September the 1st, a Wednesday, its autumn. I am at war. Its back into the arena to be fit, to be lean and to be strong. By the time I get to Oncology on the 21st of December I will be fit enough to undertake whatever new shit gets thrown at me. So its a new focus on exercise and diet. It also includes being more focused on work, so that it gets productive and before this Christmas I will have my poetry ready to publish.

So I start my day with toast and some admin before deciding to train early as possible today. I get into my training gear and make my way to the garage. I decide to go for an hour at a lower level to loosen myself up and set my new regime on the road. It goes well.

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I am gargantuan, I row a personal best. This is the best possible start to a new campaign. I am encouraged. I head for the shower. Refreshed I check my emails and complete the medical questionnaire for Fridays visit to the spa. That done I go to the Shed and write a brief note and take it to the post box. By now its become worrying that the garden waste bin has not been collected. I sneak out and check the neighbours bins. They are also full. I check the website of the local council and find that they are saying they have not got enough HGV drivers to complete all their runs. Their advice: “put it out next time”. Staggering. The garden guy arrives so its time to make tea, chat and and consider the strategy for putting the garden to bed for the winter. We have a plan. While he cuts the lawns I create my work invoice for August and get is sent to my new boss. My partner goes to the dentist and on her return we eat tea and settle down for the evening. I shall write the blog, check my new to do list and wait for my eldest daughter to return from what appears to have been an unproductive day at work. I plan to read a little tonight. Not a bad first day of the new campaign.

Tuesday, M.O.T. day. Up earlish and then straight off to the garage. Back home and breakfast and I start to review my notes on a TC review report. I start a new review and get a call which reminds me that I am supposed to be observing a training session for enhanced security on … Ah, I cant tell you, its a secret, besides which there maybe people scrutinising my cyber footprint. After being briefed and educated I return to writing my review notes on the new TC report. I’m done by lunch time when I down a large soup and check my emails. I tidy up, clear the kitchen and put the bins out. Then its more work until its time to collect the car. All is good, MOT granted and service is done. With new tyres, brake pads and discs I’m winter ready and willing to hit the road. Once more I return home avoiding the temporary traffic lights in the village that have failed creating long tail backs. Once back I find my eldest daughter has booked a table for the evening in the local tapas place. So an unexpected trip out to dine on small dishes of continental food and to chat about the ordinary world. I had forgotten about affogato, that delicious combination of hot expresso and ice cream. Its a great way to end a meal out. Home, I’ve been so cold that I put the heating on before we went out. Coming home to a warm house was a great way to end an evening. I settle down to the blog as the rest of the household go to bed. Tomorrow is a day for me and a chance to write and train. Over the next two weeks it will be time to put the garden to bed for the winter, plant bulb for spring and build a new iris bed in the front garden.

Bank holiday Monday and its a slow start but moves towards a scrambled egg breakfast before making a rare jaunt to Sainsburys. We start to get ready for next Saturday when we plan a family gathering to mark my partners mothers birthday. We gather up “free from” goodies and a replacement toaster. I sneak in some Tony’s chocolonley chocolate and a paper. So we return home with our goodies and wait for Tesco to deliver our weekly order. We lunch and wait and watch the people that have flooded the village to view the scarecrow festival, eat ice creams and dance wildly on the church green. So rural, so British. Tesco deliver and after storing it we set off around the village to view the scarecrows. Its more of an exercise jaunt really to keep the number of steps for the day up. When I get back home there is a mental struggle to get myself to get changed to train. I finally get myself into the garage to train. An initial half hour on the rower to get me going again. It is a small step to get me going again.

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I work hard on the rower and I am rewarded with a reasonable distance. I change and settle down for tea and an evening of submarine drama on the BBC whilst exploring the delights of Tony’s Chocolonley. I am now a new fan of this chocolate and will explore the range. Tomorrow beckons with the excitement of an M.O.T and more TC reports to review.

Saturday and it was a reunion day with old colleagues, a lunch engagement. First there was a bacon bagel breakfast and coffee before my partners friend arrived. Together they went of to tour the village scarecrow event that is running over the bank holiday weekend. I drive to a marina in Burton to meet my old colleagues and friend. It turned out to be a really good afternoon as a friend turned up unexpectedly having flown in from Bermuda in the morning and driven up from London. It was a an excellent time and really good to see and catch up with the group. Back home for the evening I was tired and settled done to a very passive evening of a TV film and football highlights. I eventually went to bed but did not sleep well.

Sunday, a slow rise and breakfast before going out to see some of the scarecrows around the village. They were supposed to be based on children’s books however one person obviously did not get the message as they created Gray as in “50 Shades of Gray”. There were over a hundred and nine entries, here are a couple.

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I return home and take a few pictures in the garden as I finish weed killing the front paths.

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I am tired and retreat to the bedroom to read for a while. I choose to start one of the novels by Virginia Bailey. I read the first few chapters. It is very wordy and full of adjectives, its slow and and jumps back and forth in time.

I snooze under the weight of description and wake in time to cook my famed chicken and chorizo one pot for tea. We eat and watch the new TV drama and then I write the blog as todays football highlights play out. Today I weighed myself and found myself to be only marginally under 95 kilos. I have feasted and lazed this week, in fact fro the last two weeks. It has to stop. I must get back to my fitness routine tomorrow as I have until December 21st to get fit before my next oncology appointment and the possible option of new medication.

Thursday, a taxi at 8 o’clock to the train station whisks me away in my Ko Lak blue suit and leather shoulder bag. I spring into first class and settle in smugly. No food! Now not so smug. I read poetry from the two collections I have with me, both by tutors on the course that I am going on in November. The Ugandan’s poetry is good stuff and full of powerful images and feelings. Some of it quite harrowing as it describes his flight from Idi Amin and the degeneration of his home land through his child’s eyes. The other poetry collection has a reader warning at the front. I read the collection twice and for the life of me I could not see anything remotely upsetting about it. Do the snowflake generation not get that life sucks at times? I assume that I have forgotten what its like to be young and the pain of discovering life exacerbated by a life spent wading around the minds and lives of the criminal fraternity and the world of mental health services. So the poetry occupies me till the train pulls into St Pancras and I glimpse my favourite Tracy Emin richly pink in the distance.

I get into the EN&L cafe. It used to be a straight forward travel cafe with regular normal food. Now it is a falafel invaded pink monstrosity with a hideous pink poodle sculpture. I get two cheese and tomato croissants and a black coffee, the best normal food I could find. I linger over the coffee till my colleague arrives and buys me a second coffee. We sit and chat till almost noon when we move onto the brassiere that I booked us into. We check in and order drinks while we wait for two other colleagues to join us .One then, an hour, later another join us and we settle into some delicious food and conversation. It is a farewell dinner for a manager who is leaving after being at the RCP for 17 years. We of course brought gifts and praise. At 4 o’clock the colleagues moved onto a space in a pub but I returned to a train to come home. This time there was free drinks and nibbles to have. I read more poetry and look out of the window. I am struck by the profusion of Buddleia that is growing wild along the train embankments. It is clear that the future of butterflies is assured with so much Buddleia established over so many miles of the trackside. I get out of the station and hop into a taxi to take me home. I am tired and settle down to watch Vera and the para-Olympics. I go to bed but I sleep poorly and find it difficult to get any sleep.

Friday and I wake early unable to sleep so its an early coffee and muesli breakfast. I get dressed and set about organising the day. The first job was to ring the garage and see if my car was ready. Apparently the garage thought I was not back from London till tonight, but my car was in fact ready. I drive the borrowed garage car to the garage and grit my teeth to hear the bill, it turns out to be okay. I now have new back wheel brake discs and pads to go with the new tyres. I am hoping this will get the car through its M.O.T on Tuesday. I chat to a friend as I drive home and catch up with plans. Home and I go to the Shed and write a letter. By lunch time I’m ready for a village walk with my partner before a light lunch. I post my letter and then set about re screwing the Shed door to the shed. It was down to its last screw, which explains why the door was getting difficult to close smoothly. I get tidied up and retire to the bedroom to start reading one of the novels that has been written by one of the writing course tutors. I get about 20 pages in and already I am finding this novel difficult. It is over wordy, adjective rich for the sake of it. Its going to be an effort this novel but I have until November to read it and its sister novel. Its tea time and I settle down on the sofa to write the past two days blog. My evening will be Jesse Stone and an early night hoping to sleep.

Wednesday and I wake late, about 9 o’clock with a sense of a lot to do. I get breakfast and set about downloading a couple of reports that I need to read and comment on. I get my washing on take a call from a friend who has been to a school celebration and is crossing town to deliver things to her colleague. As much as I try I cannot find the date I booked my car in for an MOT so I ring the garage and get them to look it up. Tuesday the 31st. I then ask if they can look at my grinding brake and they say “drop it down”. We chat a bit about being able to get there and back and they decide to led me a car. So I drive gingerly to the garage and equally carefully back in a diesel VW polo with 92000 on the clock. I had a moment of panic when I could not find the start button and then spotted the key port, how old fashioned. Once home I put washing in the tumble dryer and the new crockery in the dishwasher for its first clean. That went well and I was later able to junk the old crockery and install the new. It was a strange kind of satisfaction.

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I settled down to read reports and to start making notes on them. Once I get into them time passes quickly as I scroll through the report picking up discrepancies and cross checking issues. The garage calls whilst I am on another call. My brakes won’t be ready till tomorrow and the garage owner is not keen on me using his car and leaving it at the train station for a day. We agree that he will deliver my car and pick his up while I get a taxi into the station. This is a whole new challenge as booking a taxi locally proves to be more than tricky. Eventually I install an App and book a taxi for eight in the morning. At this point my partner appears and tells me that her mother’s carer has just packed up and left in a taxi leaving her mother on her own with no one to look after her. There is a frantic period of desperately trying to get the care agency to find a solution quickly. This all goes on as we try to be good hosts to our guest who has arrived and is staying the night. There are many calls and texts between family and agency. Eventually we cook and eat a meal and the agency finally find someone to be with my partners mother for the night. We reach a point of semi calm and I am able to get my partner and her friend into the lounge with a bottle of prosecco and time to talk. I clear the kitchen and retreat to the bedroom to write the blog.

I cannot believe that anyone would walk out and leave a 92 year old vulnerable person alone, unfed and scared, without any warning or thought for the consequences. I am sure there will be reasons and explanations but that kind of cavalier abandonment of someone whose well being has been entrusted to you is callous, cold and the act of someone who is losing, or has lost touch with humanity.

Tuesday, its a wake up in a hotel day. My alarm goes off and I hear Eric Sarte. I have time to read a bit, pack and have a coffee before going to the restaurant for breakfast. Full English of course at a socially distanced table. People are in and out pretty quickly. I pack up the last remaining things and go to reception to check out. I’ve a bity of time to kill before lunch so I go to the designer outlet just outside York and go for a wander round. I find an original drawing by Doug Hyde, it is at a much reduced price but still, I hover, I haver, I walk away to think. I find myself in the Denby store and face to face with some classic blue on offer. For years now we had been saying that we need to scrap the badly faded crockery that we are using. At a price considerably less than the work of art it is a chance not to be missed. Unfortunately there are no boxes available so each item has to be wrapped and put into carrier bags. I end up with six plastic carriers. The journey to the car is slow as the plastic cuts a bit. Once stowed in the boot I return to the crepe stand outside the centre and treat myself to a strawberry milkshake and a Sicilian crepe. I thought in my innocence that the “Sicillian” would be sharply lemon and sugary it turned out to be covered in a thick yellow gooey syrup that was disgustingly sweet. I leave to meet a friend for lunch at the York Marina. I never knew York had a marina but here is a bit of it.

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I arrive early adn settle in and I am soon joined by my friend who I have not seen for three and a half years. Most of our conversation is catching up on how mutual friends and acquaintances are and how we have since we last met. We eat and continue our conversation. There has been a lot of water under the bridge along the way. We chat for a while until the cafe reclaims the table and we move outside. Eventually it is time to head for home, but before I leave my friend gives me a bag of vegetables harvested from her allotment. The drive home is a reasonable, but tiring. Until the very end of the journey when my drivers side rear wheel starts to grind when I brake. Its a pain in the arse and means I will have to contact the garage to see if they can fit me in asap.

I unpack my bags, the bag of veg and the bags of crockery. I settle down to complete yesterday’s blog that I could not get to upload yesterday and to start to write todays. My challenge is to somehow make clear how the normal mundane everyday life intertwines with living alongside cancer, which is one of the reasons why I started to write the blog. The initial stages were easy because so much happened and there was a lot to process and write about, but as the process became “normalised” and getting on with life became the norm conveying the linkage is difficult. This process is hard to convey accurately and is probably quite boring for the people who read it. It is perhaps something I shall explore on the writing course in November. So tonight I shall head for bed early and pick up some work and of course start to sort out the car issue. I had hoped for a more restful day.

Its Monday and I am up, showered and ready to hit the road by 9:30. I’m going to York to see my mentor and friend for lunch and a talk. The journey is good on my new tyres and I make good enough time to stop for a coffee and pastry. I’m pleased that I managed the journey without wine gums but annoyed that I succumbed to the pastry. Lunch is out in town and is a welcome change. We eat and talk, especially about the current situation in Afghanistan as my friend has a connection to the ongoing crisis and the difficulties of getting people out of there. The good news is that by the end of the afternoon she knows that the people concerned are inside the movement centre and in Kabul airport. With luck they will be out soon. We return to her house to continue our conversation until it is time for me to go and for her to go and ride. I am honoured that he dog likes me and chooses to sit with .

I get to my hotel to find the restaurant is not open tonight so make a reservation for a nearby pub and then head for the bar for a drink and to start todays blog. I intend to sleep well tonight and have a late breakfast tomorrow.

Sunday, up early to make drinks and then its time to read some poetry from the books that have just arrived for our writing course. I watch the beginning of the football highlights that I missed last night and return to the poems of Uganda under Idi Amin, or to give him his full tittle: His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshall Al Hadj Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of all the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular. He was also fond of declaring himself King of Scotland. The poetry of Nick Makoha gives a picture of what that all meant to the people of Uganda as Idi Amin descended from his popular overthrow of Dr Obote into tyranthood. Nick Makoha’s collection of poems “Kingdom of Gravity” plots his flight from Uganda via the airports he passed through in is flight from Idi Amin’s Uganda. Its good stuff and is very different from his first collection “The Lost Collection of an Invisible Man.” published some years prior. So it comes time for breakfast and the Sunday call to our youngest. She is bright and cheery and I think pleased to see us. We chat about family things and plans for the future, their new house being bought and possible marriage options. Nothing is agreed except that its going to take time. the call ends and we go about our chores.

Sunday is the day we sort the house. Before I get stuck in I take the car to the garage to top up the tank and check the pressure in the new tyres. While there I grab a couple of Sunday papers and a bag of wine gums for the drive to York tomorrow. I find the occasional wine gum staves off boredom of straight line driving and helps me concentrate. I thought I might alter my route but it in the end I will go my usual route. I return to pick up my chores. My role is to empty the Dyson and dehair the roller before cleaning the downstairs carpets. As I am Dysoning I notice a butterfly on the Buddleia and pop out with my phone to get pictures and get rewarded with two of them.

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With the place tidy its time to go to the garden centre to hunt for a birthday present suitable for a young Shri Lankan woman. It has to be light and affordable. So we arrive at the garden centre and browse what options there are. It turns out that these are limited but we eventually manage and also collect a pie, bacon and a birthday lemon drizzle cake for later in the week. Home and while my partner reads the Sundays I start the blog. There is still the packing for tomorrow to do, and a Tesco order to be amended but I suspect I will manage to see the football highlights later tonight.

Friday,and its a day of no work so I can choose what I do, which is a real luxury. The day starts with a muesli breakfast and the ritualistic filing of my medicines boxes. I have two identical ones now so that I can stay a week ahead. It means that if I travel or go away I can always carry a spare supply with me conveniently. To be frank when I write my blog a day late like this Friday I have to sit and think about what I actually did the day before . I check my phone to see when people called me which acts as an aide memoir. It is a sad comment on how little attention I pay to much of my life or how forgettable so much of my routine life actually is. I tend to remember thematic events, for example I know that I did a lot of washing so that by the end of the day all my clothes were clean, dry and stored away and that I wrote a letter. I always remember when I have written letters because it means I have been in my Shed. In particular yesterday sticks in my mind because of how inky my hands got using a new pen nib holder and aubergine drawing ink. Although I remember that part of my morning, before the luxury of my Shed, was given to me giving my eldest daughter a lift into town so that she could go to the gym and to her circus skills session. Most of my morning was spent in the Shed writing letters. My lunchtime was spent with my partner eating and doing the days crossword puzzles before taking a call from a friend. There was the inevitable short walk to the post box and the wander round the garden taking pictures. This time was prompted by a butterfly resting on the lounge window ledge.

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At some point my partner went to the hairdresser and I went to the garage to train in the garage. I gave myself an hour at a reasonable resistance. I tried to use my aerobic training mask but I could only mange a couple of minutes with it as the effort was so great. This is a new challenge, I need to be able to get back to being able to start a session with a ten minute slot of using the mask. Its good for my lung capacity. It was a hard session as my stomach is still sore from Mondays injection. I have a sore area on my stomach at the injection site and a noticeable lump under the skin that is uncomfortable. It is eases over time as the depo injection disperses but it is usually less sore at this stage of the week.

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By the time I am out of the bath and my partner has returned from the hairdresser no one can be arsed to cook so we order in Indian and watch a film together followed by a new series on channel 5. Its all escapist stuff before going off to bed having, in an act of great will, cleared he kitchen and put the dishwasher on. I go to bed feeling word itchy. Not only have I not written the blog but I have poems washing around inside me. The wine gum hangover one just won’t materialise and now I have a new one sitting in there fermenting. This one is about the silence and the rage of Autumn, the vulnerability of survival and the distance of spring, but it too eludes me at the moment.

Saturday and I am up early and write yesterdays blog with a cup of coffee before taking my partner a drink. Today is big. There is a new carer looking after my partners mother, so that is a visit to be made and there are new tyres for my car to be fitted at some point. My guess is that other stuff is going to crop up as well it always does. We eat a bacon bagel breakfast and clear the decks for the day. No sooner had I finished breakfast than the door bell rang and Mr Kwikfit was introducing himself. I move my car to a quiet adjacent road and leave Mr Kwikfit to get on with the tyre fitting. It takes him less than an hour before he’s at my door handing me my keys. I retrieve my car and feel relief that I have new tyres for the coming winter and travels. I watch the early day football match keeping one eye on the Amazon site to see when my books are going to arrive. What does arrive in the post is a blood form for my next oncology appointment, but no date for the appointment. I guess it will turn up sooner or later.

By the time my partner returns the match is over and I am just finishing clearing the garage work bench so that I can use it in future to mend some things that have in bags of pieces. By the time its all done my new books have arrived. These books are written by the three tutors on the residential writing course that we are booked on in November. They look to be an interesting mixture. One of them comes with a warning about content. I do not remember any one at Don Giovani popping out before hand to warn those of a nervous disposition that the opening scenes include rape, murder and seduction. Any way I think I am in for some interesting new poetry and perhaps some new fiction.

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As I said it looks like I am going to be introduced to some new authors over the next few weeks. I have to say I am looking forward to meeting the authors in person and being tutored by them. Apparently they read some of their own work as part of the experience. I wonder how the context will be set. So having given them a first look and found that the mighty Brentford had got an away draw this week, I headed to the garage to do a short but rugged training session on the rower. In a full hardy moment I set the resistance to maximum and go for it as it is a training rest day tomorrow. Result! I row a personal best for the level.

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I recover in time to eat chicken fajitas and then flop on the sofa to continue to write the blog I started this morning. The rest of my evening will be a film, perhaps some football highlights but definitely some new poetry.