Wednesday and I wake up to find my partner up and my eldest daughter departed for work. I have breakfast and meds and then settle into a morning of Christmas shopping and organising. There is a lot of messaging going on and checking of links and wish lists. Once into the swing of things I gather pace, write lists, check off acquisitions and develop delivery strategies. My partner is easing her way through the day as she recovers from yesterday’s visit to the hospital so we both tap away at our techno. Now that there are orders out there the waiting for delivery begins. I always have a nagging concern that every trade or deal I do is a scam, and I am just waiting to be let down, robbed or conned. I have to say my faith in technology is glass fragile and not a little paranoid.

By lunchtime I am content with the progress made. A package marked fragile arrives for me, so there are positive signs that the world is functioning. Finally, I have got as far as I can get and resort to the mundane tasks like doing next week’s Tesco order. All that remains for today is to select a poem to throw for slaughter at Saturdays Poetry Stanza meeting and to train. The latter is not appealing as my injection site is still sore from Monday, so I will preload with paracetamol and reduce the resistance level a notch and increase the time. Long and easy is the watch word. But first the poem selection. I think I am going to go with one about old men.

I know why old men stare,
Why they sit and look.
Nothing now is real
So we cling like Harlow’s monkeys
To the Terry towelling comfort of memory.
All those moments when alive
When love, passion and life
Grabbed us and gave us meaning.
Now we see the world,
The bird on the wire,
The crow on the roof,
The raptor high in the sky,
We feel the air, the effort to fly.
None of what we are is here
But the world remains,
It persists and so we watch,
We see the world
And so we stare at it,
But it no longer gives us meaning,
We are in it,
But we are not of it. 

I am not sure, and it will need to be tidied up. Perhaps by the time I get to the actual submission something else will have presented itself. It’s something to think about while I train.

I did not think about it while I trained. I sent my old man’s poem off and went to the garage to train. As I did not train yesterday due to the hospital adventure, I decided to train for an hour today at a lower level. I confess I did not fancy it but then that’s what Rocket is for. He came through, he always does and soon I was astride my rower. The first half hour was a strain but as I got into the second half I relaxed a bit and found some energy. In the end it was a good session. Over 12 kilometres and 800+ calories burnt.

The session gets recorded in my food and training journal before I change out of my kit and make myself the luxury of a fresh coffee. I am truly addicted. I retire to the lounge and sit on the sofa with my feet on the Circulation Reviver, which, as far as I can tell just mildly electrocutes my feet, but it seems to work, so as I tempt myself to up the voltage I sit and catch up on the blog. My intention is to have a mindless evening as I have no spoons left. There appears to be little on TV so I expect I will scour the various platforms for something suitably undemanding.