Saturday and its hot, not the extreme hot it is due to become over the next three days but still hot. As a result my partner and I go food shopping early at the garden centre and sort out a mail delivery at the local sorting office before breakfast. After that it is a day of lazing, pulled curtains and nibbling food. Most of the time is spent on the patio under the sun shade reading. The day gets hotter as it progresses so everyone lazes more. The evening is taken up with a meal and watching episodes of the Magicians. Of course during the day there are odd moments of activity like feeding the hedgehog and taking in the dry washing from the line, even the odd crossword but in general this was a physically inert day. I am aware of how easy it is to be irritated when overly hot so I try to be calm during the heat and try not to get pulled into being productive or feeling guilt that I am not doing anything. It is a time to be minimalist.

Sunday starts with a disaster. I weigh myself. I am 99 Kilos!! In two weeks (including a week on holiday) I have put on over 2 kilos. That is appalling and depressing almost despairing. It feels as if I have wasted the last three years in my fight to try and stay fit while fighting my cancer. It feels as if I have to start all over again but with a body less able to fight. To top it all tomorrow is injection Monday so I have a couple of days of taking paracetamol to ward of the after effects of the jab and then a few more walking around with a egg sized lump in my gut that is sore. But hey you say, your still alive, which is true and at which point I count my blessings. I am not in the Ukraine or Sri Lanka and as Cicero said “You want for nothing if you have a garden and a library” and I have both. As I was fond of saying to people who asked me how I was ” I am loved and cared about, who could want anything more?”

Today is already warming up and it is only 8 o’clock in the morning, I’m on the patio catching up with the blog while the house sleeps. I will do nothing today except read, eat and drink a great deal of water. I suspect there will be other things but I shall try to keep them to a minimum as I seriously start to sit out the predicted heat wave. Unless something of great magnitude happens or I have a sudden burst of inspiration I shall write no more today. Being cool and inert will receive my full attention for the next three days.

Friday and it travel day back home from holiday. I am up early and clearing things away. I shower and then I and my partner have a simple breakfast. In the clearing away I break a mug for which we leave a note apologising. We empty the bins and try to leave the place the best we can. My partner leaves a note in the guests book and then we load the car. We have decided to leave early to avoid traveling later in what the weather people say is going to be hot. So at 09:30 we drive off. I decide to stop as soon as possible to fill the tank, which we do after the first fifteen minutes. My plan is to get to Bristol and then have a break. Its a plan I am forced to ditch 20 miles short of Bristol, the journey has been slow with a lot of stop start periods. We have a short break at about 12 o’clock and move swiftly on eating sandwiches on the move.

The rest of the journey is a slow drive with a lot of stop start periods, eventually we get some clear road as we get relatively close to home. After five and half hours of focused driving we finally get home. Before we empty the car we have a coffee in the garden and take a breath. The car gets emptied, I unpack and I get my washing in. This of course means I have to rearrange my ice hockey jersey collection as I need to integrate my two new birthday jerseys. I put all my coyote jerseys together thinking ahead about future videos to be made.

I walk down to the chemists and pickup my monthly drug prescription. Monday is my jab day so I will be taking paracetamol in preparation over the weekend. Its a real downer to be doing this after such a successful holiday. Once back I stow my drugs and set about watering the pots in the garden. Once again I have returned to a garden that gives me new gifts. A few are below:

Early evening and we eat and watch the English women beat the Northern Irish 5-0. By the end of the match I am spoonless and have nothing left. I shall take my meds and then slowly make my way to bed with a new book to read. It is another present from an old friend. E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia is going to be my next book. I am left feeling that I would have liked to have stayed on holiday for another week by the sea. Just watching the ocean would be sufficient.

Thursday the last full day of holiday. I get up and have coffee while my partner sleeps. We make a slow start to the day with a simple breakfast of toast and grapefruit. The forecast says its going to get unbearably hot so we decide to sit on the beach after lunch. In the meantime I and my partner go to post the last remaining cards and get food for the evening. The post box has been knitting bombed.

We collect pasties from the bakery and then buy a paper. Back at the apartment we settle down to a mid morning read and a coffee. Thus we wend our way to lunchtime and more coffee and savoury rolls. A brief rest and then its off to the beach to use our new folding chairs and to read at the edge of the sea. Very romantic, very holiday. Of course there is a challenge; how quickly can I get the chair together from its packaged state to body supporting function. Action video below, note the cracking new ice hockey jersey.

You would be forgiven for thinking that this is a resounding success and for a while it was. I erected the second chair and settled down to read some Proust on the Kindle. Being a fat bastard and the chair being, well less than Chippendale, I and the chair sank into the sand. I moved and once again slide sideways into the beach. I gather rocks to reinforce the foundations of my chair. I ease my rump into the chair and for a moment all feels well and then without any sense of responsibility it tipped me arse over head onto the beach giving out an ominous crack as it went. It had broken. I stuffed the broken skeleton into its bag and found myself a niche in the pebble ridge where I returned to reading. I did not last long before being aware of how nippy the sea breeze was. Enough was enough, we decamped and returned to the apartment disappointed and disgruntled. We change clothes and go for a walk to the “haunted House” and then indulge in an ice cream.

We end up looking over Westwood Ho! from the cliffs and watching the ocean roll in to a high tide. During this time I get a message from a friend suggesting that due to the predicted heat wave at the weekend we postpone our lunch date. We discuss this adn decide that it is a good idea and so I message back that we agree and are happy to met the following Sunday.

A wander back to the ice cream van and a sit down over looking the green to savour it. A final trip to the shop to buy beans for tea and then back to the apartment. My partner sits on the patio while I arrange a Tesco delivery for Monday. A stranger stops to talk to my partner over the patio wall and asks if she and her husband can see our apartment. They own one of the apartments in the complex and are thinking about changing the layout to one that is similar to the one we are in. They come in and have a look around and we chat a bit. They own several letting properties and are considering what to do with their latest acquisition. They seem relatively okay and clearly comfortable with life. They leave and I continue with the Tesco order. Then sadly we start to pack for our departure in the morning.

Tea is a simple affair with the football on in the background and then out of the blue a brass band starts to play. There on the green a brass band has turned up and is giving an impromptu performance. An unexpected event which is very English seaside.

The evening progresses and I start to draft the blog as France set about Belgium in the football. I’ve written nothing this holiday apart from postcards and the blog, that’s unusual but I note the Poetry Society annual competition is open till October so I might have a stabbed at it for the chance of the £5000 prize. I think however my entries will lend up joining my Herod’s Children collection which are all my competition failures.

Wednesday and I am up early as I can not get back to sleep. I do my usual email and message check as I sit with my first coffee of the day. Perhaps time to write the postcards. It is indeed and for a while I pen thoughts from Westwood Ho! to friends and family. By about 9 o’clock my partner rouses after a disrupted night so I make drinks and marmalade toast to get us both going for the morning. I have a bath and for the first time for a few days listen to the radio as I soak.

First activity of the day is to post the the cards and get a paper. This we do noting as we do that today its cloudy and the breeze is quite cool. We decide to slob for a bit doing puzzles and reading. I have had to resort to my Kindle and find myself starting to re-read In Search of Lost Time, Proust’s five volume life’s work. By lunch time phase two of the plan comes into operation, we head for the chippy. There is nothing like fish and chips by the seaside. We order, we wait, we collect and then walk the few steps back to the apartment to sit and enjoy our box of treats. It is delicious and a real holiday treat.

There is feast and there is then the rest afterwards. We laze and do nothing but enjoy the after glow of holiday food. eventually we rouse ourselves and prepare for our daily beach walk. Fully creamed and with back pack full of towel with head off down the beach. My legs, specifically my calfs are aching from all the sand walking that is being done but I know that it is good for me. Westwood Ho! beach is long and flat with surprisingly few people on it. We paddle along the waters edge for miles before we retrace our steps as the tide comes in.

We get to the slip way just as the sea starts to lap up against it, excellent timing. We dry our feet, put on our shoes and head to our favourite ice cream van on the green. Its a pleasure to sit for a while as we eat out 99s watching the sea come in and the streams of people going about their holiday fun. Post 99s we go and shop for strawberries but there are none. My partner asks a guy stacking the shelves if there are any. He goes to look adn returns with a whole tray of punnets. We are very happy. Back at the apartment we change into lazing gear and potter for a while until we feel the call of coffee and a fat rascal. I eat mine as I watch the women’s European football. Between the end of one game and the start of the next I start to draft the blog. I realise this is not exciting but to have a holiday where I and my partner are feeling relatively well and enjoying the weather and the location to the extent that we can do nothing and feel good about it has not happened for a while.

This evening will be more football and a “nibbley” late tea before a relatively early night. Tomorrow come what may we will be having our beach day complete with chairs, books and treats.

Tuesday and I awake from a good nights sleep at 10 o’clock. I am extremely dopey for a while until I have a coffee. My partner makes bacon sandwiches for breakfast before we go out to walk the beach again, full length today. This daily walk is crucial to getting 10,000 steps in each day. Its cloudy today so before we set out my partner re-plaits my hair and then we are off.

We walk the beach and paddle for much of the journey. There is something definitely English about the way we paddle in the sea. There is a certain idiosyncratic way that Brits approach the ocean. Can’t do without it, not sure what to do with it. At the end of walk we make our way to the shop to buy a paper and some more 0% beer. I rest after the walk by doing the crosswords in the paper as we eat strawberries and drink squash.

My partner gets twitchy at siting around and soon drops hints about doing something and proposes mini golf. I’m not enthusiastic but agree. So off we go to the mini golf course. We time it poorly as we end up behind a family of about eight. So our round of 18 holes takes sometime.

I lose by a single hole, I cannot keep up the concentration required. Defeated I need the consolatory ice cream. We go back to our favourite ice cream van and order our favourite 99s. Once again we sit on the green and slowly appreciate the ice creams as we look out over the sea washing up at full tide onto the pebble ridge. My eldest daughter rings and we chat about drain cleaner and disrupted travel as well as the priorities of feeding the hedgehog and putting the bins out. Time is getting on so we return to the apartment and couple watching football with making and eating tea.

Spain versus German is the evenings main match and proves to be a good entertaining game. I start to draft the blog against the background of what seems like an inevitable German victory. Time seems to be flying by on this holiday and we have yet to use our beach chairs and I’ve not written a post card yet. It is a shame we are not here for longer as this feels like the first time in a long time that we have been on a holiday that has been restful.

So perhaps we will return or find another haven to visit but it seems we fare better when we are in an apartment and can look after ourselves. If I miss anything it is my garden and my Shed with its desk and books. Finding time to write and think is sometimes a problem on holiday and it is my garden and Shed where I am able not only to reflect but also record those reflections or convert them into something expressive. However with sunsets like the one above I am fed new experiences and triggers. I still have the Kiss of the Spider Woman washing around my head and all sorts of thoughts about why confined men are characterised as likely to become sexually active with other men if they become emotionally attached or engaged. I suspect the sexuality of the author has a strong influence on this.

Monday, still on holiday, still the sun puts in an appearance and still I do not get a good nights sleep. So its a bed, sofa, bed combination night again. Again I get up early and read. I read until I finish the The Kiss of the Spider Woman. Its a while since I read a book that actually comes to its conclusion with the words “The End”. I know this is one of those books that is going to hang around” for quite a while, I’ve already started to have ideas about it. Not until my partner gets up do we eat breakfast and plan the day. We prepare our shopping list and head out to the local bakery and the general store. We return to the apartment, stow the food and settle down on the balcony to read the paper, do puzzles and for the first time in a long time jot a few notes. For what they are worth here they are:

I like to think that I can learn something when I am holiday, so I thought I would keep a note of what I’ve learnt so far. This is day three of the holiday and so far its been productive. Firstly I’ve learnt that I do not sleep well in a normal size double bed when it is hot. This is exacerbated by the hot flushes induced by my anti-cancer drugs. I am condemned to a menopausal type flushing till the day I die. I think this has increased my personal space perimeter to that of a football pitch. So no matter how knackered  I am at the point of retiring I fail to sleep for a long time until I finally drift off only to wake up quickly after and needing to decamp to a sofa. Here I doze for a while before trying to return to the bed. The outcome is that I get up early and read, which is a mixed blessing.

This brings me to my second learning. I should not read crime thrillers and who done it books. Having spent my life in the criminal justice system and in particular working in therapeutic communities with hundreds murders and the like I have a head full of lifes extreme inhumanity that humanity is capable of. The result is that the made up stuff is what it is, namely contrived. Sometimes its thoughtfully contrived and plausible, usually when kept simple, other times it’s just a hotchpotch of ill-informed pseudo psychological nonsense. There is a running joke in the family that I always know who’s done it before the end of whatever film or series we are watching. Its simple really these are forms of entertainment and of course have to be written in such a way as to be clever or entertaining. There are assumed rules to that, once you know the rules it becomes easy to see through. The reality of murder and serious crime is far more prosaic and human than the entertainment business would have us believe.  

Thirdly I have found that reading some book is exhausting. Not because the physical effort of reading them but the aftermath of them. There are those books that niggle at you and stay with you. In odd moments traces of them come back vividly and pose a question or prise open a door that you think you had bolted tight on the inside. The Cat That Saved Books was one of those but the most recent is the one I finished this morning, The Kiss of the Spider Woman. It is a book full of challenge and with a current of long academic footnotes that act as an invitation to thought along the way. In the narrative the psychological theory (now old and replaced by more rational thought) is played out in a relationship. Perhaps it appeals to me is the setting as it is a prison cell. Perhaps it was the broken night sleep, but once I had finished the book I was instantly tired and knew this was one of those books that will stay with me. Relationships in confined space have of course been a large part of my life, however mine have always been spaces with an intention, the searching and making of new meaning, new personal universes. It is the “normal” confinement of relationships that creates the journeys and universes that everyone lives in daily. Here are the greatest perils, the roots of what makes some books exhausting to read, or rather to live with afterwards.

Fourthly I’ve discovered that when I run out of books, I compulsively write. Either stuff like the above, the blog, letters, and poetry. It would seem that after a life time of trying to understand and make meaning that it is not something I can turn off.

Lunch time arrives as does the hottest part of the day. Its fat rascal time and a cool drink before we prepare to walk the beach. With a bag on my back we walk the length of the beach as the tide comes in. On our return we run out of sand and are forced to climb over the pebble ridge by the lifeguard station and walk back along the burrows behind the pebble ridge that runs the length of he beach. We get back to the main resort are and buy ice crams which we at while sitting on the “village” green. We watch a bunch of adolescence being adolescents, a couple smoking but most of the others vaping. It seems to be a big ting amongst them. They are obviously visiting for the day and like a flock of seagulls rush off together to get on their bus. The leave a load of crap behind, empty cans, bottles and wrappers. We watch and pick out the ones whose futures are already etched in there behaviours. We finish our ice creams and wander off to find postcards. The choice is not great and we end up going back to the “arty” shop to get the best variety before returning to the apartment. Here we indulge in cooled drinks and I retreat to the shady bedroom to draft the blog and fulfil my promise to include the treasures we found on the beach, our version of Caligula raiding Neptune’s palace.

So it is now evening and still hot, there will be pasties for tea and football tonight. Best of all a new sunset to admire and perhaps inspiration to be had. Football: England 8 Norway 0. I put off going to bed as long as possible in the hope that I will fall asleep tonight.

Sunday, a poor nights sleep between bed and sofa and then back to bed, so a late start to the day proper. A croissant and strawberries breakfast again accompanied by coffee. We call our youngest daughter, a Sunday ritual, and find her decorating and planning future home improvements over the coming months. By the time we leave for our first beach walk it is gone 11 o’clock and we need to beat the tide coming in. We walk the full length of the beach and back again, easily breaking the back of 10,000 steps. We return to the gangway as the sea starts to lap up it. A difficult decision followed namely what type of pasty to have for lunch. Having selected we returned to the apartment to feast lazily and to spend the next few hours reading and watching the Wimbledon final. The book I am now engrossed in is Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. A friend with a genius for picking and sending me book that are right up my street has sent me a preloved copy, which has intriguing notes written in it by a previous owner. I really like that.

By mid afternoon its time for a walk over to the ice cream van to get 99s and return to see the final set of the men’s final at Wimbledon. I shower and return to reading as the heat of the afternoon reaches its peak as it streams through the glass side of the apartment. Tea comes later, a simple fish cake and salad repast before settling down to watch the final episode of a series we have been watching. I’m hoping for a better nights sleep. I realise I have nothing deep and meaningful to share and acknowledge that at the moment things are being an effort, which affects how creative I can be.

Saturday and its the first full day of Holiday! Its sunny, again. I wake early and curl up on the sofa and read The Appeal for hours. My partner joins me and we pop to the shop for a paper and some strawberries so we can breakfast continentally on croissants, strawberries and yoghurt. We both settle down with our books and continue to read. By lunchtime I have finished The Appeal. A book with an intriguing format and an interesting mixture of social dynamics and medico/psychological conditions. It was a fun to read, a bit predictable if you apply the rule of disbelieving what must be true, but entertaining. It got me thinking if I could write one, after all I’ve known and worked with hundreds of murderers and life is always much stranger than fiction. Perhaps when I have done other projects.

We lunch on ham sandwiches and then go for a stroll towards the “haunted house” on the cliff edge at the far end of the resort. We move on to the field overlooking the bay and sit quietly on a bench watching the sea. A gentle stroll back brings us to the surfing shop where my partner buys a new cap. We meander back via a closed bakery back to the apartment and continue to read. I fall asleep and before I know it seven o’clock has rolled round. It seems the men’s doubles at Wimbledon has been on for ever and as I draft this blog they are only into the fourth set. The evening will provide another glorious sunset and time to read or explore TV. The weather forecast suggests more sun tomorrow, it must be a heat wave!

Friday and its Holiday time. Lift off is due to be 11am so there is much to do before we roll. The hog needs feeding, the bird feeders need to be filled and then the car packed and the wine gums secured in place. the wine gums are an essential for me when I drive any distance. At 11:08 we roll off the drive and get underway. Six hours later we arrive at our destination, Westwood Ho! There was a brief sandwich stop but for much of the way we crawled for no apparent reason. I was very glad that the car has air con as the temperature outside ramped up.

We settle in and take a first look at our apartment. We are pleased and the view of the sea is excellent.

My partner and I settle in, stow our stuff and go for a slow walk round what is now familiar territory. I buy non alcohol beer as a holiday treat and then prepare ourselves a pizza having mastered the oven. We retreat to the large sofa and I draft the blog with the women’s football on in the background. I’m tired now and have little energy left so I shall indulge in a beer, some maltezers and then head for an early night and a bit of a read. It looks like the weather may hold.

Thursday 7th July. Its a day of preparation for the start of a holiday tomorrow. Before we can set off to sunny Devon there is a much to do. So I spend my day sorting out yesterdays mound of packaging and recycling it. Then its on to the serious business of choosing a holiday wardrobe and packing. The weather is looking good so the amount of stuff I pack is kept to a smaller amount. I slip in a peanut butter bagel and a coffee to wash the meds down and then continue with the preparations.

By lunchtime holiday organisation is well under way. My partner and I make a list of the food we intend to take with us and the shopping list that goes with it. Having sorted that have lunch and then we take the car to fuel it up and check the tyres before going to Sainsburys to get our supplies. Back home the vittles get stowed and we go about our chores lists. A friend calls me on her journey from seeing her mother and we have the opportunity catch up. I squirrel away my birthday presents and get the hedgehog fed. The guy who keeps out garden tidy turns up and over coffee we discuss what needs doing and the how, when and how much it is going to cost. We do the business and I leave him to get on with the job.

My partner is still packing and I slide into the evening and wonder if I will get to watch the women’s football euro match and indulge in a long and refreshing pre travel bath. So its time to pack the laptop ready for the journey, hopefully I shall be posting tomorrows blog from the seaside as my partner and I just want to have a holiday without either of us becoming ill.