Friday and I pan an easy day, so as my partner goes off to the gym I laze in bed and check my vitals. All is good there and then I spend sometime thinking about what I am going to do with my next poetry collection. Of course it leads me to write a poem and in doing so it gives me the tittle of my next collection. I decide it will be called, the Cancer Years; ordinary brave.

445
There’s a lot written
about being brave, 
lots of slogans
and wise sayings 
but none seem to 
quite fit.

No one asks to be
Cancer brave,
it’s an unwanted
accolade.

Quietly many men
and their loved ones
get on with things, 
each being brave 
in their own way. 

There is no media fanfare
or out pouring of admiration,
nor is there a rush to do things,
fund raise or join a movement,
just the soft tread through the fear.

If there are tears 
they are shed privately
once the mundane is done 
and there is a quiet moment
to reflect.

Anger is dissipated 
gently, released in gardens,
and in putting things 
in order in consideration
of those to be left behind.

It is the resilience unexpectedly 
found in the depths
that makes us brave
in ways that can only 
be ours.

Ordinary people being 
ordinary brave
in ordinary ways
with one eye 
on the end of
our days.


                                                  445  02-05-2025

I get up and get into my training gear. After a bagel breakfast I head for the garage and the rower. Its been 7 days since I last trained due to a combination of weekend and injection. Its got to be a meaningful session so I go for a forty five minute session. Its a real pig of a session and although I try to pace myself the end of the session is a real grind. I manage just over 8 kilometres so it could have been worse. It will do for a session after a weeks break.

I record the session and then eat my lunch on the patio with my partner. After a chat my partner and I go to the local garden centre and pick up so gardening essentials. Once home my partner sets to in the garden and I start to draw up my partners family tree starting with my partners mothers side. It takes me ages to get all the people mentioned into the right generational line and then to sort out which line each person belongs to. The information is jumbled and there appears to be one or two people who do not fit the tree. I get as far as I can and before dinner is served I replenish my dosettes for the next two weeks.

The evening sees me drafting the blog while having one eye on the TV. Its going to be a lazy evening. tomorrow our village will be celebrating VE day so I expect there will be military vehicles rolling around and people doing strange things in uniform. Already there are poles appearing along the road so there will be unexpected informative boards everywhere. Rumour has it that there will be a fly past. I hope I can sleep with all the excitement, or maybe its just the desperation of having a Reform dominated county council. I go to bed full of meds and a sense of foreboding.

Thursday and I wake up early as this is going to be a busy day. So I make warm drinks for my partner and I earlier than usual. My partner gets up for a shower and is quickly followed by me. There is time for toast and morning meds and then I am off to see the hand physio. The amount of bendiness is measured and the scar tissue examined. The decision is that I should concentrate on massaging the scar with Nivea crème and using the night splint with the latex dressing. We agree that I should return at the end of July when six months of splint wearing comes to an end.

I arrive home and wait for my partner to return from her physio appointment and when she does we drive the cars to our local garage. My partner’s car get left at the garage for its newly acquired “crunchie” sound to be investigated. We return home in time for my partners friend to collect her for lunch. I sit on the patio, have soup and then I spend the afternoon trying to put together the contents of a fourth collection of The Cancer Years, for which I have no title for yet. At one point I take a break and draft another poem.

444
The drooping broom
trying to sweep
the lawn edge,
this and a profusion
of green 
is what I feel
this May day.
A sunny time 
that belongs in summer
as the temperature rises.
There is much to do 
but I do no stir,
sitting quietly
like the garden before me.
“behold the lilies
of the field 
for they neither
reap nor sow”.
I am not sure 
I can live 
Like that.
So I find myself
pen in hand
jotting while birds
sing and Spring
takes a sprint start.

All these flowers,
trees and plants
do everything that
is beyond me.
When did I stop
paying attention,
let myself not listen,
let myself not see?
It’s time to put the pen;
Down!

                                     444           01-04-2025

Having written I return to preparing the collection. Mid-afternoon and the garage rings to tell me that my partners car is done. Thankfully it is only disc pads that needed replacing. My partner and I go and collect he car and return home. The resources to begin to make a family tree for my partners family have arrived so I start the process of trying to build a tree from the notes that my partner gave me a few days ago. It is a preliminary phase of sticky notes placed on a pre printed ten generational template. After an evening meal I start to try and build adn initial tree. By 8 o’clock its time for me to watch football. Its what I do until full time when I start to draft the blog, taking my night meds and strapping on the night splint before bed. Over the evening I have been thinking about ideas for more poems based on the dedication that I am thinking about for the fourth Cancer Years collection; “This collection is dedicated to men and their loved ones who quietly gets on with their life while fighting prostate cancer. We can’t all be VIPs but we are all, in our own ways, brave.” I think there very many men and their loved ones who are quietly being brave everyday without publicity, without doing things that they would not normally do and just want to live an ordinary life for as long as they can.

Wednesday and another night of soreness from Mondays injection. Sometimes, especially when injected on the right, I lose a couple of days and it seems this is one of those occasions. However I need to make the effort today as I am having my nails done again at noon, at least that is what I thought until I checked my phone. I have a text message timed at 03: 15 on Wednesday night telling me not to forget my appointment for 12 o’clock tomorrow, clearly meaning Thursday. So when the Spa opens I ring and leave a message to ask if this is correct. I then get on with taking my vitals and having breakfast. I am generally puttering around when I get a call at 11:30 from the Spa person confirming my appointment is for today. I drop what I was doing (oiling the windows and putting key rings on the window lock keys) and dash off to the Spa at the gym.

I sit down and present my hands so that the old gel can be removed. Some magic solution is paced on a piece of pad adn clipped to each of my finger tips. Then make conversation with the beautician. We cover the weather, Indian festivals and their relation to both the weather and the Kings Coronation, about rehabilitation and housing for miscreants and the nature of criminality. So with the niceties out of the way my nails are cleaned and new layers of gel painted on while we discuss family, grandchildren and international travel.

Each layer requires that my hand is briefly baked in a small finger oven and while I do this we continue our chat through the issues of the day. I am finally finished and have gelled and shiny nails. It takes quite a while but is relatively affordable so I an going to need to brush up on my conversational Spa talk. Once home I suggest to my partner that we go to lunch, which we duly do. Its a real luxury just being able to drop things and just go and eat some where. By the time we return home there is time to do some gardening. We put into action some of the things we discussed over lunch, so my partner plants the remainder of the plants to be planted and I trim the ferns back and gather up armfuls of “sticky Willie” weed from around the pond. There is of course staking to be done and bulb cutting back to follow on. By the early evening quite a lot has got done. The cars are repositioned on the drive for tomorrows early departures and then its time for tea.

The evening sees me close up the newly oiled windows and put last years industrial sized fan back in position in the lounge. With that all set I draft the blog feeling the oscillating gusts of cooling wind from the fan. No doubt I shall watch Race Across the World as I know one of the contestants and then it will be an early night as tomorrow I am going to see my hand physiotherapist for the last time take my partner car to the garage, supervise the garden guy adn of course vote in the local elections. Somewhere in there I need to train and get back into stride until the next interruption by the next injection. At the back of my mind there are two things that May brings, firstly an oncology review adn secondly the preparation of the fourth collection of poetry in the Cancer Years series, but this time with a British publishing preparation group. So I move on into May taking my night meds, wearing my nocturnal finger splint and hoping all goes well.

Tuesday the day after my 28 day jab and a really crap night. My injection site and the right side of my belly hurt, hurt enough to keep me awake and when I move. Its a a bastard. I get up to make a fizzy paracetamol and go back to bed to try and sleep. I have gone down with a severe bout of NSGS. (Non Specific Grumpiness Syndrome). Nothing is right with the world and my recently retired partner is innocently in the cross hairs of my irrational grumpiness. As I lay around in bed waiting for the paracetamol to kick in she busies herself ready for the day and to be host to her friend who is coming later in the day. No matter what I do I am uncomfortable and I cannot sleep, which increases my NSGS. After a while l try taking my vitals and they displease me, they are not what I would have liked, not bad but not good either. In the end I resort to trying to write poetry.

443

Its the morning after
my 28 day injection,
right side, the worst,
and I'm fucking sore!

Not been this bad for
a while.
Early morning paracetamol 
has been downed
while my partner
spruces up for the day,
shower, shorts
and then tidying,
even round me.
 
How irritating can this woman be? 
Bloody irritating is the answer.
Especially to a man with
Non Specific Grumpiness Syndrome.

This retirement transition can be difficult.
Expectations about joint adventures,
building social networks
and all the unexpected consequences
of not having to be useful, productive,
structured and contributing,
lead to tidying, cleaning
and all the things feminists
railed against!

My old preserves of garden 
and garage invaded,
if I am not careful 
I won't get first go 
on the new power washer. 
I am feeling crap in the middle 
of domestic hygiene
and another's search 
for meaningful days
and meeting of
unmet needs.

For God's sake woman 
will stop dusting the
head board before 
I get up!

The truth, 
the truth is 
this moving on
is tricky for us both. 

                                                     443 29-04-2025

The poem goes in a direction I do not expect but it is true that adjusting to retirement together can be tricky at times and its made no easier when I am on one of my bad days. So I languish in bed for a long time trying to get comfortable and hoping the paracetamol kicks in soon. I think I might have drifted. Eventually I get up eat and do the crosswords in todays paper I make an effort to tidy up a bit before retreating to the recliner with my laptop, a bag of nuts and a Red Bull to draft the blog while my partner and her friend sit in the garden and chat before going out to eat.

My plan for what remains of the day is to receive and squirrel away the Tesco deliver later in the evening whilst watching football and then to get myself to bed early in order to face having my nails re-gelled at noon tomorrow.

Sunday, a day of rest and preparation. So after a slow breakfast its out into the sunshine garden and a lot of garden pottering. My partner and I garden in bursts through the afternoon until I retreat to the sofa and watch a football match. Early evening I read a little more of my newly acquired poetry pamphlet before returning to the TV drama that is currently being watched. It is soon time to go through my night ritual of meds, finger splint and last minute chores like setting the dishwasher on its way. This night I add some paracetamol in anticipation of tomorrows 28 day injection.

Monday and its twenty eight day jab day. Its a day a loath. I am up early to shower and take my normal medication and go to the GP surgery where I bump into my brother in law before being called into the clinical room for my jab. It does not take long. I always think I might get away with it this time but inevitably I am proved wrong. I take a paper and croissants home where I share them with my partner on the patio as the sun is shining. My partner gardens as I firstly red and then open my post. There is a letter from someone I went to school with and is a big and welcome surprise. I set about filling out my application form for the Author’s Licensing and Collecting Society, apparently this writers organisation collects “secondary royalties” for authors works and pays them out twice a year. Strangely the application is hard copy only but once they accept me I cam go on line to add all things I’ve written for which I hold royalty and copyrights to. On the form I had to just provide one of my ISBN numbers to prove I am eligible to join. I am interested to see what happens next. In the same post my new bank account details arrive with the new debit card. All this means is that I have to make up two new files to go into my newly organised filing draw in the office.

By mid afternoon my injection site is getting sore, but I go to the post office to send off my application form and then return to the sofa to read more of Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch. I can feel my body increasingly trying to reject the mornings injection. By early evening I am very sore (always worse on the right hand side) and I drift into the evening. There is more reading, some TV and then I draft the blog, a terse and short addition. I take my meds and slouch off to bed hoping for sleep.

Saturday and I surface slowly to find my partner has already risen and had breakfast. She brings me hot water before going off to meet a friend for lunch. I get up and walk down to the chemists to collect my drugs and return to make a late breakfast. The Pope is getting buried on the TV so there is wall to wall coverage that is all red and chanting. Today is poetry stanza day so I select a poem to take with me and run off copies.

429
The end of another tax year, 
pension dependant yet
the revenue man 
continues to badger
me for self-assessments.
Leave me alone,
let me be
in cancerous peace.
All those years of grind
boil down to numbers
in a statement devoid 
of understanding.
But as I flail through 
the mounds of sofa side
papers, a result of 
COVID displacement,
listening to the babble 
of others from my office as was 
I am filed with resentment 
and not a little rage.
Once I knew where all my 
documents lived, organised,
neat and tidy. 
I feel like I live on the street,
my world in a heap
stuffed into plastic bags
and not even colour coded. 
So the radio play
the Mindful Mix and
I write this to calm down. 
I know why the displaced
become terrorists, 
and I have fantasies of 
doing the world a favour
by not missing Trump
by an ears width. 
It seems a more useful thing
than filling in forms.
Woodie had it right,
Some men rob you 
with a gun
others with a fountain pen.
While cancer robs me of my life
HMRC bleeds me dry.
The builders have cried off,
It’s raining,
and I realise just 
how fucking 
irritated I am by it. 
Watch out rowing machine 
here I come,
and to cap it all
it’s in the bloody garage,
in the cold.
I’m on one!

								429 23-01-2025

I drive to the Quaker meeting house where I meet up with nine others of the poetry stanza and spend the next two and a half hours reading, and talking about the groups poetry. It is a good time and full of ideas and images and phrases that are new and evocative. The chair of the group has recently published a poetry pamphlet and so I was able to buy a copy from him before leaving for home.

I drive home with a head full of images and comments and immediately settle on the sofa to watch the English women’s rugby team narrowly beat the French, followed by an FA cup semi final. With a fresh burst of energy I go to the chippy and get tea for my eldest daughter and I before an evening of TV drama until my energy starts to ebb and is time to take my meds and draft the blog. The usual going to bed rituals see me flirting with the midnight.

Thursday and I wake up ready for the day once I have gone through my waking rituals. There is a lot of domestic stuff to do during the day. In anticipation of training I am in my training gear but before \i get to go to the garage I spend a lot of time finalising some financial stuff. It always takes me time at to work through the various options and to master the technology. With that done I take some time out to read more of Orbital, it inspires me to send a book of poetry to a friend. Lunch time comes and goes and then I can no longer put off going to the rower. I get on board the rower and set off for a half hour session. It is always hard going later in the day as the energy levels can be low. So this session was a grind and I did not reach my 6 kilometre standard, but it is all I can manage this afternoon.

With the session recorded I shower and get ready to go out and meet friends at a Mark Steel show in Loughborough. My partner and I arrive in plenty of time so we have time for a drink before our friends arrive. The Mark Steel show entitled “A Leopard in my house” is mostly about his experience of being diagnosed and treated for throat cancer. It is an energetic and honest performance and above all very funny, at least I found it so. I recognised a lot of the moments of the cancer journey and the insanely funny and quirky things that happen along the way. My partner found it more difficult which goes to show how many sides there are to dealing with cancer and its effects on every one involved.

At the end of the show my partner and I drive home where I am confronted with the consequences of one of my poems. So as a result number 436 is not for publication. Eventually I get my night meds down me and go to bed with a head full of thoughts from the evening.

Friday arrives and I sleep late, clearly tired out by yesterdays experiences. The days plan goes out the windowe h, so I take my morning meds and then go with my partner to the gym. Before going into the gym I pop into the gym spa to book my next nail session. With that done I go to the lounge gym to have breakfast and wait for my partner. When she reappears we take the car to our local garage and book it in to have an unnerving grinding noise to be investigated. On the way back home we drop into a garden centre for snacks and petunias. Home and there is time to rest and prepare for the evening. Its the usual Friday fare of rugby and TV, except this evening I have to decide which poem if any I am going to take to tomorrows face to face poetry stanza meeting. I admit I am losing track of the ones I have already taken, but I have several new ones that might be suitable. Inevitably there are the bed time meds and the wearing of the finger splint.

Wednesday and I wake up with little time before I need to up and out. I have time to take my morning meds and down a Lemsip to ward off the end of my cold and to get ready to drive. Eventually I get away about 09:45 and arrive at my friends house a few minutes past 10 o’clock. Staunton Harold is our final destination where my friend and I head for the café. I order breakfast and a drink and then spend hours talking with my friend about how we are and what is going on for us an our families. This person is one of the few people who is able to ask the difficult questions about the relationship between me and my cancer. Some of the questions are difficult but they make me think and I always find that useful. We have more drinks and pastries and of course more conversation. Eventually we went to the garden centre and looked around at what was there. For me the big find was the type of watering can I’ve been looking for, for a long time, so I left with an unexpected find.

Once home I rest for a while and then begin to read the book that my friend had given me earlier. Orbital by Samantha Harvey is the Booker Prize winner in 2024, interestingly it is a novel about peoples response to living in space. The themes and the issues are remarkably similar to the Swedish poet who wrote a poetic odyssey of people set adrift in space, written in thirties. The evening continues with some TV and I finally draft the blog before taking my night meds and putting on my finger splint before going to bed. Today has given me much to think about and new reading to feed my brain, so a good day.

Its a Tuesday and that means I wake up to a training day, and this Tuesday I wake up to an evening at the opera. I make my partner a tea and we check to see how we are before getting up. We both grab some breakfast and my partner goes to the gym. I do some life admin and pay some bills so I can finally put my hand operation behind me as far as the surgeon is concerned. With that done I head for the garage and the rower. Today it has to be an hour, I need to push myself to do the longer rows, speed will come later. So with some opera in my ears I set off. Its seems a long time but I finally get to the end, not quite up to my normal standard bit its okay for a work out.

By the time I have recorded my session my partner has returned and we have lunch. I go for a shower and then my partner and I go off to the next village where I try to open a Nationwide ISA, it turns out to be a fools errand, I will not bore you with the details but the supposed advantages of technology are grossly over rated and pale into insignificant compared to the good old days when you went into a bank or building society, slapped money on the counter, filled in a form and Voilà you had an account. The upshot is that at the moment I have a myriad of codes and identifiers, account numbers and security codes and in theory have a current account and an ISA, except the current account is nowhere to be seen on my and but a defunct ISA account is, and if I go in via internet banking the same defunct ISA account is showing and there is no current account. No money has been able to be moved so at the moment its been one waste of time. I am assured by all those around me that it will all come good. Bah humbug!

The evening has been a far more enjoyable experience. La Traviata is one hell of an opera and it has the additional benefit of having two intermissions, which tonight meant two ice creams! I was struck in the final act, (spoiler alert), that when Violetta sings about her disease she has a line in which she says ” this disease robs me of all hope” and it struck me that my cancer diagnosis seemed to do that to me, it was assumed that I was incurable, the language of the medics was and still is all about containment and palliative care, in a nutshell “when and not if”. I note that I feel differently now, less overwhelmed by a sense of hopeless imminent death. I am not exactly bouncing around like a new born lamb but I do feel less constrained. I’ve held off this disease for over five years now and I continue to have a quality of life that many would envy, I do not feel a shadow or any sense of helplessness hanging over me, I do not feel that I have been robbed of all hope any more. I feels like I am moving on. On that thought I take my evening meds, don my finger split and go to bed. Tomorrow I have coffee with a friend booked.

Easter Sunday and I wake up to find that someone has given me an Easter cold, bastards! I wake with a streaming nose and a general blocked upness. I check my vitals and the good news is that they show no fever or decline in other functions. So it will be my standard approach to a cold, breakfast and then a training session followed by a lot of rest. Breakfast goes down and stays there then I am off to the garage and the rowing machine. I cant face an hour but I reckon I can do forty five minutes. This turns out to be a good decision as the session is a real flog. By the end I am knackered. I do not make my 9 kilometre standard but I do manage 8+ kilometres.

I record the session and then get changed into lounge gear lunching on chicken soup that other well know cure for a cold. After that I read Night Watch by Terry Pratchett inspired by the fact that a friend is also reading it. After a while my cold can no longer maintain focus and I slide into a bank holiday sports fest of rugby and football until I can take no more and I return to reading.

In the evening I become increasingly limp and watch a film on TV based on the true events of a hostage taking in Amsterdam. The ending was interesting in that the hostage ran out and was chased by the perpetrator only for a police car to run the perpetrator down and for him to die from his injuries the following day. Imagine the paperwork! By the end of the evening I am wrung out so take my meds and go to bed determined that this cold will be a single toilet roll cold. That’s the way colds get measured in this household.

Monday and I wake with my my cold intact as witnessed by my runny nose so I get up and make my partner tea and myself a Lemsip. I return to bed and sip my soothing potion and chat to my partner. whilst savouring the heady mixture of hot lemon and paracetamol I begin to wonder about indulgence. So I ask my partner what has been her greatest indulgence. Its a tricky question. I come up with two, the first being the Wolf, a Suzuki Jimny, a four wheel drive car that was a third car. Secondly a personalised Mont Blanc Meisterstuck classic fountain pen, which I either lost or was stolen from me. The car sadly had to go as it was an indulgence that started to be too expensive to keep. With the exploration of indulgence done and the Lemsip finished I get up and have breakfast, slowly, before drafting the blog for yesterday and the start of today. The day the Pope dies I am informed by my news feed. The plan for the day is to ease my way through the rest of the day and then the family are going to see The Penguin Lessons. I am fascinated to see if reference is made to the phenomenal frequency at which penguins evacuate their bowels! It will either be fun or dismal. Jean Reno made a film called My Penguin Friend based on a true story, which might be a better bet, a sort of Leon meets Pingu.

The afternoon is eating, reading and preparing for the trip to the cinema, which means more Lemsip and clean hankies. The Penguin Lessons is based on some true events in Argentina, the main character and the penguin actually existed and there is old cine film to prove it. The school also existed, as for the rest I think there was artistic license. What did I take from the film, two things, one; people like to talk to penguins and two; penguins are good listeners. After returning home I up date the draft blog and settle down to some reading and making last minute alterations to tomorrows Tesco order until its time for my night meds and retiring to my bed. The Lemsips seem to be holding off the worst of the cold, which is good as I do not want to be sniffing all the way through La Traviata tomorrow evening, and have people think I am a hopeless romantic.