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.

Tuesday. I am ill. In fact I feel terrible. I cancel work for today, which is in fact the next day, which goes to show how crap I am. I move my car so that my partner can go out. I go back to bed. I wake at 2pm, again at 4:30. I have half a bowl of soup and go back to bed till 6:30 pm. I get up and eat some food, take more drugs, and watch The Power of The Dog. Take my meds, draft the blog and go to bed. This is my dormouse approach to illness. Like animals who become ill, they sleep until they are better.

So many days in one blog you ask, well that’s because I have been away in wood where there was no wi-fi. Yes there are such places, a word to the wise, such places also seem to rely on composting toilets! This epic started on Friday as I and my partner rise and start to get ready to drive to rooks wood in Bromyard, Herefordshire. By lunchtime we have packed the car, had lunch and prepared to travel. I have of course left enough food for the hedgehog and filled the squirrel feeders. So we both head off feeling absolutely crap as we are both feeling decidedly under the weather.

Its a two hour drive and all goes well, an easy run. We call ahead to tell the host that we will soon be arriving and as if by magic he is there to greet us. Our Rook Tower is up a wood chip path so I am pleased that our host has a motorised garden truckette.

We settle in, unpack the food and then sit on the veranda to look around. As the evening arrives we retreat inside and cook our evening meal. Its beginning to get chilly so we light the log burner not really convinced that it will warm the whole tower through, but we were very wrong.

We go to bed ridiculously early as we both feel crap. It was going to be a long and interrupted night.

Saturday we get up, wrap up and have breakfast on the veranda. This sounds lovely and it was even more interesting when the “ladies” popped in to join us.

They look charming and they are. Their little feet clickity click on the decking as they run after the crumbs we throw for them. Of course being really stupid semi townies we do not realise just how much we are conditioning them. Before we know it w are bonded. Fromm now on we only have to appear on the veranda, or even open the door and the “Ladies” would clickity to us immediately, even from a hundred metres away. However we soon discovered that the “Ladies” crap profusely! This was to become an issue as we found ourselves tip toeing through the piles.

The whole of Saturday is a snotty battle ground, we are both ill and neither of us want to roam away from the tower. We drift from hot drink to hot drink and dozed intermittently. Once again in the evening we lit the log burner and let it warm us through. The difficulty was that we both kept feeling alternately cold and then fevered. We eat a huge meal of fresh filled pasta to fuel ourselves. We play Scrabble but its all too much and we go to bed ridiculously early again.

Sunday, its Mothers Day and I get up to make hot morning drinks and take them to bed where I pass on my daughters present to my partner. We are still felling crap but we are determined to get out today. So after breakfast we get ready to go to Bromyard. Clutching a leaflet in hand we drive to Bromyard. It was closed. Truly, utterly closed in a very British Cristian everything closes on a Sunday way. When we got to the church (historic of course) we found it locked and full of internal scaffolding, it was having the decency to fly a Ukrainian flag at least.

We discover a sheep called Ann Campbell and a building that Charles the first slept in. We also found a rather unusual clinic that appears to have the most unfortunate name.

There is not a lot to do in a rural Herefordshire village on a Sunday that is closed so we go back to the Rooks Tower. More food hot drinks and scrabble. To my surprise I actually pull a seven letter word.

We eat and watch half a rugby match on my phone. and then we go to bed to try and sleep. We are both exhausted. We go to bed adn have a poor night as we both suffer from our colds. Of course we wonder is this COVID.

Monday. We get up eat toast and pack. By 10 o’clock we are back on the road and home by 12 o’clock. There is a spurt of energy, unpack, washing in, cleaning being done, pots watered, hedgehog fed and garden paths swept. I do a LTF, no COVID. My partner is the same, so we just have shit colds. I manage to get to 4:20pm when I set off to the GP surgery to get my monthly injection. I get there and into the nurses clinical room very quickly. I am jabbed and walk home. I drift into the evening, Peaky Blinders, Killing Eve and extraordinary portraits. I’m trying to draft the blog but break off to do tomorrows Tesco order. Back to the blog. I’m beginning to feel my regular junkie like response to the jab. I’m exhausted and I have a morning of a work drop in session. I go to bed, wrecked.

Thursday and I wake up with my internal organs trying to leave my body through my nostrils. Its an inconvenient state to be in so I down coffee and eat muesli. I take my usual meds and top them up with paracetamol. On the dot of 9 o’clock I’m in front of my laptop for a work team meeting and that is where I stay for the next two hours. Its a long two hours but like all hours it comes to an end. I spend time preparing the cameras that we are taking away for the weekend away. They have not been used in a while so they needed resetting and the power packs charging. It seems that we each have a large and a compact pocket camera each. To this I add some binoculars and fill a bag with our toy. Job done, I walk down to the chemists to pick up my prescription including my injection for Monday afternoon. I have moved the appointment to the afternoon to accommodate our return from the weekend away. I buy a paper and I then get drawn to the village café where I indulge in a bacon and sausage baguette. I return home for coffee and sit in the front garden soaking up the sun and looking at the signs of spring.

My partner and I eat lunch in the front garden enjoying the sun, we are joined by a butterfly who seems to be impelled to be part of our sitting.

Having dined we set off to fill the car, check the tyres and then shop for our weekend food. We wander the aisles with our list and of course add extras to it as we imagine our meals over the weekend. We do the checkout dance and drive of with our goodies. Once home we stow the food and prepare for the evening. We eat and then my partner does her singing lesson and I take more drugs and watch TV until its time to watch another episode of Last Kingdom and to draft the blog. I tire quickly and look forward to my bed.

Wednesday and I am up and into my shorts for an early coffee. I had hoped to get to the gym as soon as possible but some work emails came in and I needed to respond to them, so I get to go to the gym later than planned. I arrive to an almost empty gym apart from one spin class taking place. I pick a favourite cross trainer and churn out an hour as my legs are still feeling yesterdays efforts. I get to burn 722 calories and go 7.86 kilometres. A warm shower and I am in the lounge with a large coffee and an egg and bacon roll. I drive home filling the car with petrol, about an hour before the chancellor reduces the price by 5 pence a litre. Grrrrrrrrrrrrr!

Once home I .settle down to a work meeting on Teams. I do my best to be engaged but it is a stretch when others are just turning into white buttons. I’ve said it before, its like going to a meeting with a paper bag over your head. At the end of the meeting I retreat to the garden and spend time on the swing seat with a coffee and a bun. A friend rings and we try to have a conversation but the signal is so poor we give up. I spend some time contemplating my Buddha head in the evening sunshine. The smile is intriguing.

I top up the hedgehog food and then go indoors for the evening noting the way spring is blooming in the sunshine.

The evening sees another episode of the Last Kingdom watched and then I have the luxury of having my hair braided. As my hair grows the possibilities of more complicated braiding become more numerous. I am hoping that eventually I will settle on a signature braid.

Part of my evening is spent getting the cameras ready to take away at the week end. I and my partner are going to a lodge in the woods where we hope to get some good pictures of nature. I find that the battery packs are not as good as they were and order some replacements to arrive tomorrow. My “soffice” is now a tangle of leads, plugs and adapters as I try to get everything up to speed for the break. In the background the TV continues to chatter about the chancellors spring statement and the Taliban deciding not to allow the reopening of secondary schooling for women. The Ukraine is now down the batting order but the news is no less distressing and enraging. I will go to my bed still wondering what else I can do. More prosaically, I have a work meeting to attend at 9 o’clock in the morning.

Tuesday and I wake from a really crap night. For the first time in a long time I decamped to the spare bedroom in order to get to sleep. The new meds obviously work their magic in the night but I wake unrested with a disturbed gut and feeling a bit like the bottom of a birdcage. It takes me time to get going. I get myself coffee and toast before getting in front of my laptop for my work 1 to 1. It goes smoothly, although I am not sure I was that coherent. After the meeting I pick up the admin aftermath and catch up with some organising of future travel and hotels. I do a bit of Easter preparation and then its time to go for a lunch time walk with my partner. We take a turn around the village and return for a light lunch.

Its gym time. I head for the gym feeling distinctly still off it. I get to the gym floor, grab a cross trainer, switch Bet Midler on the i-player and get under way. As I churn out the effort I begin to feel better and the session goes fairly well. I end up feeling pretty good. I burn 727 calories and go 8.31 kilometres. So good in fact that I spend some time on the weights machines. Feeling mildly pumped I go for a shower. I get two looks of interest, the first is by a guy who is a bit confused by my long hair and the second who was clearly amused by my Hedgehog T shirt. I hit the lounge for a coffee and then drive home to put the bins out.

The evening consists of a meal and several episodes of the Last Kingdom. In the end I give it best and draft the blog before drugs and bed. All I want is a better nights sleep tonight and be able to get to the gym early in the morning before afternoon work meetings.

Monday, the partner has gone to work and I get up to a marmalade bagel and coffee. My eldest daughter is ensconced in her study so I head for the Shed and that’s where I stay all morning, writing letters. A friend calls and we talk about the various day to day things that make family life what it is. I have a training session to attend at one so I stop for chicken soup adn then log in. The session gives me the basics of what I need to know and at the end of the time I and a colleague take a bit of time to review the session and what it means to our role. Then we talk football, life and pensions.

I return to the Shed and complete my letters. I check the hedgehog’s canteen and top up the water bowl, before refilling the squirrel and bird feeders. By mid afternoon I’ve had enough and pack the Shed up and go to post my letters. From there I go to the village shop and by some basics before returning home. I agree to give my daughter a lift to her circus skills craft, where I wait for her to finish. I order Indian take away before setting off home. Once home we wait for food and Tesco. Thankfully food arrives first and we are able to eat before Tesco come knocking and I am amused by my surprise as I spot things I have forgotten to order. It gets packed away and we return to watching the Viking tosh that we are currently following. My interest is mostly in the hair braiding.

Whilst meandering through my day I check my emails and my messages in which there are reasons to be concerned. The waters are not smooth at the moment and there are things to be managed in the coming weeks and months. As usual the elephant gets eaten one bite at a time all that is required is direction and the will.