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.

Easter Saturday and I am up early so that I and my partner can go back to the garden centre to buy more turf for the front garden. I had miscalculated how much would be needed so extra was required. It was a fast in and out job and we were soon back home eating breakfast. After breakfast I return to reorganising the office. Eventually I am able to free up shelve space so that my partners music books are on a shelf of their own and at hand for when she has her singing lessons. Ultimately what is required is a longer term strategy to create space. So I order another Hippobag with the intension of clearing space in the garage storage space so that we can store more in the garage as well as getting rid of the piles of paper that needs to go. I get to the stage where I can do no more so my partner takes over the task.

I watch an inordinate amount of sport from then. The garden guy arrived and set about laying the turf we had bought earlier and mowing the grass. He works like a demon and by the time he goes home things in the garden are looking good. The new turf needs watering over the next few days and it will be weeks before it can be mown.

The evening comes around and I watch TV and do some more organising until its time to draft the blog and take my night meds. I have not trained again today so tomorrow it has to be a priority

Thursday and I wake up knowing I am going to spend the day clearing the end of the sofa and the office. I am determined to get what I can do to complete this task done by Easter. I do my vitals, which are good, and then get into “tidying” clothes before eating a healthy breakfast and then I am at at! I stay at it until gone six o’clock at night when I reached the point I can do no more and it is up to others to do their bit. The results are gratifying, the next phase is to get rid of the jettisoned mounds of papers, but that will grow as others rationalise there papers and “stuff”.

By the time I reach this stage I am knackered, I have no energy spoons left at all so slump onto the recliner and stare into space until the evening meal. After that its a night of football which includes the most amazing extra time win I have ever seen. Eventually I go off to bed having downed my night meds, donned my night splint and hope fo ra good nights sleep.

Easter Friday and a wake to a partner who is awake and does not have a plan for the day. I have breakfast and when I go to take my morning meds I find my dosette are empty so I have to do the ritualistic fortnightly filling of them. Its a tedious job but one that keeps me straight in terms of medications.

With the drugs sorted its time to prepare the car go and get what is needed to re turf the old flower bed in the front garden. With the car turned into a truck my partner and I go off to “Hagrids” one of our local garden centres. Its a flying visit for top soil and turf. I think I have measured up but I have not done the square meterage calculation the result being that when I get home and do them I think I have under bought. I will just have to wing it. With the goodies unloaded my partner and I go food shopping in the village shop before I settle down to do the days crosswords. While I am exercising my brain my partner and eldest daughter are busy sorting out their stuff in the office. I stay well clear and draft the blog until they can do no more and the evening closes in.

The evening is going to be a slow one of indulgence as befits a Bank Holiday. Some favourite TV, perhaps some reading and suddenly I am thinking a small glass of red wine as a treat. It’s been a simple day but tomorrow I need to train in order to keep my “Moving On”, moving on.

Wednesday and I wake up thinking about the continued organising of the office. I go through my getting up routines including my vitals (all good) and then I get up and get straight into my training gear. Of course breakfast comes first and then I get to clearing and reorganising the shelves in the office. Its full of old reports and assessments of services that I have done over the years. They included prisons, therapeutic communities and mental health units so I have to go through them all to take out everything that could identify the services or individuals, so that I can put some stuff in the recycling and set aside the stuff that I will need to have destroyed. It takes hours to do. Eventually I have done so much throwing out that I can once again refit two of the shelves that had been taken out.

Eventually I am can do no more, I need others to sort out their stuff before I can sort out my filing draw and other areas. So having beavered away for so long I have no option but to finally get round to training. I get myself into the garage and onto the rowing machine. I am already knackered before I start my thirty minute session. Sessions at the end of the afternoon are always more taxing and difficult and this one was no different. As a result I do not make my desired 6 kilometre distance.

I finish the session to find that the household has gone out so I get changed and prepare to watch a football match while eating my order in curry. That is basically it for the day apart from taking my night meds and donning my finger splint before going to bed. Tomorrow will be another day of office organisation and reclaiming, I am now determined to get this done before Easter weekend so I can start using it again and get down to writing people letters again and stop organising my life off the end of the sofa like I have been doing for the last five years.