Wednesday, bin day. Breakfast of muesli and then some bed stripping, laundering , hanging out, tidying, bedclothes changing, ordering drugs, booking Mondays jab appointment and doing a bit of admin work. So by lunch time there was still training to be done and some tidying before our guest arrived. Frankly I’d had enough so I went to the club to drink a quiet cup of coffee and do a bit of google research. I decided that the Bond movie at three hours long was an ideal afternoon escape so I strolled over to the Vue cinema and indulged in a reasonable film and a packet of fruit pastilles.

I was quite pleased, given my condition, that I managed the film with a single piss and that “excuse me, sorry” shuffle down the row. Film over and everyone dead ready for an 007 reset I decided to eat out as well and made my way to Frankie and Bennies as the decent Italian could not give me a table for an hour. Frankie and Bennies has taken down all its signature photos and covered the walls in bland non COVID harbouring paper. Its even more soulless than it was before. The bruschetta was okay but they had no macaroni cheese. I selected Spaghetti Bolognese as an alternative, a poor choice as the sauce was insipid and tasteless. I tried to end on a high by choosing the exciting sounding Tolberone cheesecake, another mistake but at least the black americano was hot. I also discovered that this week is dyslexia week, my week! This invaluable piece of info came via LinkedIn, I see no evidence that it is recognised anywhere else. Perhaps I should wear a badge with some bollocks about a hidden disability along with one that says I’m dying of cancer and see if anyone notices or which one they think is more notable. I pay my bill and drive home via the garage to top my tank. I seem to put a lot into the tank but my mileage calculator in the car does not seem to go up very much, I am suspicious.

I think there are tipping points in the experience of cancer, today was one of them or at least raised the issue of there being tipping points. I realised to day that there are two distinct positions with this diagnosis. You either fight to stay alive, e.g exercise, diet, research, stay informed, stay engaged with the world and continue to try and make meaning of life and ones personal internal universe or you settle for dying in as peaceful and quiet way as possible. In short you quit because it does not make sense to go on doing all the other things that give you the allusion of agency and purpose. I think the divide between the two is subtle and very fragile as time goes on. Those moments when the aggregation of the worlds aggravations coalesce to raise the issue of a tipping point are unpredictable and certainly caught me unawares. It is something I need to learn, to recognise and to be clear about. On the other hand my life is now too short to be taking any more shit than I need to.

I get home and retreat to the peace and quite of the bedroom to write the blog and reflect on the day. Tomorrow I have work and my first visit to a chiropodist to sort out my chemo thickened big toe nails. Now life does not come any more prosaic than that.

Tuesday, the day the bin goes out and I get a day to myself. It starts with a muesli breakfast and then I head for the Shed to write letters. I notice the squirrels, Squishy and Squashy, have emptied the bird feeder and refill it before settling down to write. I spend the morning writing letters whilst a friends lavender candle scented the atmosphere and the heater kept me snug. I have a growing pile of envelopes but my stock of pretty writing paper is almost spent. At lunch time I have soup and walk to the post box to send my letters on their way. It is then time to do some Christmas shopping. I browse and research and by the end of about an hour or so I have cards and wrap with one or two luxuries to nibble. Christmas fun over I set about some enabling environment work and organising some future training sessions. By late afternoon I’m ready for the gym. My partner and I go to the gym where I cycle and cross train burning off about 500 calories. After showering I sit in the lounge and order an Indian meal and then my partner and I race home to be there to collect our meal. Its the wonder of technology and the encouragement of sloth that makes this possible. Having said that I am pleased to tuck in to my butter chicken and not have to cook. I watch the conclusion of the current Silent Witness episode and start the blog. It feels that like this is one of those periods of humdrum routine which I hope will keep me fit for as long as possible and will help hold my own at least up until my next oncology appointment in December. On the day of my appointment I have booked a pantomime for the evening. It seemed apt.

81 days to Christmas, oh yes it is.

Monday: up, breakfast, a welcome phone call from a friend and then I am in front of the screen for a morning meeting. Lovely people and doing their best so a good experience. The post arrives and I have the excitement of getting a letter. I do some admin and then go for a lunch time walk with my partner to buy a paper, flowers and some buns. A brief lunch and I take time to read my letter, which is a really nice thing to be doing. I am soon back in front of my screen for a team meeting. All of the afternoon is passed in the meeting and then I am doing more admin including sorting out my invoices. There is a brief brake to take the Tesco deliver in and then there re more loose ends to sort out. By the time its time for tea I’m up to date with my invoices and ready for tomorrows work. WhatsApp crashes and several hours later is still down.The evening is the weekly challenge of TV quiz programmes. Then its the blog. My plan is to spend time at the gym tomorrow, to get out and about, perhaps even breakfast after some exercise. Time to leave the the sofasit.

Sunday and the usual early morning drink and a chat to plan the day, then its breakfast and then face time with the youngest daughter. She was in good form and a delight to chat to. I get a phone call from Coventry Blaze telling me the ice hockey shirt I ordered has come back with the wrong spelling of my name on it. The guy is very apologetic adn promises to get the corrected one to me as soon as possible. Yep its ice hockey season.Time to clear the decks and to put my washing away and get organised for the coming working week. We go to our local garden centre and buy vegetables. While there we visit the butchers to get bacon and while there we lay in a turkey breast for the freeze as an insurance against a tricky Christmas. It cost us £27 but there was a second label on £45! We have joined the butchers Christmas club in the hope that we will have some cushion against possible Christmas shortages and price hikes. On return to home I prepare a one pot meal and pop it in the oven on a low heat before we get ready to go to the gym.

The gym is tough as I do not usually train on a Sunday. I row for 15 minutes and cross train for 35 minutes, burning off 535 calories. I take a long shower and relax in the lounge while waiting for my partner. We drive home and settle down to watch Strictly while eating the one pot. As the dance programme melds into the world of nature and breeding I begin the blog. I shall watch the football highlights tonight as the Mighty Brentford have managed to sneak a late win against a top flight team. Then it will be bed for me. I am tired and when tired I turn to chocolate.

Saturday and its throwing it down with rain. Breakfast and its still throwing it down. We decide not to go to see the Tigers play. Its still throwing it down with rain. I rig up my laptop to the TV and we get to watch the Tigers match from the comfort of the sofa. An attritional game in the rain. Tigers win with the last play of the game 13 -12.

There are chores to do and things to be topped up but of most importance is the lack of chocolate. I go to the shops in the rain dressed in a parka coat that is used in only extreme conditions, like rainy days with no chocolate. I return with a bag of goodies including two types of chocolate. Its time for dinner and the joys of Strictly Come Dancing. I cannot believe I’m addicted to it, I think I’m jealous. When anyone asks me what I would have been if I could have my life over again my answer is always dancer. It would have been disastrous as I have no sense of rhythm and also I am pretty tone deaf. However the thought of being able to express being to music is very enticing. No need for talking or words, ideal for a dyslexic. It also means not having to explain oneself to anyone. Anyway by the end of strictly chocolate is eaten and the blog is started, and its still raining.

Friday and I crawl out of bed not feeling as chipper as I have done. I get breakfast and watch the TV morning show. In it there was a short piece on some woman who was having time away from her TV job to be with her family which included her father who has prostate cancer. During a conversation with him he revealed that a new drug that he is taking has reduced his PSA level to 2.5 from a staggering 1000. The medics told me mine was high as a justification for some of the procedures they used on me, mine was 147 maximum. How ignorant I was at the time, and there was me thinking I had read lots. How did I miss the possible range of PSA? Still better late than never I guess. I retreat to the Shed and spend my morning writing letters, it pours with rain. At some point I refill the squirrel feeder and bird feeders as the squirrels seem to be eating everything they can at the moment.

There is a bacon bagel for lunch and then I am back in the Shed writing some more and arranging some Amazon purchases. I go to the post box to speed the letters on their way. I visit the village chemist to buy Actifed to find they do not sell it so I buy my partners eye drops and return. At the end of the working day my partner and I set off for the gym. She will do her yoga class and I get myself onto a cross trainer and do sixty five minutes, burning off 712 calories and covering 8.22 kilometres. This is my best yet. I shower and wait for my partner to finish her class before we drive off to the local supermarket to get pizza for supper and Actifed. Home and we eat while watching a TV film, a rugged mad man abducting women film. Morgan Freeman of course and of course he wins in a super cool way. This time he shoots the psychopath in a gas filled room through a carton of milk to avoid an explosion. So cool but psychopaths always get such a poor press. And so to bed.

Thursday and after a poor nights sleep I get up in time to have breakfast and take a call from a friend before going to my first meeting of the day. The meeting was relatively brief but fruitful. I was left with some admin to do but most of the morning was used up by sorting things out and doing chores. At lunch I down a large dish of soup and then I am into my afternoon meeting. I join a group of therapeutic community people to talk about the issues facing them at this time. There were people from India, Japan and America as well as England. It seems that there is a resistance by the nhs to invest in the non physical or pharmacological interventions that vast numbers of people require. The waiting lists in some places means that many people are never able to access the services they need. It seems to me that currently the medical establishment is too burnt out to face the challenge of attending to the psychological needs of large numbers of people in the community. Logically the onus for the provision of such services needs to be moved from the current system to a much more co produced community based system that offers safe space where people can firstly find safety and then to enable them to evolve into milieus for change. It means applying relational practice to a wider range of spaces and people services. The meeting ends and I send a LinkedIn invite to someone who is battling to preserve a local service in Leicester.

Having exercised my brain its time to exercise the body so I head for the garage and the rower. My body aches from yesterdays session in the gym but I need to keep going. I manage the half hour and a reasonable distance.

I retreat to the sofa to record my session and to catch my breath. Not for long though as I drive my eldest daughter to her circus skills session. During this time I start to read Early One Morning by Virginia Baily. Its a Times best seller, so I had high hopes but I found it… overly wordy and implausible. I will of course finish it as it might pick up but I am not hopeful. At the end of the session I drive home and eat tuna pasta and settle down to watch English football teams either lose or struggle to hold their own. Its a depressing view and I am glad when it is over so I can get on with the blog for today. I am tired but tomorrow I have a day with no commitments so I can get some Shed and gym time. My biggest challenge is to control my diet and not to comfort eat, my biggest enemy is my sweet tooth.

Its Wednesday and I am up and about quite early tucking into my muesli and coffee when a friend calls having read the blog. Neither of us have exercised for two days and so there is a conversation about rectifying this. I resolve to go to the gym and she resolves to go for a walk and test her new ear buds. As soon as the call is over I set the dishwasher into motion and change into my gym gear. I have decided to always now go ready changed in to my training gear as it saves a change of clothes, why did I not do this before? So I gear up and drive off. I make an impromptu stop at the garage as no one is there and they have petrol, so I squeeze another £15 into my tank. Suddenly I feel secure, such a fools paradise. I continue to the gym and head for the cross trainers. I spend an hour on one pumping away adnd noting my heart rate was purportedly 144. I check my pulse on my fitbit and find my pulse to be 117. I suspect that gym machines are over rating the pulse rate to try and stop people having heart attacks on the equipment and in the gym. Can you imagine the paper work? Any way I burn off 675 calories over 7.43 kilometres and feel satisfied. I work on a couple of machines to stretch my shoulders and the top of my back and then do sets of crunches on the crunch frame.

I pop back to the changing rooms and squeeze myself into a pair of trunks, my silver swim hat and googles and head for the pool. My body knows whats coming this time and does not panic like it did on Sunday and I actually manage to swim lengths of front crawl, not consecutively, but I do swim. I try to swim breast stroke, or at least my version, frog arms and dolphin legs, but my shoulders just rebel and refuse to play, I am so out of condition and practice, so I go back to crawl. I must get myself a massage to loosen the shoulders. I also notice that getting into the pool is tricky as I cannot bend down smoothly to ease myself in, its more of a jerky drop onto the pool edge and then a slither in. That needs to change, I’ll be fucked if I am going to use the ladder like all those hippos that are now flailing about in half the pool in something called aqua aerobics. It looks more like “staying alive in the water” than even my swimming does. I swim, I swim a bit more and at the point where I am knackered I talk myself into two more lengths. I manage them and haul myself out of the pool and head for the steam room. Its a ten minute slot I give myself and time it on my watch. Since my friend passed out in the showers a few days ago after being in a jacuzzi I am careful about taking my hot body into the relative cool of the pool area. I head for the showers and start hot and move to cold as I cool down from the mornings efforts.

Eventually I am in the club lounge with an americano black and a chocolate caramel shortbread. I drink the coffee but cannot face the sweetness of the shortbread.

• 

• 

I drive to the super market to get cash and then to the garden centre where I find they are selling ten trays of pansies for a tenner. I cannot resist and load up. Back home I unload the plants and set them out where I want them and put out the compost bag and tools ready for garden guy who is coming today. My cheap reading glasses, 4 for £20, which are supposed to cut blue light from screens, have arrived and I test them out. I am very satisfied with them, in fact I type this wearing them and finding that they actually work. The 1.5s suit me. I now have a pair in my “office” backpack, a pair in the bedroom for nocturnal reading a pair on the stack of books that live at my end of the sofa. I think I am sorted. I also get the winter covers on the front garden arm chair and stack the back garden chairs and pop the new winter cover over them. I am beginning to wonder if I have an unconscious wish for winter to be here earlier that it is due. There is a part of me that thinks that as from January I will be able to go and visit the services I work with again. It is part of the work I really miss. Last winter was all lockdown, with a new heating system and a freshly decorated house in lieu of a holiday. It was cosy but very constrained, this winter will be equally cosy but with a greater sense of freedom and less of a sense of threat. I am officially not a leper according to the email I got from the government the other day.

My garden guy arrives so I make him tea and explain that today is a planting day and to have fun, pansies everywhere! I retreat to the sofa and begin the blog as I am being taken out for a meal tonight. Actually my partner is taking me because her friend cried off and a meal out seemed like a good idea. Its an early table so with luck I might catch the second half of a European match later.

After a really good meal I do make it back to see Ronaldo pull off a last moment win and then I finish the blog for the day, climb out of my dining clothes and head for bed as I have meetings in the morning and a therapeutic community meeting in the afternoon. At some point I need to train and follow through on todays effort although think I am coming down with a cold.

Tuesday, another early morning after a poor nights sleep. So I do breakfast on automatic. As I get ready to attend a meeting the alarm system engineer arrives to service our system. It takes less than 15 minutes, one battery check and a cursory glance at our hard wire system and I get a bill for £65. Basically I paid a fee to keep my house insurance in line. I go to my Teams meetings and after an hour and a half I end the meeting and get on with a lot of admin work to keep the wheels turning for my services. A brief walk at lunchtime and then more admin. I get a letter from a friend and settle down for a coffee as I read it. It is a lovely letter but I find I am struggling to read it. In fact I struggled to read the cross word clues in the paper today. I order reading glasses from Amazon, so tomorrow the problem is solved. I continue to work and sort out my sofa end office. By late afternoon I no longer have the motivation to train and watch a rugby match until tea time. After that its a sedentary evening during which BT Sport will not let me in and as a result I waste time trying to rectify the IT. Time for bed and the hope that tomorrow I get going again.

Monday, just another Monday, breakfast followed by some gardening time as I continue to put the garden to bed. A lunch time walk to pick up a paper and rediscovered hot cross buns takes me into an afternoon of reading, interrupted by the Tesco delivery driver tapping on the window to wake me up. Shopping stowed I return to reading The Fourth Shore. I finally get to the end of this tale of naive catholic Italian imperialism rape and female entanglement leading to later life discover of unlikely relatives, but hey what would you expect from leaving a blue eyed baby in the desert with your brothers native tattooed wife to raised while you piss off back to England to end up marrying a placid midclass bloke who then dies leaving you with a house and pension. Just a story of everyday folk I guess. Such bollocks, but not sure I’ll say that when I meet the author in November. I will of course read Early One Morning by the same author just to see what equally fantastic tale is created. I eat and watch TV exhausted by the demands on my credulousness. I watch Bill Baily’s Limboland before bed to return myself to some sense of reality. I’ve not trained and I wonder whats happening to my motivation, I’m sleeping less and feel tired a lot of the time, I guess there’s my answer.