Tuesday and I seem to have slept well again. So I check my messages and emails and take my vitals. My partner goes off to aqua aerobics and I drink my morning hot water before getting up. However before I can get up I get a phone call from the dentist who says she was expecting me at 9:30. I am taken aback as my diary clearly says 2:30pm. I rebook for later in the month quite happy to not have to do the dentist today. I do not make it to my morning meds or breakfast as I get waylaid by an urge to finally clear out my T shirt wardrobe. So I go full on and spend hours, literally sorting through my shelves and draws and dumping ruthlessly any garment that I do not wear or had lain so long as to become stained and unwearable. I end up with two bin bags full of old clothing and a very tidy wardrobe. Its noon before I stop, take my meds and have lunch.

My partner returns from her gym session and we eat before going to the garden centre. There are empty pots to fill so we cruise the rows of available plants and think about what we need over a drink and and Eccles cake. Having grabbed a trolley it gets loaded with top soil, compost, Zinnia and the crowning glory of a new very green Japanese maple. Once home I get out the required tools and plant the new tree in my favourite Vietnamese pot. I spend time staking the fuchsias that are coming up and then clear away everything. By the time I have finished I am over hot and just need to rest. I sit and check my emails and then watch the England women’s football team get taken apart by the Spanish. While watching a disturbingly inept display by England I eat tea and then watch a movie on Netflix , which my daughter has managed to join and included my partner and I and fiendishly included a code to get in so hopefully the account will not be hacked again.

I check my emails and find my dentist has sent me a ” you’ve been naughty” letter but have waived the non attendance fee. I’m slightly irked but as I am not paying anything I let it go. As the evening continues I draft the blog and begin to think about whatever it is that is making me feel so “itchy scratchy” at the moment, it is usually a sign that there is something trying to be written and trying to find a way onto the page. It could be tonight, tomorrow or in a weeks time but there is something at some time. For now I move towards my night meds, the dreaded night finger splint and the sleep before I need to get up and go to the hospital pharmacy to pick up my next cycle, and so the battle continues, slow and relentless.

Monday and I wake after a good nights sleep knowing this is to be a training day. I take my vitals, which are pleasingly good, and get into my training gear before having breakfast with my partner. I take my morning meds and then I sit and read my emails and messages. I am pleased to find that the editing team have sent me four possible book cover designs for the upcoming poetry collection. I choose one and respond to the team, suggesting a slight tweak to the front cover. I also decide to go with the blurb written by the editor for the back cover of the book. It feels as if we are getting close to the finished article now and will soon be looking to up load it to the platform.

With the book work done I put my washing in and head for the garage and the rowing machine. I put my ear buds in and select a training track that will see me through the 45 minute session that I have programmed into the machine. I start at quite a fast pace and the training track drives me forward. By the end of the session I am very hot and sweaty and quite ragdoll like. The effort has proved worth it as I have smashed my personal best by some 683 metres. It is an unexpected row but most welcome. Go me!

I am knackered and go to the sofa to recover and record my session. Out of the blue a friend rings me and we have a long chat about family, schooling and what we have both been doing over the last couple of weeks. Its a real pleasure to have the conversation and the catch up. We chatted about the coming month and the things we have planned, it would appear that both families will be busy, mine with family visitors and cancer admin, while hers will be preparing for York Pride. When the chat ends I go out and hang my washing out, taking advantage of the late sunny afternoon before eventually going for a shower.

Feeling refreshed I start to draft the blog until tea time when I eat with the family. Tonight my partner has a singing lesson, my eldest daughter has gone to an art class and I return to the blog while waiting for Tesco to deliver. With that out of the way I can gather in my washing and settle down to read or do something mindless. It will end with night meds, the finger splint and finally bed as I look forward to tomorrows trip to the dentist, never a favourite pastime. I am very tired and spoonless after todays efforts.

Saturday and I wake knowing this has to be a training day. So I am up and into my training. I have my morning meds and and scrambled eggs. A new oncology appointment arrives as does a bloods form. This time it is to be a short interval of four weeks so the 25th of June is to be the magic day with bloods a few days earlier. I go to the garage and get on board the rowing machine, today has to be an hours row. I get my ear buds in and get set for the off. The start is slow, perhaps too slow but I get into a comfortable pace as the training music track picks up speed. Although I do not make 12 kilometres the distance I do make is okay as is the 700+ calories that I burn.

I record my session and then watch a rugby match on TV, my local team is playing to get into the end of season play offs, which they do comfortably. I get out of my kit and then cook tea, a chicken stroganoff with turmeric rice, which I serve to the family in time to watch the series finale of Dr Who and then move on to the European cup final. I got bored with that by half time and watch a couple of episodes of Rabbit hole before taking my night meds, clearing the aftermath of my cooking and going to bed. Another mundane day but one in which I feel anxiety rumbling around about my cancer, its a long since I have been reviewed on a months gap and I wonder just how concerned my oncologist is about my PSA rising for a second time in five months, clearly enough to want to scan me again and see me face to ace in four weeks. Maybe its nothing, a lot can happen between now and the 25th of June.

Sunday and my partner has gone to the gym leaving my to do my vitals (a good set today) and to have breakfast and meds before settling down with my laptop to try and sort out my Netflix account. I try to log into my account on the TV, which takes me to a verification code on my phone as it recognises my phone number but not my email address. What’s more it takes me to a verification page in Spanish! I have no joy, so I sit and think for a while. I try to login with my phone number but does not recognise my email address and tells me no account belongs to this address. When I try to log in again I use my telephone number and ask for a verification code by SMS. Bingo I am suddenly into an account but one that has a totally different email address from me but it has my debit card as the preferred method of payment. Bloody cheek! I cancel the subscription but I am told it will not take effect until the 29th of June as Netflix is clearly wanting to collect the months fee. I try to clear the card from the account but it will not do it only offer me the opportunity to put an alternative way to pay on the account. I look at the profile page and find the name of the person with the account is Luizmary Perez and there is an email sign in for the account to her. She has put at least four other profiles on the account, which I delete. So in theory the account is closed and all by Perez profile is gone. I send the email address an email just saying I know that she stole my account and card and not to do it again. I am a man with a particular set of skills, I felt like adding. With that done of course I rang my bank and got through to a really nice chap at the security branch who checked my details and confirmed my identity and blocked my card. A new one will be with me soon and its details on my banking app. He was also able to block any future subscriptions to Netflix for a period of time. So by the time I had worked my way through all of this it was mid afternoon. I breathed a sigh of relief and settled back to a sandwich and an apple.

I had also removed the email address I had used to send my “I know what you did ” email and as a consequence had managed to lose all my diary entries on my phone. There followed a period of extreme NSG (nonspecific grumpiness) as I wrestled with the IT on my phone to retrieve all the diary entries on my phone. I finally got there much to my relief. What it did do for me was make me realise how some of my bits of IT are interlinked, which was a bit of a nasty shock. I am clearly more ignorant than I thought about the IT in my life. Having over come my IT nightmare I read in my newsfeed that Netflix has recently been hacked and account holders data been stolen, this the Guardian reported 3 days ago so it would appear that I was one of those who had been affected, which is why my account would not recognise me and the software kept coming up in Spanish. Its this sort of thing that makes me want to hide cash under the mattress and only communicate by letter and Pidgeon. The garden guy has turned up and mown the grass and dug things but I hardly notice having spent my time wrestling with the murky world of cyber security.

I am looking forward to an evening of a final episode of Rabbit Hole and the good old fashion feel of a paper book to read. There will of course be the last minute adjustment to the Tesco order before night meds, donning the night finger splint and restacking the dishwasher. But at least I can enjoy the flowers in my garden and know that no one is watching Netflix on my money.

Its Friday and I wake up and make my partner and I warm drinks after which I take my vitals, all good< and then get for breakfast. By the time I get this done and taken my morning meds its time to get ready to go to the small spa at the gym and to have y nails redone. My partner is to have her feet and hands done, I am just having my nails done. When we walk into the spa area and say hello it is the elderly woman who is seated in what looks like a gaming chair with a foot bar attached, who clearly wonders what on earth old pony tailed bloke could possibly be doing in the place. She as ushered behind a curtain to finished off while my partner and I settled in to get our nails done.

The young woman who is doing mine obviously enjoys her work and we chat about what my options are. These conversation are bizarre, they belong in a whole new world and as they drift and I find out that she is know for waiting for her father to go to sleep and then painting his nails, I wonder what I have got myself into. This honest faced young woman is clearly a ninja beautician. She set to work on me, removing old layers of gel and preparing to put on my base coat. I pop my hands in and out of the UV dryer and then its crunch time. I tell her I want sparkles, but shy sparkles and she shows me options. I go for a subtle sparkle and she applies it as I dip my hands in and out of the UV dryer. Eventually I am done, a small dab of oil on each finger and I am good to go. I pay and leave for the gym lounge where I read whilst waiting for my partner.

After about an hour my partner joins me and we go for lunch at an Italian place across form the gym. I stick to spaghetti Bolognese and garlic bread followed by an Affogato. The waiter tipped us the wink that there were coupons available on the internet so I pounced with the result that we got 25% off the bill. Worth having!

Arriving home there was a quick look around the garden, which led me to do some staking and the filling of the bird feeders. before taking some more photos of the flowers. The peonies have been magnificent this year as are the pink poppies being.

With the garden chores done its time to return to the sofa, where I intended to sort out my drugs dosette boxes, but I gat side tracked by buying shirts. My favourite shirt that I wear most is a work shirt from DIckies, it is now very old and a bit battered. It so old that I was not sure if Dickies was still in business, but I find they are. To me satisfaction I find two shirts I like and to boot if I sign up I can get 10% off. I go for it. I now have new shirts that I can wear in my new fashion mould of shirt and shorts and on a good day Crocs. With my shirt buying taken care of for at least the next five years, I turn to filling my dosette boxes for the next two weeks.

All though these activities I have been messaging and replying to messages, one of which has lead to me arranging to meet a friend on the day before my birthday for lunch as she is passing through on her way to the South on, I assume, business. I’ve also sent messages about the possibility of creating an audio book of some of my poems. I’m just exploring at the moment but it feels like it could be an interesting project with new things to learn. With all this done I draft the blog. Its a mundane day, by which I mean almost normal. I’ve done normal things that others take for granted, which cost me a lot of energy and provoke fatigue. It is the hot flushes that descend from time to time that leave me drained, that and a persistent backache at the moment. I ease myself into the evening and will nibble my way though to the night meds, the finger splint and the hope for sleep.

Thursday and I wake after a fair nights sleep. I check my vitals and all is good apart from my heart rate that seems to be up a bit and I note I have constricted throat. I get up and shower have breakfast and then rest for a bit, it appears I have few spoons (energy) today. I have checked my messages and my social media, there is nothing there other than the editing team checking what size I want my next book to be. I reply a solid 6 x 9. And then its time to go out for lunch with friends.

My partner drives us to the venue, a swanky gastro pub in the depths of the Leicestershire country side. We are first to arrive and are shown to our table but when our friends arrive we move to an outside table. This, I think to myself is good for my vitamin D production. So for three and a half hours we sit and eat and catch up with what we are all doing and how we are. It is really nice to sit around and just idly chat about the world and ourselves. It also gave ma a chance to give my friend a belated birthday gift, one of those where I had it delivered to me by accident. I rounded off my meal with an affogato and a shot of Tia Maria, and absolute luxury.

On returning home my partner headed for the garden to continue planting seeds and plants, I headed to the bathroom where I began the adventure of changing a toilet seat. Having taken the old one off I set about fitting the new one and soon realised that upgrading to a “soft closing” seat from an old “bugger I’ve dropped the lid again ” seat as a bit more complex due to the instillation of the mechanisms. After a bit of trial and a couple of restarts the household moved into the new soft closing era.

I look at the new one and note that it is more “ample” in its dimensions and wonder if I have unconsciously chosen a new seat to accommodate my now more Rubenesque derriere. I pack away my tools, dispose of the old seat and retreat to the garden to sip ginger beer and see what my partner had done in the garden. I doing so I noticed the sun shade parasol has ripped. So I have gone from fixing something new to finding something else broken. It is just how life is at times. Perverse.

I retreat to the sofa feeling tired and so I start to draft the blog. By mid evening I am decidedly “itchy scratchy” and resign myself to an evening of TV to finish off “Murder at the end of the World”. So I head to my night meds and finger splint. Tomorrow beckons and with it the renewal of my gelled nails. But in all this I am increasingly thinking about an audio book of some of my poems. Not a full collection but a number drawn from across my collections. The question is whether to do the reading myself or to have someone else read them. It is a conversation I shall be having with myself over the next few days and maybe weeks. If I can get round to it I shall write to friends and ask them what they think.

Wednesday, its oncology review day so I’m awake early despite the review call being in the early afternoon. I take my vitals, which are good as my partner goes off to see her mother. I dally a moment to jot a poem before I get up. This one will not make it into the up coming collection, but maybe in one later this year, I will have to see what happens over the next few months in terms of writing anything else new.

447
The tide is high 
and like Blondie
I’m hanging on.
I keep reminding myself
that ships only sink when water
gets inside.
So my hatches are battened down
and my bilge pumps
are at full stretch.
Iv’e turned my bow
into the oncoming storm
and see the horizon
rise and fall.
All around the ocean
rages and batters
at my hull.
This luckless slinger
can only watch
and cling to the wheel
in the hope that I might
be able to steer.
The tide is high
and like Blondie
I’m hanging on. 

                                    447 28-05-2025

Having emptied myself of the writing I get up and get dressed. I need to eat as I’ve had a bad gut all night and of course everyone knows that what is required in this situation is a full English breakfast. So I head for the village pub with my eldest daughter for company. There we order and devour whilst chatting about her doctoral thesis writing and other stuff, being joined for a brief while by the landlord’s dog.

With breakfast done we walk back home where I settle down to do the days crosswords and listen to the radio. Its more Heresy that I listen to while getting an early start on the blog. My oncology review is due for 2:30 but they rarely ring on time so I know that I am going to be sitting around for a long time this afternoon. I get as far as I can with the blog and then take up my current reading, Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki, while I wait for my call. As I wait I make bets with myself about the time they will call, I think it will be about 5 o’clock if they run true to form. Busy people oncologists. I check my email sand find the second edit of the new poetry collection is back. I apply myself and make the necessary changes and send it back to the team. This should be the final draft.

The oncologist proves me wrong and rings around 3pm. It is a lightning fast call, the usual how am I and I tell him I am having lower back pain and do not know if it is tumours on my spine or age and rowing. He notes I’ve not had a scan since February 2024, he also notes that my PSA has risen for a second time and asks about my blood pressure. I duly report my current average over cycle 25. He then surprises me and says he will see me in four weeks, order a scan, prescribe one more cycle and send me a bloods form. He also surprises me by saying he will see me in person at the next appointment. And then he is gone. Two minutes max! So all this is a bit unexpected, I thought it would be another routine “see you in three months” job. If he thinks the fact that my PSA has risen twice since December 2024 is significant then I guess getting fresh data and seeing me in the flesh quickly is a good idea. One more cycle is the time it takes to organise a scan, bloods and the pharmacy. So at some point in June or early July (probably on my birthday) I will get some clarification.

With the session over I take my partner to the garden centre to get more fibre pots for more seed growing and some plants for hanging baskets. I add liquorice comfits to the shopping along with real ginger beer and freshly squeezed lemonade, I can no longer tolerate Red Bull. By the time I get home the garden guy has turned up and so its time to make coffee, have a chat and then my eldest daughter and I set about putting an end to the ridiculous tax issues of my late sisters estate. The tax return for the final year of her life is signed off and sent, the accountants bill paid and hard copies made and filled in the estate accounts. All this just in time for tea.

The evening is a football evening and race across the world evening and then I’m going to bed full of night meds, strapped to my finger splint and now slipping into a new time schedule for my oncology expectations. It is easy to think I should stay calm but some how it proves to be tricky. Tomorrow my partner and I are having lunch at a swanky gastro pub with friends so there is pleasure to look forward to.

Tuesday and I wake up feeling that I need to train again to keep my fitness going. My partner is up and getting ready to go for a physio appointment. I check my vitals, which are good and then I get up and into my training kit. A quick breakfast, and a check of my social media and I slowly make my way to the garage and the rower. I strap myself onto the machine, plug in some music in my ears and then I get on with a brisk session for thirty minutes. This is a fast and sweaty session as I listen to a training podcast. At the end of my thirty minutes I am spent and out of spoons (energy), however I have cracked 6 kilometres, 400 calories and a 1000 strokes. That is good after yesterdays lack lustre session.

I record the session and then sit and listen to several Radio 2 comedy programmes, Heresy, The News Quiz and The Unbelievable Truth sipping Red Bull before having the energy to have a shower and trim my beard. I have no energy or inclination to do anything other than sit on the recliner and draft the blog. I’ve already completed the update of my blood pressure figures ready for tomorrows oncology review. I do not think the oncology team will think I need much beyond another three cycles of Enzalutamide. My PSA has risen twice since December 2024 by 0.8 so I do not think they are going to be excited or bothered about that, my blood pressure average for cycle 25 is 121/73, so they will be happy with that. I am getting more back ache which might signal an increase in the size of the tumour on my spine or it could just be me getting older in combination with the rowing. The most they might consider is a bone scan as its 15 months since my last one. All this considered I suspect tomorrows review call will be short. I must be one of their successes and they are probably snowed under with a lot of people who are far worse off than me.

The evening starts with a plain pasta tea and then I look to see if my edit of The Cancer Years: Ordinary Brave has been received and worked on. I am eager to see what the team at Ruler’s Wit come up with as a book cover and how they interpret my ideas about a Rene Magritte style front cover. There is TV to watch, the current series being Murder at the End of the World. Its been a rainy day, second one on the trot so the garden, with its new plants, is enjoying. The night meds are taken, the night finger splint is strapped on and I go to bed wondering if the oncology review will go as I think it will. There seems few other options according to the arithmetic.

Sunday and I wake quite early to find my partner has headed for the kitchen and is already putting in a pork joint into the slow cooker for pulled pork in about twelve hours time. I set about assessing how I am and how I am is still sore and feeling grim. I check my vitals and they are okay. I get up and have breakfast and then prepare to go to the garden centre to buy a garden kneeler for my partner and a new mallow to go in the front flower bed. My partners efforts in the cold frame has borne a big crop of cosmos and its time to plant them out.

On return from from the trip I get into my gardening clothes and gather up the necessary tools and materials to go planting. The next few hours saw my partner and I planting, tidying and sorting out things in the garden. Everything was done and dusted by 4 o’clock, which was kick off time for the last day of the football season. Of course I watch a match and at the end of play the long long slow cook of the pulled pork is done. It was a real pleasure to have simple pulled pork buns just like I liked at rugby matches. The evening slides in and I end up watching a really crap Keanu Reeves film before taking my night meds and getting myself off to bed feeling extremely tired.

Bank Holiday Monday and I wake at about 8o’clock and promptly fall asleep again to surface again some two hours later and immediately know I have every few spoons (energy) to spend today. I feel drained before I start to do anything, and today is a day I had said I would train. I take my vitals that are okay but my blood pressure monitor is running low on battery. My partner goes to the gym and I get into my training kit. Instead of training I clear the kitchen, retrieve sowing trays for the cold frame and have breakfast. There comes a point where I can no longer put of the training session, especially when you know its going to be a tough one and just plain bad. I get myself into the garage and onto the rowing machine. I then decide that for some reason I will go for a 45 minute session. I start slow and hope to warm up, I don’t and the session turns out to be as tough as I thought it might be. A below par distance and calories burn.

I record the session and then take a time to walk around the garden with my partner. There are new flowers coming out almost every day. It is such a gift to be given new flowers almost every day.

With the garden walk finished I settle down to do the editing on the next poetry collection. Its a long job and requires focus, which means its slow work for me with little energy. I’m part way through by tea time. Once I have eaten I return to the editing and eventually get to the end. While I have energy I get it sent to my new editing team with one or two additional bits of information. Then its onto drafting the blog. It feels like I am recovering from my monthly jab, which is just as well as it feels that there is a busy week ahead. So I head towards my night meds, nocturnal finger splint and bed in the hope that tomorrow I wake up with more energy and less feeling of frustration.

Friday, my least favourite Friday of the year, a Bank Holiday weekend which means I get my 28 day jab two days early, and this particular Friday I am getting my 8 day jab, B12 injection and my bloods taken for my oncology review on Wednesday. So I am up and showed and taken my morning meds in plenty of time to walk down to the GP surgery. I arrive promptly and I am called into the clinical room equally promptly. Today my 28 jab nurse is also doing my B12 and my bloods. The jabs go okay, a bit stingy but I was (or my veins were) reluctant to give up blood but eventually we got the vampire tubes filled enough for the samples. I walk home via the Co-Op and got croissants and a paper. The store was pretty depleted of some things as it was clear the cyber attack on the the Co-Op was having a lasting effect.

I made myself breakfast and then did a few things in the garden like relay a fire in the chimenea and dispose of the ashes. I topped up the squirrel feeder and the bird feeders before wrestling two large boxes into the recycling bin. I completed the days crosswords and then began to look at more of the photos from the visit to the Shropshire Sculpture Park. As I did so I became aware that my injection site was getting sore and I was becoming more uncomfortable as time went on. I persisted with my review of the photos from the sculpture park, here are just a couple more to share.

What I have put on the blog is a tiny fraction of things to see at the sculpture park, I did ponder buying a small owl made out of motorbike parts but as my partner reminded me, “where would we put it”, and its true we have so much stuff that we have gathered up over the years. So we left the sculpture park empty handed but having had a lovely and unexpected day.

By early evening I am feeling really crap. I eat pizza for tea, fix the Netflix account and watch films and TV as my soreness and inability to concentrate increases. I take my night meds and my partner makes me toast to help soak up the liquid paracetamol I take. My partner goes to bed but exhausted as I am I hang onto till midnight to see my blood results. Usually they are on the system at midnight but tonight they do no appear. I reason that it is Bank Holiday so there may be a delay. I go to bed at gone midnight and hope for the relief of sleep.

Before getting up I do my vitals and they are are good enough apart from my heart rate that is higher than usual. I do not know why but all I can do is rest today and get through the post jab effects. Once up I make breakfast and sit on the sofa and begin to draft the blog, adding photos and blood results along the way. At lunchtime my partner brings me a much appreciated bacon sandwich as I work towards updating my blood pressure spread sheet, a necessary chore as its one of the things the oncologist is always interested in. I like to be able to given then an accurate average over the current cycle, hence the spread sheet. Once that is done the plan is to rest as much as possible and ride out the aftermath of yesterdays injections.

I wake up in a hotel bed after a crap nights intermittent sleep, my partner does the same, we both feel rough and under the weather with a lot of aches and pains, which is a real pisser as we are going to the Shropshire Sculpture Park to day. I take my morning meds before going down to breakfast. Its the usual British buffet breakfast, no need to say anymore. Despite myself I cannot resist doing the full experience of cereals, cooked breakfast and of course toast and marmalade. When we are full my partner and I retreat to the and prepare ourselves to travel the thirty minute drive to the sculpture park.

Its impossible to miss the entrance of the Shropshire sculpture park, for starters it has this over looking the entrance not to mention a dragon or two.

I parked up and my partner and I walked towards reception to to get out parking permit and wrist bands but before we even got to it there were these to see.

At reception we collected our wrists and pathetically got the girl behind the counter to put on them on for us, and then we wandered off into the main area of the sculpture park. It was amazing everywhere you looked there were amazing constructions some caste and some recycles and apparently all for sale! Of course as Brits and me with my dickie prostrate my partner and I went for a pre-emptive piss before exploring and discovered that toilets can be an interesting and surprising places to be. This chap was sitting in the middle stall of three.

Then of course when comfortably ensconced in ones own cubicle there was this for company plus a useful info notice.

Having got comfortable there was then the mirror to contend with.

So having got the message that nowhere was going to be free of recycled metal my partner and I started to wander around the vast park with our mouths open and not quite sure where to look first. The first field is an animal scape, which can be wandered around, it is full of cast animals ,and the more we look the more we saw.

As we wandered around we found more and more things to see. One was the heroes tent where I found Rocket and Groot who I’ve put at the top of he blog and my favourite, a famous Banksy turned into 3D, again all out of recycled parts and machinery. I just loved this.

We wandered around finding things and taking photos for ages until it was time to have lunch which we duly did in glorious sunshine and with a skeleton in a wheel chair.

With lunch done my partner and I continue to wander around and kept finding new things. There are some small pieces, some fun pieces and some monumental pieces. Here is an example of each.

I and my partner had expected not to be at the park long but we spent the whole day there, including a large ice cream. Then just as we were walking to the car park we discovered a whole new bit of the park and so we wander off once again to look at the new sculptures. Eventually we were both tired, my phone had run out of battery and my partners was getting low and we need it to get us back to the hotel. So we retrieved the car and made our way back to the hotel a thirty minute drive away. My partner has lots more photos of the sculptures so I expect more will turn up on the blog. It really was a brilliant day and somewhere where children would love, no wonder it won the “best day out” award.

Back at the hotel my partner and I refresh in the bar before going back to the room to find the dodgy bathroom door had been fixed, the sliding doors on the wardrobe had been fixed but still no BBC 1 or 2. We dined in the bar a bit later and sat outside over looking the hotel grounds both of us reading until it became chill. I hooked up my laptop and watched a European football final, Spurs beating Man U. After that it was al preparation for another nights sleep. I had found the room fan and put it on in the hope that it would alleviate both my and my partners hot flushes in the night that were so invasive and disturbing last night. I down my night meds and get my head down knowing I have to drive home tomorrow. ITs been a good day, a day when I was feeling ropey to start with but got better and better as the day went on but by the end I was completely out of spoons, hence no blog drafted.

Thursday, a better nights sleep and so it was time to pack and indulge in one last hotel breakfast. On a table close by was a number of men who had known each other for 37 years getting together for breakfast together having met up the previous night. They were delightfully English, at the end of their meal and in saying their farewells they very primly shook each others hands and went their separate ways, so English, no hugs, no cheek kissing, just a very measured goodbye and a hand shake, lovely. We saw some of them in the car park later doing the last round of farewells, handshakes, already done that, just a few “good to see yous” and “see you next times” as they went to their own cars and departed . My partner and I finished breakfast, packed our bags in the car, settled the bill and drove home using the combination of my cars SatNav and my partners google maps on her phone. Went splendidly until they disagreed at which point it was a case of picking an option and going with until they coalesced once more. Of course it got to the point where I knew where I was and they became redundant.

Home and straight into life admin, checking the emails, reading the meters, collecting drugs and unpacking, whilst the garden guy turns up. There is a new mattress topper to air and put on, and of course the blog to catch with. Most important is that I have signed the letter of agreement with Rulers Wit and paid an upfront amount to get my fourth Cancer Years collection up on Amazon, it is to be called The Cancer Years: Ordinary Brave. So I have editing and the torture of other people inspecting my work to start, but I feel glad that I have found a British based team to do he work rather than going back to the Americans.

The evening beckons and I do not know what I shall be doing yet but tomorrow is a 28 injection day and a bloods day. It being a bank holiday the injection has to be this Friday, so I am liable to lose a chunk of the next two to three days as I deal with my injection soreness and the other side effects. Next Wednesday is my oncology review so I have to keep training, taking my vitals and drinking copious amounts of water. Its not my favourite time but I am here and intend to stay here, there is much to do and much to write.