Saturday I get up and make black coffee for my partner and myself. My partner has been fasting since yesterday and cannot eat until after her scan at 2 o’clock today, all she can have is black coffee. While my partner takes a shower I make my breakfast out of her sight so its all over by the time she comes down. The morning drifts by with odds an ends being done. I order a new desk organiser to complete my reorganisation of my “soffice”. I get the evening meal into the Crockpot. The garden camera reveals more activity by the hedgehog and I renew its food supply. The local bus service, which has a stop outside the house, has a strange idea of a timetable. It publishes one and then teasingly ignores it, so actually catching a bus becomes more of an intuitive art form. Unfortunately this morning my daughters intuition was not on point with the result that she needed a lift to her hair appointment. So we drop my daughter off and I take my partner to her scan appointment. We arrive in plenty of time and note another couple waiting in a car. It turns out that these scan appointments are spaced at quarter hour intervals. We get in to the medical centre and almost immediately my partner is called. In a very short time she is out again, scan complete.

I drive us home to the luxury of bacon bagels, a good way to break a fast. I settle down to watch the women’s rugby international between England and Wales. England of course thrash the Welsh but my main interest is watching one of the English players who went to school with my daughters in the local village school. Strange to see someone you knew from school nativity plays being an international athlete. We eat the Crockpot evening meal and settle down to amuse ourselves until Killing Eve is on. It was good to see Villanelle back on form and killing with aplomb again. Football follows and drafting the blog. Its been a slow day, meandering day, lazy day. It ends with meds and a late nigh to bed. Tomorrow I need to activate again.

Thursday, a strange day as it seems I remember little about it. There was toast to start the day and then a work meeting, which was okay. So there I am in the middle of the day already having written and submitted my Invoices for March. My partner and I go for a walk in the village to pick up prescriptions and some bits of shopping. its cold, wind and raining and no incentive to do anything. In the afternoon I have a brief nap and talk to a friend who continues to try and recover from long COVID. It is a slow and challenging process and not made easier by a world that insists that recovery has to be faster or on a timetable set by it and not on the actual state or needs of the person. It strikes me how quickly people want to move on regardless of evidence that there are still real issues to be faced and recovered from. We chat for a while until my friend goes on her way and I return to my nap. I finally rouse from my nap and go to the Shed to feed the hedgehog. It is still eating heartily and appears to be prospering. I drift into the evening, my partner forgoes her singing lesson and we watch a combination of mysteries and football. Late in the evening I clear the kitchen and wander off to bed. I have meandered the day away and know that Friday needs to be different.

Friday and I wake feeling less tired and get up to make a tasty bacon bagel breakfast and prepare to attend a work meeting. I make fresh coffee and settle down in front of the laptop adn log into my Teams link. I wait, I continue to wait, I start doing other things, and wait some more. Eventually the laptop throws me out, its clear I’ve been stood up. So I now spring into action. My partner has holiday time at the start of June and asked me to surprise her with a break or holiday. I scroll through many options and eventually come to a hotel in Windermere, which fits the things we like. I book it for a week, so now we have settled our breaks for the year so far. We intend to see how things go now and adapt our plans for later in the year.

Next it’s time to relocate the fish and to recycle the fish tank. I relocate the fish to the garden pond. I’ve been cross breeding guppies with a cold water fish so I am hoping that there is enough genetic strength in the strain to adapt to the pond environment. I clear the fish tank away and reclaim the lounge alcove. This means I can reorganise my “soffice” and return the sofa to being a piece of furniture. Friends suggest it is a harsh move for the fish, however in the current energy environment it is a luxury to keep heating 96 litres of water to 26 degrees, filter it and light it 24 hours a day every day. That is not an insignificant amount of electricity to be saving and at todays costs, its a financial saving. So its done, an era is over, we move on. I lunch on coffee and iced bun. I clear the kitchen and head for a Shed, where I write a brief letter and feed the hedgehog. I wash out my ink wells, yes you read right, I wash out my ink wells as they tend to sludge up over time. I have also found that dipping my nibs in a candle flame seems to clean them and make the script sharper. I pop out to the post box and return to find the new starters for the garage light have arrived. I fit a new starter but to my chagrin the tube still refuses to light permanently, it just flickers. It means the tube has gone. I take the old one out, do research and source new ones. My partner and I drive to the nearest Wickes and buy a couple of replacement tubes. We know how to have fun. I get home and put in the replacement tube. Bingo, there is light. In another universe I’d be a god.

Too late and too hungry to train we settle for an Indian takeaway, women’s football, TV and finally, as I write the blog, Iron Man 3. During the day I get messages from friends. One has gone down with COVID the other continues to battle the affects of long COVID. It is a battle and the cruellest element is the way it robs people of their energy at a stroke, unexpectedly and wholly. My cancer does it to me on occasions and it is a very disconcerting feeling as the ground gets cut from under you and any plans you’ve made. All I can do is trust myself, rest and go again, again and again until its as good as it gets, again.

Wednesday, I’m up and breakfasted quite early for me. Today is a day to fill the drugs wallets for the next two weeks. It is a regular ritual that is a marker in my monthly cancer management regime. By late morning I am ready to go to the gym, my first time for 14 days that I have been well enough to train. At the gym I get my usual large bottle of water, get changed and find a cross trainer. I optimistically set the trainer up for an hour at my usual resistance level and set off thinking that I will do well to do half the time. I take it easy but as time goes on I loosen up and I am not as out of breathe as I expected to be. To my surprise I manage the full hour and the bonus is that I burn off 703 calories and manage 7.57 kilometres. This is far better than I expected. I shower and hit the lounge for a couple of coffees and egg and bacon rolls. As I indulge a friend calls. She has been to visit her old horse and is on her way to her second coffee and cake engagement of the day. She chats about her improving golf game and the balance to be had between family and golf. I finish my coffee and leave the gym.

On the drive home I stop at the garage and fill the car as I am down to my last 30 miles. My full tank costs me £65! I will not be going anywhere too soon and if I do it is going to be pre-planned well. I drive home, fill my washers, bring in the bin and set off to the garden to feed the hedge hog to find the shed door propped open. The guy who helps with the garden has turned up unnoticed by me. I switch into tea making mode and go for a chat with him in the front garden. I top up the hedgehog canteen and then hang my washing on the airer to dry. Its time for my nap, my new regular afternoon habit. I hit the bedroom and command “Alexa wake me up in thirty minutes”, and she does, but I cheat and have a bit of a lay in. By the time I am up and functioning again garden guy has gone and I set about cancelling my direct debits for the rugby season tickets. We have not been for a while and the season is closing soon, besides which the saving will go a long way to of set the increase in our energy bills. We eat tea and watch a combination of NCIS, Designer competition and football. My pixies are feeling quite active again and I discover that they experience “synaptic itch” where they scratch each others heads as they think through tasks together. Its amazing what goes on in my head. I draft the blog and prepare to get myself to bed, drugs and sleep.

Today I went to the Shed and wrote three letters and read one letter that came in the post. This is my biggest step to wellness in over two weeks. I also posted letters, cleared the kitchen, put bins out, fed the hedgehog, took my half hour nap in the afternoon, ordered and ate Indian and put the dishwasher on. To which I added watching football, ordering stickers to go on letters, ordering ear de-blocker and sorting out my travel for the 13th to take my sister to her cardiology appointment. That’s quite enough for one day. All that’s left is to take my evening drugs and post the blog. Tomorrow I will train for the first time in weeks. I need to get back in the fight.

Monday, back to the usual domestic routine accept I do not return. Normally I would have gone to the gym or to the Shed. Today I did neither as I struggled to throw off the headache I woke up with. So I dillied and dallied all morning, filling the hedgehogs canteen, topping up the squirrel feeder and filling the bird feeders with seed. Somewhere in there I made toast and took my drugs. I feel like Poo Bear with a head full of fluff. At lunch time my partner and I walk round the village and pop into the shop for a paper and bread. On our return my partner loaded the crockpot, we ate lunch and I did the cross words. The Tesco delivery arrives on time and we squirrel away the goodies. I am free at last to have my afternoon nap. I go to the bedroom, flop on the bed and mutter ” Alexa wake me up in half an hour”, she replies “half an hour starting now”. I fall instantly asleep. In my dark blue numbness I hear an alarm and mutter “Stop Alexa”. My next memory is feeling chill and finding its 5:30pm. My half hour has turned into an hour and a half. I’m a little zombified and stare at the TV and start the blog. I drift through the Fugitive, Perry Mason and NCIS. So uplifting in a world where the good win and the rogues and criminals get justice with no social media spew to distort the reality. I eat tea and continue with the blog and the “good overcomes bad” medicine. By the time I get to the end of the blog draft I am truly zombied. Today has been a morass of treacle, a head full of fluff and increasing frustration with myself. I hate myself like this, I’m inpatient to get better and to recover, I’ve things to do. I loose sight of my real fight and I feel like I am distracted, disarmed and dogged.

Sunday and I wake up in Buxton. Our final day of our weekend break. We have pack and then go for breakfast. Its easy to sit and relax and let breakfast meander by. Its a bright spring morning and we listen to others conversations around us. We have a plan. Pack, check out, pack car and then walk into town to shop for last minute goodies. Our plan goes well. We walk down into Buxton and find the Buxton Pudding company where we load up with puddings, chocolate, tipsy fruit cake and stem ginger. Then we step across the road tp the spring house and buy some more water from the shop there. One fills ones own bottles adn then pay fro the bottles. Once you have a bottle you can have as much free water as you like. The Buxton spring is famous and has a well space where “water women” would administer water to those visitors who sort the water for its “medicinal” properties.

We gather up our plunder and return to the car, load up and drive home. My Satnav decides not to reverse the route by which we came but selects another more meandering route. We finally get home, unpack, unwind and settle down to a warm drink and hot cross bun. My first job is to check the hedgehog canteen. Sure enough nearly all the food has gone so I clear out the canteen and refill the bowls for the night to come. I check the camera and apart from the usual pigeons, squirrels, birds and cats there is a surprise. Our hedgehog has a visitor!

I guess hedgehogs have to find each other in spring if there are to be Urchins to grow into new hogs. The “friend” does not appear to have turned up again yet but maybe they are an opportunistic species. Of course they maybe the same sex, in which case Urchins will not be an outcome. I go through my usual process of downloading the images and putting them in chronological folders. While doing this I came across a picture of one of the visiting cats who it appears is on its own evolutionary trip.

I return the camera to its position and set it off. I will check it again midweek, hoping to see more hedgehog gatherings and the further upright development of cat kind. No sign of the fox this week. I let myself have the luxury of watching a rugby match and answer one or two messages. Now its time for my nap. This is my new insertion into my day, a one half hour nap between 1pm and 4pm roughly. I’ve adopted this since watching the Horizon program which showed athletes now incorporating a nap into there day as it increases the big slow wave activity of the brain. This is considered a good a thing. I nap and soon after there is tuna pasta to eat and a blog to begin to draft. Tonight is the last ever Peaky Blinders, so of course I will be glued to it. I am beginning to feel much better from how I was last week end, my cold is abating and I need to start to train again or at least get into the steam room at the gym, but tonight its Peaky time.

Watch this, I found it when I woke up this morning, Saturday. The Russian cartoonist animator, who lives in Israel, is now in hiding. Oleg Kuvaev is his name. The cartoon was banned immediately in Russia.

https://youtu.be/bdSgwsaDNXY

It started my day spiffingly and put me in a good mood before breakfast. My partner and I breakfast leisurely in the hotel dining room before getting ourselves ready to explore the town of Buxton. Its a gentle walk into Buxton centre and then onto the museum and art gallery. It is a quaint rural collection but fascinating. We pass the famous Buxton crescent and pump rooms on the way.

The museum is full of interesting things including a selection of photographs by the local camera club who have an exhibition of the effects of lockdown. There is a wide range of interpretations but my favourite is the following one:

Another exhibition was a celebration of “Trees of Derbyshire”, which was full of great art, photography and poetry. My favourite was in fact a model of bumble bee life.

The rest of the exhibits are archaeological and local history in nature, however Buxton has a famous item in its collection, namely the Buxton Mermaid.

We spend a long time looking around but eventually its time to get lunch before going to our afternoon show at the Buxton Opera House. So its tuna melts and coffee before we go the Opera House at 3 o’clock for the show start at 3:30. Its a small and compact theatre that has been redecorated with some really good murals and mouldings.

We spend the next three hours being entertained by a Meatloaf tribute act in which the female soloist had actually sung duet with the real Meatloaf.

Here are a couple of brief samples of what entertained us:

Its not something I could do, and live music is always an experience, I come away not being quite sure what I’ve experienced. It feels like I’ve had a really good night at the working mans club except we come out in to the sunshine at 6:30. The crew and performers will be doing it all over again at 7:30. That’s a tough gig.

We return to the hotel and almost immediately go to dinner. We dine well and then return to the room to watch Killing Eve and football, during which I draft the blog. Its been a busy day, and I’ve not mentioned the Buxton Pudding company, the art shop, a man who tells me I’m meeting Jesus or the man who liked my braiding.

Friday and its a leisurely start to a day that is going to be full of traveling. It starts with a cereal breakfast and to my delight the hedgehog food order arrives. I check how my hog has fed during the night and find cleared dishes. Without any hesitation I replenish the bowls with enough, hopefully, to keep the hog going till Sunday. I down my drugs and pack for a couple of nights away.

After a brief lunch we drive off to Buxton. Its an easy drive and we arrive safely and quickly at the hotel where we check in and head out to the excitements of Buxton. Our excitement consisted of hot chocolate and cheese scones in a small but very Ah La coffee shop. It sits opposite the Opera House that we are attending tomorrow, so in effect this was a dry run for tomorrow. We plod back up the hill to the hotel and I settle down for a nap. Since watching Horizon yesterday I am instituting a 30 minute nap between 1 and 4pm each day. It is good for my slow wave production.

I wake from my nap and get ready to take my partner to the bar for a pre dinner drink. We settle in to two big soft armchairs looking out over the local bowls club lawns. We listen to a loud voiced woman taking about “tell us once” systems and how this is needed for the Ukrainian refugees. The bloke she is talking to is impressing her with his and his colleagues efforts to get Ukrainian teachers out of the Ukraine. She is impressed and gives him her number. My partner and I get up to go into the restaurant when my partner nudges and and says “Isn’t the woman who was shagging John Major?” Well lo and behold there was Edwina Curry. Now that was unexpected on a trip to Buxton, but a quick google shows she lives nearby. The following three course meal was much enlivened by the encounter with jokes about bad eggs. A good protein full meal that was washed down with coffee before retreating to the room to watch Have I got News for You. Well that was the plan till the bloody TV would not work. Reception said try it on the internet, it would not connect so we watch HIGNFY on the i-pad. And so to bed after drafting the blog. Doing it on the road is always confining I think, so I always feel I ‘ve short changed anyone who has read the the blog so I make a mental note tonight to be attentive to morrow and put in lots of pictures of our Opera House adventure.

Thursday and I wake to snow! Not what I was expecting but there it was.

I wake up still feeling ill and decidedly under the weather, enough for me to cancel two work meetings and retreat to bed for a little while longer. My partner brings me coffee and we both get ourselves up and functioning. I admit my functioning was much enhanced by a fried egg sandwich and more coffee. I check messages and emails and plan for getting better. The weather is bizarre, one moment the sun shines and snow disappears and the next moment it is squally snow storms.

I message chat some people including my youngest daughter and we agree a date for us to visit. Once this has been accomplished then the race for a hotel room is on. We know which hotel we want but they are always busy. I get the final available room for the dates we want and bag it. So we are sorted for another weekend away in April. In a spirit of joy I take my partner to check the hedgehog canteen. Our hedgehog has eaten everything that’s been left for it, and for the first time there are leafs in the feeding area. I am taken aback by the fact that all the food has gone, which was a fair amount and I wonder if our hog could be eating for two or more. The thought of urchins in the future is an enticing one. The dishes are refilled and the canteen put back in order. I will check the camera tomorrow when I top up the canteen for the weekend.

A friend calls and we are able to have a brief chat for the first time in a while, apart from dealing with long COVID there is a wife with COVID and children that have been ill. The juggling of everything is clearly demanding. My partner and I go food shopping at the garden centre, where we also find a birthday present for the family in Shri Lanka. Back home and I find myself tired so watch an episode of the Repair Shop. As the early evening draws on I watch the news and just find myself feeling less and less that I have or can have any control over what is going on and what affects me. That particular worm turns in my gut and I find myself increasingly angry and less tolerant of practically everything. I start to draft the blog and retreat to a warm bath bomb bath.

Tomorrow is the third anniversary of me being air ambulanced back from Jamaica when my kidneys collapsed and my prostate cancer first identified as a real possibility. Its been three hideous years of challenge, loss and trauma. Its also been three years of incredible support from family and friends. By the 19th June 2019 it was confirmed I have metastatic prostate cancer. My oncologist said he could give me an additional 18 months with chemo. The survival curves based on my Gleeson score was 8 months, so in all I had 26 months. So 33 months down from the confirmed diagnosis I’m ahead of the game. This is my time, every moment is a gift. My clock is still the dandelion clock, I still keep an eye on the wind and watch for the hurricane. In a world where I have nothing to lose and everything to gain I am more powerful than ever before, so never think I can’t handle it.

Wednesday, bin day but it isn’t. I wake up in a dopy state at 10 o’clock and realise its a disaster. No one put the recycle bins out last night or early this morning, the result is our recycling will be with us another two weeks. There will be serious compacting to do. I get up and do coffee and drugs. Life becomes a slow motion procession from one minor task victory to another, each one a spoon sapping effort. First its another Lateral Flow Test just to make sure yesterdays was not a fluke. I laze for a fretful 15 minutes but my test comes up negative. I am confident that I’ve just had a really crap cold and a more than usually bad response to my monthly injection. Onward then. I feed the hedgehog and realise that I am running out of his favourite Prickles meaty supper so I order in a dozen cans. I top up the squirrel feeder and the bird feeders. I then settle down with the De Montfort Hall What’s On and mark my possible interests. I succumb to the temptation and book seats for Dr John Cooper Clarke. He’s a man who has made a living out of poetry, perhaps the poetry coyote can learn something from him. All of this takes it toll so I go to get a paper and a baguette at the village café. On the way I stop to take a picture of the magnolia tree that always amazes me at this time of year.

I get home safely from the café and then read our gas and electricity meters, I guess this is to prepare for the the new energy cap and to assuage some sort of anxiety. Of course this entails buggering about with the appropriate apps on my phone and laptop thus extending the process by at least 300%. I’m seriously running out of spoons now so I down load the garden camera to see what my hedgehog has been up to while I’ve been ill and away. It would seem my hedgehog is a brave little he/she or extremely unobservant, which in combination with next doors cats thickness seems to make a survival ecosystem. See below:

So my hedgehog is alive and thriving by the look of it and clearly able to see off the cat with a hoggy “if you think your hard enough” look. I replace the camera in the garden and flop on the sofa. Social media is quiet today as friends get to grips with their Real Worlds. It would appear at the moment that people have more then their fair share of aggravation to deal with. I’ve now hunkered down, no spoons left so I draft the blog early so as to have at least something down. This recuperation is going to take a while, my natural instinct is to sleep and then get myself into the gym and “sweat it out of me” but to be frank I’ finding it difficult to get up for it. Perhaps its age or a combination of age and existential anxt. My partner arranges dates with friends and I fix my immediate attention on the weekend ahead when we are going away to Buxton to see a show. Pace is the key and kindness to myself. This evening is a foreign land.