Tuesday and I wake up after a really crap nights sleep. Its seven o’clock and I get up, pull on some clothes and move my car off the drive so my partner can go to work. Its a real going to work day and my eldest daughter follows my partner soon after, leaving me alone in the house, so I go back to bed with my phone and book. I deal with messages, look up football coverage and send messages as I sip a cup of coffee. Its clear I am not going to go back to sleep so I get up and clear the kitchen, make another coffee and ring the hospital booking line. I am expecting an arm wrestle but I am met with a cheery voice, which once it had confirmed who I was, provided me with the date and time of my new appointment. So come next Tuesday (the 30th) I shall be seeing he who made a pact with the devil to see if he has got any pills, potions or herbal concoctions to offer me. Having burnt through the radiotherapy option without a a single radio wave being expended I’m hoping that there is something he can offer beyond leeches and pointing bones over his shoulder. These last two are the final throw of the dice before reaching the “Fuck off and die” stage for which there is morphine, hopefully lots of it. Anyway having got my early appointment (its as fast as you can expect the nhs to operate these days, positively lightening fast compared to the replacement hip waiting list times) I settle down with my coffee, tick off items on my to do list and start to draft the blog before gliding into the day. I was hoping for sunshine but so far I am being disappointed. Onwards.

A friend calls and we chat for a while. Its nice to be able to wander around the house while chatting, it is the luxury of having the home space to myself. It would seem that the bank holidays are coming thick and fast and with them the organisation to occupy families. After the call I go down to the village shop to get a paper and meet my partners brother. We stand and chat family stuff for a while then I go on to the village café for coffee and a sausage and egg roll. I while away time doing the crosswords and then return home to yet another box of trinkets and beads.

I spend a lot of time going through boxes and looking up designer and artist names who appear on some of the boxes. I find new layers. There is a real mixture of modern and old stuff. The modern stuff is fairly easy to identify adn to assess, the older stuff is more tricky and so I turn to my metal recognition set of fluids and the diamond identifier. I spend more time sorting out which of the trinkets are gold and/or contain diamonds. Putting all the objects back in some sort of order takes times, but eventually the collection is boxed. That is enough of that for one day. Its getting on so I prepare to train for the first time in ten days. It feels like the Real Life death stuff has caught up with me. I change in to my kit and go to the garage to set the rower up but find the display is blank. So I waste time putting in new ones and then set myself up to row for 45 minutes. It goes better than I thought it would after ten days. I manage to go over 10 kilometres and burn 600+ calories, so its a reasonable session.

I get back into the lounge and record the session in my journal. Its a FFY (Fend For Yourself) night so I make soup and a roll for tea and then take a call from my youngest daughter to talk about executorship issues. After the call I return to drafting the blog and watching the Night Agent. Its going to be an early night for me after last nights crap sleepless night, so I will be heading for the waves as soon as I feel my head nod.

Monday, awake, coffee, breakfast and more coffee to wash the morning meds down. I ring the solicitor and chat to her about my sisters estate and the state of play. There are some executorship issues to sort out. So that’s one thing off my to do list, now I need to decide whether to buy the painting that my partner and I saw last week, which we thought would finish the lounge décor.

I spend time sorting out more of the things that were brought back form the London house. There are boxes of jewellery full of odds and ends and it all needs sorting through. I go through it piece by piece. Some of it I test to see if it is silver, gold or base metal, other pieces I use my probe to test to see if the stones are diamond or not. Its something that goes on most of the day in fits or starts in between doing other things. Before long lunchtime comes around and I ring the art gallery number and get the gallery owners husband who promises to ring back. Before he can ring I email his wife and tell her I want the painting. I have time for a bowl of soup before the gallery owner rings me back. It turns out that she was a music teacher at my villages school around the time my daughters were there. Anyway we chat and do the business, so I end up the owner of a new painting which will complete the lounge. It is going to be delivered this week after the gallery owner ends her day. I ask myself why now and the answer appears to be that I want something fresh and alive, that is unrelate to the past that I am surrounded with at the moment. Here is a sneak peek of what is coming to our lounge live and direct.

Business done I head for the Shed where I spend time writing letters. A friend calls and we spend some time chatting and catching up with what we are doing at the moment. Its a welcome distraction and it is good to hear a voice from outside everything that I am steeped in at the moment. Time moves quickly sometimes when I write so soon its time to be walking over to the post box and sending them on their way. As I return I note that the sun has spurred the garden to flower. I pause to take some pictures. I never cease to be amazed by the way my garden keeps producing such blooms in such profusion.

Back in the Shed I start to mend one of my sisters stained glass pieces. Its a Kiwi whose bounding edge has become detached so I superglue it back into place and leave it to dry. I put my washing into do and then return to sorting through the boxes of trinkets adn nick knacks that remain to be sorted. I am in for a surprise, I find my maternal grandparents wedding rings and signet ring. I also find my paternal grandmother’s wedding ring and aunts signet ring. Then my parents wedding rings and and my fathers signet ring appear wrapped in a plastic bag. So within five minutes I have to hand the wedding bands of two generations. I am the last of my generation and here I am with the bands of them all. I’m struck by how sticky the ripples of death are when trying to move on.

The evening arrives and I eat with my partner. I start to update the blog while watching more episodes of the Night Agent. The evening passes until I droop and find I am spoonless and need to get sleep. Night meds and then bed. I’ve ticked some things from my to do list for today, the most glaring omission is the lack of training. So tomorrow my priorities are to train and to garden.

Saturday and I wake up at 8 o’clock, the time I want to leave for London today. Clearly my unconscious is running the show and being clear that this is something that I do not actually want to do. There is toast adn marmalade with coffee in bed to gather strength adn then there is a flurry of activity as I, my partner and eldest daughter dress and get ready to go to London. On the road by 8:30 ish. The drive was mostly good with one comfort break before we arrived at the London house to met by my youngest and her partner.

The house is partially cleared of furniture and stuff like clothes and bedding, the rest of the contents lay around in disarray waiting to picked over by us. In my head this is a Tomb Raider mission. For the next five and a half hours the five of us pick through the wasteland of my family history, finding unknown artefacts and familiar items. There is a conscious jettisoning of family history and memorabilia. Difficult it is to find that there are the remnants of my mothers parents in the house as they lived with with my family till they both died. My grandfathers army chest with his name and rank on it is unearthed as is a very old music cylinder box. We snack, we drink, we pop out to the café on the corner that was a chemists in my childhood. Next to it is a dentist which ironically was a sweet shop in my youngets days, where we would go and swap ration coupons for sweet treats if we were lucky. Down the road, the old Co-Operative store where I would be sent to buy forgotten food items and was taught to chant my families co-op number, double nine, two o five seven. The house is a mess and a shock to the daughters, this is the wreckage of a life, a family and the inability to ask for and accept help, to even recognise that help was required and available. It is also the wreckage caused by ignorance and bigotry of a mother who sewed the seeds of mistrust in social services and filled her daughters head with paranoia about being taken over by “do gooders” and people who know best. In the end my sisters “independence” killed her. We load boxes with the “essentials” but we all find ourselves slipping “one last thing” into our pockets and into the small spaces left in the boxes. I did at least find the deeds of the house and its documentary history from its very beginnings. At last we could do more than load the cars, hug each other and make our separate ways back to our current homes. I took one photo. It was not of the house, which I will never see again, where I spent my childhood, it was of the single flowering Iris in the front garden. The Iris that my grandfather brought from Kew Gardens when he was a gardener there at the end of the war. It was in full bloom, at least a hundred years old now. On arriving home in Leicester the self same stock of Iris was welcoming me home in a single bloom.

Once home the boxes were unloaded to the hall way and an Indian take away ordered. I am tired and know I am full of the day and everything that it has bought up for me. I eat, watch a film and football highlights. Finally after being alone for a while I take my night meds and go to bed numbed by the effort of the day, the driving, the sorting and the final departure. There are no more of my family left in the city in which we were born and raised. We have either died out or moved on.

Sunday and I wake and doze till 10 o’clock, still feeling tired from yesterdays efforts in London. I have coffee on the patio and chat to my partner about yesterday and then while she goes for a shower I start the blog as I do not want to leave it till the night when I think I will be tired again. My partner and I eat breakfast and then go to our local garden centre to buy weekend food and to get some ice cream treats as the weather forecast suggests some days of warmth. If this is true I plan to garden most of next week. I return to drafting the blog while the afternoon football match plays out on TV. My partner makes me coffee and a coffee and I sit on the patio to indulge and while there I take the opportunity to stitch the sleeves on my Shu Muttens Tigers ice hockey jersey up so that I can wear it as my gardening shirt over the coming week. The football slips into rugby on the TV and I start to unpack some of the boxes that are sitting in the hall. I start with the boxes containing ceramics and begin to replace my youngest daughters swimming trophies with them. The trophies are carefully packed in padded envelopes and I place the new arrivals on the window sill trying to produce the best array to show them at their best. When I have finished what I can I return to a small box of jewellery and start to see what is there. There is an assortment of ear studs, rings, necklaces and my sisters trademark self strung necklaces of polished beads and pearls. I label them all up and then set about verifying the metal in a couple of the rings I’ve found. The first one looks like gold and diamonds so I test it for gold first. It turns out to be at least 14 to 24 carat gold, however I cannot test the diamonds till tomorrow when the battery I need for my diamond tester arrives. The other ring is more straight forward as its hall marked. With the jewellery sorted I move onto the paper work and find the deeds of the house along with other house paperwork including the mortgage my parents took out to buy it. A huge sum of £1800 which they secured with a £200 deposit. It was a 15 year mortgage, which I think they managed to pay off early. My final piece of rummaging finds me going through a file in which my sister was plotting out the family tree By the time I’ve done all this it is time for the evening meal.

My evening drifts from good food to TV and drafting the blog, changing the Tesco order before I run out of spoons and take my meds prior to seeking my bed. Tomorrow I need to get back to some sort of rhythm and to bring some order into my no mans land life. It means writing letters, pursuing my oncologist, extravagantly buying a new painting and retuning to sensible eating and proper training. Most of all my garden calls and there is where I will seek solace. I have to be done with the past as the future is rugged enough with out the extra weight.

Friday and I wake up after a disturbed night. My partner is in the office talking to work colleagues and I can’t be arsed to get up yet. I open my phone and find loads of messages from friends telling me that they are thinking of me and wishing me the best. It prompts me to get up and reminds me I have a fight on my hands. So breakfast and more coffee get consumed and then its meds time. I hesitate but in the end take them as its the night cancer ones that are not working. I start my oncologist stalking. I ring the cancer nurses and leave a message in clear terms about what I want and make it clear I’m not waiting till bloody September to be seen again. There is no one there of course but I leave the message. Then I find some re-directed post that needs attention, so I draft a note to the solicitor and wander over to the post office to send it off.

Its lunchtime and my partner goes to see her physio so I go to the village shop to get a paper and then drop into the village café for a bacon and egg roll. Whilst devouring these these goodies I settle down to do the crosswords. My brain is obviously still functioning as I whip through them quite quickly, but then they are easy. As I sit back in the warm glow of success the cancer nurse rings me. To my pleasure she has already put the letter from yesterdays session in front of my consultant who has responded that he will remain in charge of my case and will see me at his Tuesday clinic. However it will be one to three weeks before he can see me. This is about as urgent as this guy (that’s a pun) can manage. So I will wait with baited breathe till Monday and then ring the appointment line. I walk home and moot going to the gym but I really do not want to. I do not fancy public spaces at the moment so I wonder what I can do to fill my time. In a stroke of reckless abandon I research car insurance quotes given that my current insurer thinks they are going to automatically renew my insurance for a cost that would not give me much change out of seven hundred quid. I try Direct Line who give me a quote of in excess of £700. I decide to give the Meerkats a go, why not? So I put in my details and up comes 129 quotes. Some of them are so cheap I cannot help thinking they must be shit but the Tesco Bank on catches my eye. I click on it and they recognise me as being a Tesco Club Card person and immediately offer me a discount. I go through the process, get my partner to check I’m not being a total arse and end up buying their policy, thus saving me over £267. Go me, and with RAC roadside assist as part of it the RAC can go whistle at renewal time. So for a few moment life is sweet again.

In preparation for the tomb raiding expedition tomorrow, i.e. the trip to the London House of my dead sister, I whisk my partner off to the garage to check the tyres and fill the tank, before returning to an evening of food, rugby, Bridgeton and Have I Got News for You. It will be an early night as the plan is to leave early in the morning for London. Despite my semblance of normality today I still feel numbed and driven back inside myself. I have to keep reminding myself that I have to deal with what is and not what I think it might become. Its not personal its just Nature.

Thursday and I wake up to a coffee and the thought of my radiotherapy appointment. I get up for breakfast, coffee and morning meds slowly and without enthusiasm. What I am buoyed by is the WhatsApp messages of support I get. My friends are being very kind to me and it is very much appreciated. I dress and start the blog to fill in time before driving to the hospital.

GUTTED. I am too much of a risk to do Radiotherapy on. My cancerous prostate is invading my bladder so that radiotherapy is too risky and would leave me with some very unpalatable outcomes. The doctor was clear, cogent and sympathetic, if lacking a sense of urgency. So I have spent 71 days waiting for an outcome on drugs that I know are not working and watching my PSA level double in less than 71 days. I urged the doctor to press for an immediate appointment with my consultant oncologist so that I can get onto a new medication. His response was that he would write his letter today and my consultant would get it early next week. For fuck sake have they not heard of a telephone or email. Its so ritualised and unresponsive as to be unbelievable. I shall be on the phone tomorrow to the specialist Macmillan nurses who I will recruit into my campaign to be in front of my consultant as soon as possible.

Back at the car I find I am hemmed in and cannot get out. Cars too big and parking spaces too small. I’m about to probably lose it when the guy parked in front of me appears and leaves so I can drive through and get out. The drive into town is silent, neither I or my partner can process what just happened in the clinic. We sit in the restaurant and gradually talk about options. There are some practical things that this frees us to do so we make a couple of calls. Having eaten we leave and drive to the gym where my partner cancels her hair appointment on Saturday so that we can go to London for the final visit to my dead sister’s house.

Once home I change out of my “going to hospital” clothes and don shorts and an ice hockey jersey. I go to the village shop and get some cash as the garden guy is coming today. Once home I find I am still stunned and immediately head for the garden. I spend the next few hours organising the pot collection and potting out the plants that were rapidly drying in the greenhouse. Its comforting to immerse myself in the plants and garden. I finish all I can do and just as I pack up the garden guy arrives bearing a gift of fresh rhubarb from his allotment. We chat, I pay him and he get on mowing the grass, while I retreat inside to start my evening of eating, blogging and watching football on TV. I will inevitably end up taking my useless night meds and going to bed.

I’m lost in no mans land. Its going to be a rough fight, and I need the tools to fight quickly and that in itself could be a battle. Now I make new plans, simplify, simplify diet, simplify my days, simplify my priorities. Today the wind blew and my clock lost some of its body.

Wednesday and I wake up for my second morning in the York hotel. I check my emails to find ,my missing PSA result is in. Its a real blow, Its 7.5, double what it was 72 days ago. This is what happens when you spend 72 days on drugs that are not working and waiting to be got to on a waiting list. I’m gutted. I drink coffee, eat a Kitkat and watch the squirrels in the trees outside and reflect upon the PSA score, the conversations I’ve had over the last two days and and further reflect. In some ways ignorance would be bliss but I am not. PSA velocity like this is not good, I am in for a rugged time. I had reached the point that I was more than my cancer and that it should not define me, I shoulded do stuff, but the reality of cancer has a way of coming along and making that difficult to believe. I reflect further and only move once checkout time comes around. I leave and drive home, a sandwich and bounty bar on the way.

Once home I unpack, try unsuccessfully to get my GP surgery to respond and mend my laptop (again). So frustrated with it that I drag out my dead sisters old laptop and endeavour to up grade it to Windows 10, that’s how desperate I am. I go to the GP to get an appointment sorted and drop into the village café. I will drift into the evening and the football. It’s all about tomorrow now and what happens at the radiotherapy oncology appointment. It will either be a big let down or a bums rush to action, I don’t hold out much hope that this is going to go anywhere at any pace. It will be night meds and bed to wake to the hospital appointment.

Tuesday and I wake up in a York hotel room. I do not feel on top form so make coffee and take my morning meds. I check to see if my blood results have come. They have but the one I am most interested in, the PSA is not there. Its sods law in action again, I go to breakfast feeling a bit disgruntled. Post breakfast I rest and then go into town for a stroll around town to look at pictures and what the tourists are up to. It also gives me thinking time to mull over the conversations I have had. There are huge queues to buy ghost tour tickets. I wander up to the minster past a bloke advertising mead.

Of course I end up in the York Fine Art gallery where I bought the Jay Nottingham paintings last time. I wander around the pictures and note there are now a lot of Jay Nottingham prints. He is also doing bigger versions of his night pictures and forests. I am not sure the bigger pictures work and the forests have naff couples in them .

By this time my feet are singing and I am tiring of thinking about stuff so I retrace my steps to the hand made chocolate shop in the Shambles. I get there at about 3:15 thinking that with all the tourists around it is bound to be taking full of advantage of a potential haul. To my horror they close at 3 o’clock! Really, are they mad.

I trudge back to the car park and return to the hotel where I start to update the blog. I settle down for a quiet night reading more of David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind. I will also watch the football on my laptop later on. The Chalmers book is a real challenge and extends me beyond my comfort zone. I can only do this in small bits. Try this snippet:

It would appear that philosophers cannot think about anything without there being other possible worlds based on logical deduction. Personally I find having just one (or is it) is enough of a struggle. But it is refreshing to have to think about what language actually refers to and beyond, but it is hard work. So I settle down to an evening of philosophical conjuring and if I am lucky football, meds and sleep. The thought that I carry most with me from my musings is that I am not my cancer, I am much more than that. I almost forgot that and nearly lost myself. I’m back.

Monday and I am due to go to York, so I get up and have breakfast and morning meds and then pack. I shower and then moves cars around so that I can take mine to the garage and fill it and check the tyres. This all went well until the tyre check. The tyre pump deflated not inflated my tyres so I had to resort to my temporary pump that plugs into my lighter socket. Not a good start. To add to this my partners mother was found to be unresponsive this morning and her brother had to dash across to her house to support the carer. Fortunately she recovered and did not need to go to hospital. I took my partners car to the garage and filled it. So with the chores done I drove off to York. At the first opportunity I pull into a service station and check my tyres. Feeling confident in my tyres and happy I continued my journey.

I get to my destination at 2:30 through some tricky road works and then settle down with my friend and mentor. For over three hours we talk about how I am and and how the world is, teasing out issues and taking time to think about some of the things that are facing me. I am fed chocolate biscuits and coffee but most importantly listened to and asked the difficult questions. It eases the no mans land I find myself in and I come away calmer and cleared about some of the things I can do. There is a lot going on at the moment and finding space to do what needs to be done is the trick.

Check in at the hotel is swift and I am soon in my room drafting the blog before I go out with a friend for a meal. Still no sign of the missing blood results but the issue with the house in London has been delayed. The funeral directors want to know whether I want my sister ashes in wood or plastic (no brainer) and have quoted me the prices and delivery charges. Apparently there are rules about sending dead peoples ashes to other people which appears is an expensive business. All in good time is my first thought.

Early evening I go and pick up a friend and go for a meal in town. It is really relaxing to be able to eat at leisure and to talk about TCs and work experiences. I note that tomorrow is the tenth anniversary of my retirement, My friend pointed out that when I retired I said that I was going to do absolutely nothing and that in fact I then spent the next nine plus years being busy with my own practice, the CQC, and the enabling environment project at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, plus of course a spell with the Barchester Group in Hull and a couple of lecturing gigs at Hull University. There were some Therapeutic Community reviews in there as well. So as my friend pointed out I failed miserably at doing nothing. My friend is suffering from long COVID so by the time we have eaten and chatted she is tired and needs to rest, so I take her home and then go back to the hotel to finish the blog and talk to my partner before taking my night meds and going to bed. As always my visit to York is proving to be vey useful and I feel that I have a lot to think about and process. All of it is so useful in helping me prepare for whatever is to come as a result of Thursdays oncology appointment.

Sunday and I wake up knowing the missing blood results are not in, but I check anyway. Still not there. I make my partner and I warm drinks and we laze in bed till we are ready to move in on the day. I down my trusty muesli, another coffee and my morning meds and head for the garden. Its a labour of necessity today as my front hedges have burgeoned this spring. I gather up my tools, which includes a heavy duty hedge trimmer. I start be dealing with the passage way down the side of the house. I cut back the hedge so that I can get the recycle bin out to the front garden, and then attack the front hedges. I shear my hedges and then gather up the clippings, compacting them as I go. Its a high spoon activity and it does not take long for me to work up a good sweat. After some hours of work I have run out of spoons so I pack my tools away and sit on the pation with a coffee and a scone.

Clearly scones and coffee are good for me as I have a burst of energy and plant out some of the bedding plants that were bought yesterday. By the time I’ve done that I’m ready to watch the rugby semi final on the TV. My team Leicester Tigers lose to the Sale Sharks, they clearly miss my season ticket support. As the sun abates I once again head for the garden and put in a couple of Lavatera (Mallows). My jasmine has died as has my long standing fuchsia so I put in my mallows to replace them. I am hoping that in due course the new plants will establish themselves. If I’m successful the new plants will flower from June all the way through to September or October. I really am out of spoons now and retreat to the reclining sofa and watch Country File. Tonight my partner and I dine on pasta and strawberries before we slide into the evening. Maybe the BAFTA awards, maybe more Night Agent, hopefully football highlights as my team won today. What is for sure I will not be waiting up till midnight to see if the rest of my bloods are in. Tomorrow I travel to York to see my mentor as part of my readying myself for Thursdays radiotherapy oncology appointment. It is the time to gather up my resources, check the resilience batteries and have options for all the possible/likely outcomes. At the moment I think I am in for a bit of a grind in the near future with the medical profession.

Its Saturday but last night I stayed up till gone midnight to see if my blood results got posted. The answer is partially. To my disappointment only one set of results are posted. The missing set contain the PSA result which is the crucial one. The ones that I have got are not brilliant but then again I had a crap cold when I gave the bloods, so perhaps the less than good results are to be expected.

So I crawl off to bed at 1am feeling less than gruntled. I sleep irritably and wake again at 8 o’clock the following morning. So Saturday starts with coffee and a lay in while my partner and chat and plan the day. My partner makes me a bacon sandwich and we both have a morning of tidying the house and getting our environment in order. By the end of the morning all our washing is done and our clothes are away. Beds are changed and the cars have full washer tanks and one has a new rear wiper. Having sorted the house we drive to our local garden center and top up our shopping. On the way back we drop in on another garden center and indulge in scones and coffee.

During all this I’ve been wrestling with one of my laptops which refuses to start up. My afternoon is taken up with watching a rugby semi final and keeping an eye on a laptop screen that occasionally changed which hue of blue it felt like. I slide into the evening and also into the Eurovision song contest. It is a tour de force of techno modern noisy irrelevance but in some respects fascinating. Its going to be a long evening mostly because I know I will not go to bed until I know whether the rest of my blood results are in or not. It is rumored that tomorrow may be sunny, if true I shall be in my garden trying to impose some sort of order on my rapidly developing jungle.