I have been busy alright. Garden and work mostly. I continue to fight by staying as fit as I can, no alcohol, reduced sweet stuff and daily time on the exercise bike. Result; I am the lightest I have been all year.
Tomorrow is my birthday it is also the following: 483 days since I was admitted to hospital in Jamaica with kidney failure, 383 days since I was given my diagnosis of metastatic prostate cancer, 383 days since my first hormone suppressant injection. 329 days since I first saw my oncologist, 291 since my first chemo therapy, 181 days since I finished chemotherapy, 119 days since I was diagnosed with a DVT.
All work and no play makes Roland a quick blog person. At the moment I am fully engaged in the Community of Communities Annual Forum being held on line. When I am not doing that I am busily writing content for a training resource which has as a short deadline. So life is very full especially when I try hard to keeep up my daily exercise bike time. All that means is I have little time to think and reflect on what I want to write in the blog. I am loathe to stop writing for each day as the blog as it is still very much part of my strategy to resist the cancer. The discipline and the routine is good for me and it keeps things in perspective as the days pass. It is a sort of check in for me and for family and friends that I am seperated from.
With lack of thinking time goes fatigue. I am tired by the time it comes to write the blog these days, but with a birthday coming up I am planning a break and a rest so that I can have some quality thinking and blog time.
Today its been all work. Straight into a conference session, lunch and then back again to the conference. Both the presentations were excellent and the reflective spaces following them were both interesting and stimulating. I had the pleasant task of chairing the two reflection sessions. As soon as the conference was over I packaged and posted my sisters birthday present and returned home to head for the shed and the exercise bike. An hour on the bike and I was back in front of my laptop writing content for the Enablng Environment LeadershipResource. Only late in the evening when I had sent the EE work off to the editor had I goto time to write this brief blog. It feels like I am in work mode for the week and want to be clear of work for next week when my birthday rolls round. Each birthday that I make is now a present in itself and I intend to celerate each one as lavishly as I can, although COVID and the new Leicester lockdown is a downer this year. I am just hoping there will be enough in the future to do more expansive things.
So this is it, its conference week on the net. After getting up I have a quick breakfast and log on to the conference. A screen full of familar faces of people that I had the pleasure of working with over the years and some new faces who work in the therapeutic communities. The first part of the day was an open session and an introducttion to the conference programme and a recap of the year to date. A brief break and we are back for an interview with one of the originators of the Community of Commnities. All very interesting until the end when he puts up photographs of people who were at the first C of C annual forum 18 years ago. One of them was of me and a colleague at that time, no beard, thats me not the colleague. Bit of a shock seeing myself as I was 18 years ago. Another break during which my new Underwood T shirt arrives. I had it made after seeing the testamony of his sister to the senate comittee following the death of George Floyd.
My new T shirt
Below is one of the newscasts that show the testomony that caughth my mind.
Back in the conference space we sit together again and go over issues of old. By 3 o’clock we come to an end and I quickly change and get myself to the shed where the bike awaits me. An hour later I am sweaty and tired with a to do list of domestic chores to do.
My post bike look
Chores done I sit and check my emails and begin the blog till dinner is ready. Dinner done I continue the blog and will post it before I have an evening of warm baths and thinking about tomorrows conference as I am chairing two of the session. Seemed like a good idea when I offered, now I am not sure, hey ho!
Two days of little to note really, a lazy weekend in which the rain, football and the occasional outburst of WhatApp kept me going. It was nice to earn a rest day from the bike on Sunday by weighing in with a weight loss at the early Sunday morning weigh in. Maybe the bike will pay off.
I am reluctant to go out and about just yet and I am not sure if it is a habit response in that I maybe becoming institutionalised in my own home or more risk adverse as the news media keep talking about a “COVID spike” in Leicester.
Coronavirus testers swoop on Leicester as spike in cases could lead to first local lockdown in days
28 Jun 2020, 18:31
Updated: 28 Jun 2020, 18:32
As my shed becomes my office, studio and gym I spend more time in it and have less need to venture into the world except to post my letters. My lockdown tactic of make the world come to me has worked beyond my expectations but in parallel my skills and abilities to use various communications modes has expanded. Most of my worldly needs like food, drink, clothes, equipment and indulgencies all arrive in my porch and just create a fortnightly job of wrangling the cardboard recycling mountain out to the collection point. My outflow consists of letters, emails, WhatsApp, texts ,videos, a YouTube channel, Zoom, Teams, phone calls, Amazon and the internet. When listed like that it looks a formidable modern list. There is little left other than build a pigeon loft.
So with intelligent application of the mediums available being in the outside world becomes redundant. All of course the most important thing, that of human contact. The biggest danger is turning into one of Harlow’s monkeys brought up by a chicken wire mother and craving Terry towelling comfort of touch.
Harlow Monkey preferring touch comfort to food.
It becomes a self fulfilling process as new ways of being at home present themselves. Next week much of my time will be spent at a conference on the internet. When I am not at the conference I shall be doing other work over the net. The challenge will be to get out to the shed.
Today was as follows: 1. breakfast, 2. mow the lawns, 3. write for hours about maintaining an enabling environment, 4. climb on the bike, 5. eat, 6. do Glastonbury. Productive but a boring read.
Its hot. At 9 0’clock it was hot for the work call. It was hot at 10 o’clock when I retreated to the shed and wrote work stuff all morning. It was hotter at 1 o’clock when I hosted an open forum for an hour and it continued to be hot when I wrote up the notes in the shed. When I climbed onto the bike for 45 minutes in the shed it was bloody hot, and oven like when I finished. Since then I’ve eaten, watched football and chatted in a pool of sweat. Did I mention it is hot, that pre storm, crack the sky, break the atmosphere hot. Not looking forward to tonight as I know it will be sleeplessly hot.
My impression is that everyone is making it up. Everyone does their own risk assessment and then allows themselves to do what they most want to do as an exception. I must drive to Durham to see how my eyesight has survived COVID-19.
Work, more work and yet more work as I try to catch up a back log of work. At 1 o’clock I attend an open forum on the net and then return to my shed to continue the work. The postman brings me a letter that spells out my new Shielding guidance, so it looks like my youngest daughter can soon come and stay. If all goes well I shall be fully free by August providing there is no spike. I finish work and clamber onto the bike and grind out another 45 minutes in the sweltering heat of the shed. Dinner which includes a neighbours strawberries and cinnamon buns. Then the highlight of the day; the final of the Great British Sewing Bee. The right person won but the made to measure dress by Matt was stunning. So time for the news and then football and I shall be away to bed as I have a 9 o’clock meeting in the morning.
I woke to sunshine, breakfast and a drugs pouch refill this morning. A retreat to the shed, hanging out my washing as I went, and a quick planting of more lettuce. I settled to catch up with my correspondence. Mid morning a parcel arrived for me, it was the other half of my fathers day present from my youngest daughter. Seedboms. An inspired choice of gift. I shall take great delight in bombing the more barren areas of my garden.
Letters written its lunchtime which my partner made and we ate on the patio in glorious sunshine. For me it was time to prep for my meeting with the YMCA. It a meeting that went well despite some terrible IT issues for one contributor. I still find a Zoom meeting where people choose not to turn on the video disconcerting, its like going to a meeting with a bag over your head. Meeting over I pop to the post box and deposit my letters for the day, to return home and change into my cycling shorts and churn out a half hour session in the heat of the shed. Once recovered I sort out the gigantic pile of recycling cardboard that has accumulated over the last two weeks in the hall way. I admit I hide the polythene and expanded packaging under the layers of cardboard that I stuff into the largest carton. Once done the bins go out and the now quite solid carton of cardboard gets wedged between them . I return to the shed to read while my family are out walking the village.
My partner eschews the suggestion of a take away and decides to cook a one pot and I write the blog. I’ve a stack of work things to do tomorrow while my partner has a days leave to enjoy the sunshine with a new paddling pool and sun lounger. It might also be the day that social distancing gets reduced and more things given the go ahead to open up again. I still have till the end of July to do I think but a small garden celebration on my birthday maybe permissible.
Awake and heart sink, 08:05, 28 day injection appointment 08:30! Time to brush teeth, spray the pits and dress. This of course includes picking a face mask as I am going to the GP surgery. My partner drives me done, because I am lazy. I ring and tell them I have arrived and get told to get myself to the back door. I go to the back door and try to get my mask on. I discover that my ears are not up to it. I cannot get the bloody elastic to stay on my ears and in my struggles I rip out my ear stud. I am not amused and I am even more pissed off when a bag woman wanders up to the door and says “you must be waiting for me”. Good of the nurse to turn up ,really it must be hell donning PPE, that’s nursing for you. I get in still wrestling with the mask and lay on the couch. Its the left side today and sure enough that is where the needle goes.
Home and its time for breakfast, rabbit food and yogurt. That delicious meal over I wander into the garden and rearrange things in the leper shed so I can fit the exercise bike into it. So it is now my wifi-less office, art studio and gym. If I had a throne installed I could live like a king.
Office, studio, gym
I take more photos of flowers in the garden and skim weed from the pond surface before sitting down to write letters, which takes me up to lunchtime. Back in the house I check my laptop for e-mail and realise I have missed a meeting time so there is some hasty massages to rearrange for 3 o’clock. I take the opportunity to go to the post office with my letters and stretch my legs. Once back I settle down to my meeting and chat about future work and arrange a new timetable.
Back to the shed with my newly delivered cycling gloves and I go for my first in shed cycle. An hour later my arse hurts, Rammstein is louder than I’ve ever had it but I have managed the full hour. My family have gone out so I hit the bathroom and have warm bath bomb bathe, such luxury. Having dried the floor I throw on clothes and settle down to arrange a Tesco delivery for next Friday. I’ve abandoned Sainsburys as at Tesco you can indicate if you will accept substitutes, so hopefully this time I will get Mars bar ice creams and not the crap substituted chocolate ice cream sandwiches that taste like cardboard. Dinner is then ready and I eat.
My evening was mostly watching an appalling thing called the “Luminaries”. That’s an hour of my life I wont get back. I will not do that again. So it was then time to write the blog. Tomorrow I am doing a work review so I need to sparkle in the afternoon.
