Wednesday and I am up early downing muesli and a coffee before I set off to London by 6:30am. I know the way to my sisters house in London by heart and slip into automatic as I zip down the M1. I make really good time and I am at my sisters front door by just after nine o’clock. I wait for her to get ready and at 10 o’clock the taxi arrives to take us to the medical centre where she is booked into have a scan. Its a relatively short journey but I am glad I am not driving. I grew up in this area and although the street names are the same they look very different. So much has changed adn so much gone. The George and Dragon where I used to go to see the John Williams Big Band play at the jazz club has gone. The place is filed with people oblivious to their own safety as they lunge across the road in front of the taxi. There are racks of electric scooters and the frenetic pace at which everyone is dashing about or shuffling about is horrific. I loathe London and I am reaffirmed in my youthful decision to leave it as soon as possible.

We arrive at the medical centre and book in. We are early so we wait quietly in the waiting area watching a young mum teach her two girls simple maths. A clinician appears and calls my sister in. I help her to the scan room adn leave her with the technician to do the scan. An hour later she reappears and calls me in to collect my sister, and we leave sit sit in the waiting area while I summon a taxi. It is the same driver who brought us who arrives to take us back. The return journey is more direct and although I know the places we pass so many of them have changed and with that much of the richness of my memories. It is as if the reality of now cannot support the memories I hold. It is to be expected this erosion of synchronicity between person and place. We arrive back at my sisters house and she rests on the sofa while I pop out and do a bit of food shopping for her. I make her a simple lunch and we chat. Because of her breathlessness it is difficult to keep things tidy and we talk about the possibility of getting some help for a while. At three o’clock I take my leave so that I can miss the traffic out of London. I leave my sister resting on her sofa and drive home. Its a difficult drive due to an accident on the motorway so the journey home takes me almost double the time of the morning journey. I get home, my partner is out with a friend so my daughter and I eat Indian takeaway and I watch football. I am tired from the day and soon go to bed when my partner and friend return from their meal. I find London tiring and difficult. I try to ring my sister once I am home but there is no answer, I assume she is asleep as she has had a long and tiring day.

Thursday I wake up with a start as I realise I have a meeting in two minutes, so its a very quick coffee and I am in front of my laptop. The meeting is a regular team meeting and it is full of routine updates and discussions about services, assessments and some logistics of service delivery. At the end I stay on line and chat to a colleague who is going to be driving up to watch his team Rangers play for a place in a semi final of a European football competition. I to am looking forward to watching Leicester on TV trying to achieve a similar feat. At lunchtime my partner and I walk around the village and I discuss with her my experience of going to London and ideas about how my sister might get help given her situation. We return to lunch and I decide to contact social services to see if they will do an assessment of need for my sister on the off chance that they might be able to provide some temporary assistance to her. I fill in a form and submit it and I email my sister to let her know what I have done. I spend a little time in the Shed. The football is an early kick off so I feed the hedgehog and settle down to watch the two matches I am interested in. It is an exciting night, my friends team wins as do Leicester. It is a good night. I find myself feeling vert tired, I’ve messaged and talked to a several people today about my London visit and have received kind advice from them all. I go to bed still full of thoughts about London, my childhood and the house where I was born and grew up.

Friday, I am woken up by a cheery partner eager to get off on our weekend break to see our youngest daughter and her partner. I am made toast in bed as a treat before I get up, shower, pack and prepare to travel. I of course make sure the hedgehog is fed. We set off, fill up with petrol and find our way to the motorway. It goes well till we hit junction 5 on the M5, its a slow drag through the road works, I am slightly worried that my wine gum stock will not last. It does and we arrive later than expected at our daughters in time for a late lunch sandwich and coffee. We sit in the sunshine of their back garden and we watch our daughters partner work hard to drain a pond as a starting point of reclaiming the garden. We sit and chat till late afternoon when we leave to go and check into our hotel. The Speech House is set in the middle of the forest and is still the place where the wards of the forest meet. Our room is excellent, we unpack and then take a nap. We return to our daughters and eat a delicious tea of pie and pudding. We sit and chat and catch up. Eventually we return to the hotel where I come to bed and catch up with the blog. I finally feel that I can rest for a while.

Tuesday, row or gym, gym, so its coffee and drugs when I get up and away to the gym. Bottle of water and up to the gym floor and a cross trainer. Its hard work today but I have my music in my ears again and I grind it out. 708 calories burned and 7.53 kilometres travelled. I thought about doing some weights machines but my body said emphatically “no!”. when my body speaks I generally listen these days. To my surprise the showers are hot so I indulge. It takes time to get back into my clothes, mainly because I now regularly use the hair dryer to dry my hair. I got sick of a wet pony tail and now brush my locks dry with the hair drier looking like some grey old horse shaking its mane. I like the bloke who is often in there at the same time as me as who just uses the hair drier to dry himself completely, the towel action being too much for him after his session. I guess there is a certain age where you do what you do regardless.

Post session I get in to the lounge and order coffee and a bacon and. egg roll. I settle down and read The Little Prince again in one sitting punctuated only by a second egg and bacon roll and additional coffee. It is a fascinating book and as a friend put it “tends to stay with you”. Having finished my reading I drive to the newly opened petrol station at my local cross roads. I fill with petrol for tomorrows drive to London. That all goes well but I also want to check my tyres. I spot the re-sited air supply. Its cashless. I press the start button on the machine and present my debit card. It rejects the transaction. It does this five fucking times. The last two watch by a guy who is also wanting to check his tyres. In the end I give up. So much for technology and the cashless crap we get forced into. I go home and have my afternoon nap before feeding the hedgehog. I clear the kitchen and then write the log as tonight we are going to see John Cooper Clarke.

So I prepare to go out and hope that tonight lives up to my fantasy. A friend calls after having been away and who is still battling long COVID. At the moment it seems to be rife. Another friend is currently recovering alongside her husband who also has it. It seems to be a battle all round at the moment. But right now I prepare to go and see a punk poet and of course the issue is to decide what to wear. Until tomorrow then when I have seen the opposition to the poetry coyote.

Monday, I oversleep a bit, check my messages and get up. No breakfast just a coffee and then I am off to the gym. I get there, check in and get my bottle of water and then hit the gym floor. I’m up on a cross trainer and about to set off when I find that my i-pod is out of juice, so its an hour without my music and the gym is not playing theirs. I resort to old fashioned fantasy, so I run marathons, sprint record times and drift through old holidays and trips. An hour later I am 719 calories lighter and 7.48 imaginary kilometres along the road. Its been four days since I last trained, so the outcome is quite pleasing.

I get back to the changing room and get into the showers. They are tepid at best as David Lloyd save money on their energy bills, bastards. What’s the point of a gym membership if you can’t get a warm shower after extreme exercise. I have my routine coffee and bacon and egg roll in the lounge. I take my time to eat and recover. I drive home to clear the kitchen, feed the hedgehog, fill the bird feeders, hang my towel out to dry and open my post. There is a lovely surprise, a book. The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery. Its a present from a friend and I am really chuffed. Having done chores I put a cleaner in the dishwasher and set it off to clean. I retrieve my gold ring from the Shed where it has been waiting for me to take it to the jeweller as it split. I drive to my usual jeweller and put it in for repair. Apparently 9 carrot gold does not bend as well as 18 carat gold and tends to split more easily. As I have been known to forget to take it off in the gym its probably had a rougher ride than usual. I return home and bring the washing in. Its time for my afternoon nap so I head to bed and instruct Alexa to wake in me in 30 minutes, which it does on time. I start to read The Little Prince and I am immediately hooked. I have read some of his books about his experiences of flying in south America and Africa and enjoyed them. This book is very different, both a child’s and an adults book. I am hooked very quickly. My partner returns from visiting her mother and we decide to walk down to the village shop to get pizza for tea.

While my partner cooks tea I continue to read my new book. I eat tea and read on. There is more TV but I continue to read and do so till I end the book. Instantly I want to read it again. This is clearly not a straight forward children’s book and it is not a straight forward adults book either, hence my immediate urge to read it again. However I recommend it to you.

Well its been a while since I read a book in almost one sitting. It feels good to have done so and it has given me a lot to think about. This book is very layered and I have no doubt someone has got a PhD out of it. I like it when I read something and I get the sense that I’ve missed something or a lot of things. Its that nudge that niggles at the back of the brain. Its the stuff that the pixies cannot file or put away and runs around like an oiled pig refusing to be caught. Today has been a good day, gym, reading and the first to do list in ages. The blog drafted I go to bed.

Sunday, a lazy Sunday of mixed activity and achievements. There is, of course, coffee to start with and then a leisurely breakfast. We try to ring our youngest daughter but to no avail so we move into Sunday chore mode. I get called to mend the washing line that has failed. Job done I start to prepare to mend a dripping tap. I source the tools, watch the appropriate instructional video and begin the initial preparation. Firstly I need to turn the water off. I look under the sink and locate what I think is a close off valve. I turn it and find water leak from it. That’s not supposed to happen, I quickly reverse my actions. This means turning off the water at the stop cock. One small problem, the washing machine is running. I abort the mission and focus on the required vegetable shopping.

My partner and I drive to the garden centre and stock up on vegetables. It at least gets us out for a while. We return and I settle down to watch Leicester tigers beat a French team in the European cup quarter final. Its a good game. During this time my Amazon delivery arrives, my new desk organiser that I am hoping will clear the end of my “soffice”. It is a flat pack job that requires assembly. Fortunately being part octopus I manage the juggle required to bring all the parts together. Its not Chippendale but it is functional and forces me to sort the pile of papers that has accumulated.

So the evening starts with pie and moves on to TV and blog drafting although we do manage to make contact with our youngest and chat for a while. As we are visiting her next weekend we organise dining for the two nights we are there, then its back to blogging and TV mysteries. I have of course replenished the hedgehogs canteen today already. If I am lucky I might get to the football and see my team “The mighty Brentford” beat West Ham. Tomorrow I shall try to restart my routine with a trip to the gym.

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.