Thursday and my third night in the spare room as I nurse my cold out of myself. I am getting there. I get up and make warm drinks for my partner and I, which we drink while forming a plan for the day. We decide to go into town for breakfast. We drive in to the Merchant of Venice and order our meals and then chat. I share that the family we know in Shri Lanka have been in touch again and sent pictures and a video. Things are tough in Shri Lanka at the moment, the government is bankrupt and the economy is dire, so for our fisherman family, life is difficult in the extreme. The daughter has sent me pictures of the notification of their electricity and water being cut off along with a video of how they have rigged up a car battery to power two lights in the night time. They are getting water from a neighbour. It is unimaginable that they are living like this, but having said that there are probably families right now in England close to this situation. I send some money and hope it gets them straight for a while. I wait to here how things go. We also chat about the possibility of going abroad for a holiday this year, which we both want to do but everything is so up in the air at the moment that it makes planning difficult to do. We finish our meal and pay after a long chat with the waitress about her experiences of working and being abroad. Apparently her experience is that we English are far more welcoming and good to be with than many other European countries. Go us! After a quick sortie to M&S we drive home to post, which includes a lovely letter from a friend and yet another (my last) ice hockey jersey.

I settle down to read my letter and then begin to draft the blog. After while my partner and I decide to go for afternoon scones at a near by garden centre in a village where I first lived when I left London. We wander round the new garden centre and size up the plants on offer, which are actually pretty good and reasonably priced. We head for the tea room and order our scones with me going for a strawberry milk shake as well. Sometimes I just can’t face coffee. We chat a while and then we head home. I settle down to read my David Chalmers book on Consciousness. Its really interesting but its such hard going, I have to read a bit then think and then read a bit more. Its going to take a while but I think the rewards will be large. I get to a point where something he says about the way things are defined can obscure the nature of a phenomenon. There is a graph that explains the concept. I suddenly realise that what is being said reflects the thoughts that were in the poem my friend sent. I present them here for you to think about.

It seems that allowing for questions, doubts and being curious might be a productive way to be. In essence allowing for phenomenon that are not “verifiable” by “facts” opens up some very interesting possibilities and philosophical questions, like what and why is consciousness. There is only so much of this that I can take in one go so I resort to watching football, followed by a new drama series The Night Agent. I finish drafting the blog, take my night meds and go to bed. My morning will start early with a set of bloods being taken, and so the run up to my radiotherapy oncology appointment on Thursday 18th starts.