most important was the conversation and the opportunity to talk to someone who has not shared your house for the last five months. So it was lovely to chat outside in the garden for a full afternoon. It was also nice when the car started to come home. Of course the first thing to do was replace the battery in one car key and order another ten batteries from amazon.

A quiet evening watching Strange Things before writing the blog and watching the dentists video in preparation for my visit to the dentist tomorrow morning.

DVT DAY 146

August the 1st, I am now a non shielding citizen. Freedom to mix with the virus infected population, social distance, wear trendy face wear, refuse to shake hands, and wash my hands as many times as I like with out explanation or feeling obsessional. From now on I can go to pubs and not talk to strangers, dine out and be far enough away not to hear other people eat, avoid barbers and act strange and blame it on lockdown syndrome.

Of a more prosaic nature I spent my morning completing the mending of a sewing machine, most satisfying to take something apart, replace parts and make it work again. So feeling a glow of achievement I retreated to the shed to spend an hour on the exercise bike of which a quarter of an hours was done wearing my altitude training mask. A shower and I settle down to watch the cup final. Dinner and an evening of Stranger Things and running off the new sowing machine manual from the internet. Tomorrow I go BBQing at a friends house, a family outing to assert my new freedom. Other adventures will follow. I hanker after the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, museums and art galleries. My poetry project will be completed, my painting continued, and perhaps newer things embarked on.

DVT DAY 145

Today was a shed day, so after a breakfast of noodles I made way down to the shed and settled in. Today I resurrected my poetry project and spent hours typing a bunch of poems into the laptop. I’ve unfortunately reached the ones I wrote when I was twenty one or younger. Some nice ideas but very young in accomplishment. I got as far as those that had been dated or could be located between two dates. My only option was to number them all in sequence from the start of the file as I was pretty obsessive about filing my poems right from the start, so I am confident they are in date order. So after some basic sums I find I have got 76 to go. I figure if a work at it steady a bit at a time I will have it done by the end of August. Then the fun starts as I will need to continue the numbering to the other poems I already have on the laptop. I clearly moved from typewriter to computer at some point, all I have to do is merge them and hey presto the guts of the book are ready. Apart for a pit stop ham sandwich I kept at it all day till about four o’clock when it was time to clamber up onto the exercise bike and grind out 40 minutes of pain in sweltering heat. If I had waited an hour I could have trained through the thunderstorm that hit us early evening. I just feel sorry for the Tesco delivery person who presumably is out delivering in this appalling weather. So we eat dinner and wait the arrival of Tesco before watching the final two episodes of series one of Strange Things and perhaps test run the mended sewing machine.