Today I mowed the lawns and went out to dinner with friends. The rest has disappeared as trivia.

Tuesday a work day so up early and on the road. I’m of to Derby to facilitate a training course. On the way I pick up lunch and a couple of Red Bulls. I get to Derby early and get a parking space, which had been my major concern, as parking in Derby is a nightmare. So I am about an hour and a half early and set up the room and the IT and think about the day to come. My colleague rings me to say she has been taken to the wrong place and asks for the address of where I am. As I wait for her to arrive the training attendees start to arrive, I was expecting 20ish and set the room out on that basis. The room begins to fill and then my colleague arrives, still more people arrive. In the end there are 31 people plus myself and colleague squeezed into the room. This was a bit unexpected so my colleague and I conferred and re-planned our approach to the day. I was expecting a tricky day but in fact there was very little active resistance and as the day went on the attendees got more engaged and worked at the tasks that were set. By the end of the day it felt like we had made progress and that some things and some teams had shifted.

I was expecting a slow drive home but actually made good time to the gym where I downed a coffee and waited for my partner. In the gym I clambered aboard my favoured cross trainer and pumped out 767 calories. My step count was well up having been on my feet all day. By the time the gym was done with it was mid evening so it was home to tuna pasta and a little TV. It turns out that my old passport has arrived with the passport office so they can now process my renewal application.

While treading away on the cross trainer I began to get ideas for a poem. It happens sometimes that I get a sense of something growing, forming, which sometimes make it to the page or sometimes withers in the mind. The trick is patience.  When this happens the poem forms itself until there is a moment when I find myself sitting quietly somewhere and it fall out of my pen. They write themselves and I never edit them. Once done they get typed up and filed in a laptop folder, except for those I might write as a letter. I suppose I have poems for me and poems for others, which I do not keep, a kind of gift. I think this current one is of the dark type but much can change between mind and page.

Another of those “to do” list days that do not turn out the way they should. For example I never ordered snow but found myself driving through hail and snow on my return from the shops having restocked the yoghurt store. At least we are not flooded as it appears so many are. My major achievement of the day was to apply to renew my passport on line having got a digital photograph of myself from the booth in the supermarket. The new passport picture makes the four horsemen of the apocalypse look positively attractive. I look ravaged, which I suppose is partly true.

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 The rest of my day has been taken up with revamping the training slides for tomorrows Enabling Environment training that I am delivering with a colleague in Derby. I note that the slide that introduces me has an old picture of me in the days when I still had a beard,its a harsh change of image. I also wrote a letter to a good friend in York, which helped me, put some thoughts in order. It is one of many letters that I owe. I notice that I am not so assiduous in my letter writing than I was but have it on my list of things to deal with soon.  The weather in Derby has been snowy and as usual there has been a crop of traffic accidents on the motorway so I shall be leaving early in the morning. I plan an early night for me tonight in the hope of rest so as to be fresh for tomorrow.

98.6 Kilos, Sunday morning, stark naked! A loss of 2.1 kilos from last week. Go me, I’m a hero. In celebration I broke out the first of the christmas Pannetone!

Sunday and the gale still blows and the rain still falls, The recycling wheelie been is over in the front garden and the garden furniture cover is ripped in the gale. Apart from that all is well. There will be no going anywhere today, I shall watch the six nations rugby and finalise the 40 photos that are going into the civil partnership album. Apart from the check on my passport that tells me I need one quite quickly, I’ve very little to do, the most exercise I get is hoovering the downstairs carpets. Still I cling to my weight loss for the week. More of the same is I suppose the lesson to be learnt, so I need to keep my control on my diet and to keep going to the gym. It is after all not about weight but the silent battle within. As Bradley Walsh’s character in Dr Who said tonight the shadow of cancer never really leaves you. He is right and it heightens the disappointments when they occur and makes all achievements second place.

A Saturday of international rugby but that has to be earnt by a trip to the gym. So gym it is via Sainsbury to put in a prescription for my partners mother who needs a specific brand of paracetamol due to an aversion to the pill coating on most brands. That done, we hit the gym and give it our best shot. I shed 771 calories and clock up my 10,000 steps. I am mildly pleased and return home to watch the six nations rugby games.

I’v never lost the feel of the game. I can feel what it is like to step on to a field even now and to feel the cold and the anticipation of receiving the ball. Even better is the experience of the physicality as you bring down a charging forward built like a brick outhouse by tacking his legs from under him with a well-timed diving tackle. Best of all was going over for a try, especially if it is a winning try. All my rugby memories are from my time as a Grasshopper I gave up playing when I went through a run of games where I could not remember a lot of the game due to what I realise now was concussion. I apparently was reckless with my head. Marathon running was okay but never achieved the same sense of accomplishment or sense of winning as a team.

After dinner it was time to watch the Best Dancer on TV. Truly accomplished people doing incredible things with their bodies to music I’ve always thought that if I had my choices again I would have chosen dance, the only fly in the ointment is that I have no sense of rhythm, which is a catastrophic draw back for a dancer. The rest of the evening was films. A waste of reading time really but by then my gym fatigue had kicked. What was apparent was that the storm raging outside was a big one with strong winds and lashing rain. And so to bed.

The day has been a very domestic one being taken by surprise by the early Sainsbury’s delivery guy. So my day started in my dressing gown chatting to the delivery guy about the weather as we unpacked the crates. I then set about clearing up, paying bills, organising the office and buying fruit and meat for the weekend. Like all days I start off with relatively good energy levels but as the day wears on I begin to find it difficult to keep going at the same pace. By the time I am at the gym waiting for my partner I am flagging and as a result we decide to train on Saturday morning instead. We return home and settle for then evening, me to write a brief blog and then either watch TV or read.

This veering off course is not good; my physical fitness is a significant part of my fight with cancer. The fitter I am the better I can cope with the physical demand of the treatment and also the psychological juggling that needs to be done to stay ahead of the disease. It is a constant battle on both fronts.

I manage part of it by getting “Rocket” to do the physical bit for me while my head gets on and does the research, the planning, and keeping a strategy going for the long term. In this way I can best balance my energy against the need to deal with the real world whilst fight my private internal battle. I used to use an image of a desert to understand the strange things being ill did to time and the resultant feelings of being ill but I changed to the image of an island. This seemed to represent me amidst the real world and reminder me to swim occasionally. The island image no longer feels right any more, however I’ve no clear idea what image does feel right at the moment. This feeling of uncertainty and lack of clarity of image maybe the best indication of the ambiguity and uncertainty about my condition that I feel at the moment. I guess something will come to me, I just need to trust my mind to incubate and to sort through the conflicting thoughts and feelings. “Trust the process” is something I used to say to my staff team in the therapeutic communities I had responsibility for; I guess its time for me to take my own advice.

There are only three things from today:

1. There is a new cancer research finding about a virus that might be implicated in about 19% of cancers including Prostate cancer. Another ray of hope down the end of the tunnel.

2. I went to the gym and burnt off 776 calories and achieved my 10,000 steps. Hard work that my legs, will pay the price for tomorrow (Friday)

3. I went to see Fascinating Aida with my partner at the De Montfort Hall. A thoroughly enjoyable evening, which made me wonder where else can be found witty current events comment mixed with outright humour. Click the link below, providing you are not of a sensitive disposition.

https://binged.it/2S8nV2o

An at home day of the mundane. Doing chores and ticking them off the “to do list”. The highlight was having two letters in the post, a congratulations card from my son and his family alongside a long letter from an old colleague now in Scotland. So as the dishwasher washed and the tumble dryer dried I wrote a reply. I still use fountain pen and paper for this as opposed to speech recognition software as my colleague uses. I just spell things wrong and construct strange sentences due to my dyslexia, I am not sure how I would cope with a software programme that misinterpreted my words, as I probably would not notice. My colleagues system produced “curtains” for “Schroedinger”, which in the context of knowing whether the cat is dead or alive in Schrödinger’s thought experiment is fairly spooky. Is the software making a prediction about the state of the cat? I do not believe that Windows 10’s speech software is that sentient, if at all. Apart from the joy of receiving a letter and writing one it has been mundane to say the least, right up to making the turkey one pot for tea.

During all of this I played the Argentine Tango music that was played at my civil partnership celebration meal after the ceremony, except for the news. The news was worrying because the newly voted in government are now proposing to extend the power to police to extend pre-trial bail and remand allowing them to extend detention up to three months. The problem is who decides the risk. Of course the argument is that things like the recent stabbing that took place under the policies noses before they shot the offender would be less likely to occur if the police have more powers of detention in the first place. That coupled with the argument that people should not be released before the end of their sentence means greater powers to retain people in custody. I feel vaguely uncomfortable about all of this. I wonder what the safeguards are. I suspect that I am sensitised to the growth in powers to detain specific groups of people as I am currently reading what happens when governments extend these powers and where that can lead to. The issue is and always will be the assessment of risk. Who does it and on what basis risk is assessed is going to be an ongoing debate, or is it? Will those who do it now continue to or will there be some kind of inclusion of public anxieties steered and encouraged by the current crop of politicians? Well that perked up a dull day.

Up early and off to London. All a bit of a daze really but once I am on the train I read. I have returned to Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man and The Truce.

The hour passed quickly before we pulled into my favourite Tracy Emin.

I walk to the RCP and have breakfast and prepare for my one to one with the programme manager of Enabling Environments. My manager turns up and after a quick chat with another colleague we set up in one of the ground floor work rooms. We start with an in formal chat about poetry. I suggested Kate Tempest, one of my favourite contemporary poets.

The rest of the time we spent in discussing the work and the services response to our support. That took us to lunchtime and my journey back to Leicester. I caught the early train by two minutes and settled once again into This Is A Man. I am not sure how I feel about reading the life lead by those who were subjected to the Nazi work and extermination camps. It is a relentless grind of survival in appalling conditions beautifully observed and recorded by Levi. The tragedy is that Levi died having committed suicide in 1987, although this has been challenged by many who knew him at the time.

Back in Leicester I drive to the gym and indulge in a dish of soup and the newspapers while I wait for my partner who has a session booked with her personal trainer. When she arrived I was tired and decided to go home to eat and write the blog and watch some cup football.

Today has been the Roland MOT day. It started with an early visit to the GP to get my 28 day injection. It went smoothly, but always does, until later on when it gets progressively sorer and persists for a few days. Back home for breakfast and to write my invoice for the Royal College of Psychiatrists. By the time I had finished the task it was time to walk down the road to the dentist. This was to be a check-up and an assessment of how my mouth had survived chemotherapy. My dentist is a star and spent time asking me how chemo had gone and how I am now. She checked my teeth and gums and we discussed what she had found. Thankfully there is nothing urgent and things that need attention can wait till I have spoken to my oncologist on March the 24^th. So the outcome from my point of view was a satisfactory one. I made another routine appointment for six months’ time, if there is a need I can return before this. Home again and more organising for tomorrow by buying my train tickets. Once again it was time to get on the way to the hospital for my CT scan.

Mercifully the drive was easy until we got to the car park. As usual we had to queue to get in, thankfully not for long. We arrived in the x-ray department early for my appointment. My partner and I sat and read until a small nurse called us into the inner area of the ward. I was shown into the small cannulisation room where the same small nurse attempted to put a cannula into my now predictable wiggly” vein. True to history it wiggled and the nurse had to patch me up and had to have a go at the vein next door. Success. So I sit in the waiting area drinking water and trying not to dislodge my cannula. A spritely young man appeared and asked for me to accompany him into the scan room. He checked my name and birthday and then explained what would happen. So I sat on the bench, dropped my trousers and laid on my back while the spritely young man hooked me up to the machine that was going to pump a dye into my blood stream. He tested it with saline and then we got on with it. We had a couple of practice breaths and a bit of sliding up and down and then the dye was injected into me and we did the sliding back and forward for real. There is a momentary side effect of feeling you want to pass water and a slight metallic taste in the mouth, in me it manifested as a distinctly warm arse effect with no metal mouth effect. I was done very quickly and had to wait in the waiting room for 15 minutes to make sure I did not keel over. After my quarantine was up the small nurse reappeared and beckoned me into the de cannulation room. The cannula came out a lot easier than it went in and I was sent on my way with a small pad taped to my arm.

We drove home and I headed for the bath to ease the soreness of this morning’s injection. I, shed my clothes, threw in a sparkly bath bomb, selected a book, got a non-alcoholic beer out of the fridge and added my phone to the little fold away table next to the bath, I was about to hop in when the phone rings and my partner answers it, my daughter is ill at work. I swear quite a lot as I drag on clothes and grab my car keys. My partner and I drive to the college where my partner goes and retrieves our poorly daughter.

Home and poorly daughter retreats to bed and I strip again and get into my bath. I text a lot and message several people to say that the civil partnership photos are now viewable on the photographers website. I start to get cold and top up the bath. In doing this I discover I can block the over flow with my feet or a wet flannel so as the bath warms up again the water level rises and I feel the warmth immerse me. I become aware that I have to move to turn the hot tap off. By this time the Archimedes principal is kicking in and as I move my bulk I create a Tsunami. Splash and splosh there is a flood over the rim and the floor is awash. I pull the plug and wait till levels are safe and then gingerly get myself out and onto the duck board, from there a spare towel gets foot shuffled around the flor to soak up the flood. Success, all there is left is a couple of wet towels to deal with. I notice as I prepare to leave that the floor is now very golden sparkly due to the bath bomb. Far more sparkly than I am I notice.

Tea time and I settle down in front of the TV not feeling very clever and slightly chilled. I have watch some quiz shows, mainly Only Connect as it features the very witty and bright woman who is also an ace poker player who on her time has walked away with over two million in prize money. So all that remains now is to organise for tomorrows one to one with my project manage at the RCP, so it’s an early start for me and a ride on the iron horse to London.