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.
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.
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.
MY GARDEN GIVES ME ROSES AND PERFUME
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.
I INTEGRATE MY NEW ART EQUIPMENT
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.
GARDEN JEWELS
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.
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.
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.
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.
ONE BEES BUM UP A FOXGLOVE.
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.
I WONDER IF MY ART CAN RUN TO THIS?
Post Teams call it is dinner, TV, walk and sorting out the last minute additions to the Sainsburys order, life must go on.
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.
DRUGS AND COFFEE IN THE MORNING SUN
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.
ALL I NEED NOW IS INSPIRATION AND TALENT
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.
A JIGSAW FULL OF ‘WHIMSIES’
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.
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.
So that’s how its wired
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’m impressed that it was still working!
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.
Giles is a man after my own heart.
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.
Yeast makes bread making possible 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.
Before
After
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.
Nothing like the smell of fresh baked bread.
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.
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.
DRAGON
LION
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.
MY GOING TO THE DOCTORS OUTFIT
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.
MY NEW WATER BOTTLE
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.
THE COMPLETED JIGSAW
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.
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.
