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.
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.
