I suddenly feel the urge to blog. In the past the shorter darker days have sent me into a tailspin of gloom but since retirement I have so much more freedom to avoid gloom, I would feel guilty if I let myself go. What are you all doing about the news from the US? As soon as I realised what was happening, I deleted all my online news feeds and stopped listening to Radio 4 or watching TV news. If it comes on while I am changing channels I sing loudly shout nonsense and frantically find a channel with dull people up-cycling bedside tables. (Much repeated moan – Up cycling in my view should be called ruining – beautiful old telephones turned into horrible lamps …ughhhh) anyway back to the news from America – I just can’t face it anymore. I followed the election build up enthusiastically, hoping (expecting) that ‘Sane’ Kamala would win and ‘Mad’ Donald would lose, then disappear. Now I give up. The American people have made their decision, and I have made mine – to ignore them, him, it, the whole terrible thing the whole terrible lot of them. I am too weak and lazy to do anything positive to improve the world so I have decided to stop looking, listening, reading, to hibernate and just wait until someone tells me it’s worth waking up because all the greedy old men with humongous egos have been eaten up by a monster.

While we wait, we in York and have been ill. Not seriously but persistently and when I say my family I include one cat. Between us we have taken four lots of antibios and a ‘Boots’ load of paracetamol and ibuprofen. Fortunately Maria and I didn’t need clamping by the front paws onto the kitchen table while utilising long leather rose pruning gloves to have our medicine administered but Vince did. Awful, awful, awful – we needed Lisa badly. Poor Vince acquired over a week or so a lion face with a big swollen jaw and a lot of dribble and pus, squeeling with pain at one stage. We took him to the vet three times or was it four, and each time he pooed in his box and was very distressed. The vet said it could be something sinister (a popular euphemism for cancer) but could equally be a vermin bite or an abscess under a tooth. I started preparing his eulogy on the basis that cancer is very much in fashion in our house so I saw no reason why Vince wouldn’t want to be part of the trend. Hopefully he doesn’t as his face is no longer ‘lenny’ like (Tv lion from the 60’s) and his appetite is back and his temperament is jolly as ever. Bobby the only non ill member of the family has a smug look on his face that warrants a punch.

The last five weeks have probably been my least productive period for years. I have done next to nothing except feel poorly and slightly obsessively keep on learning German. My excuse is that we are in Bonn for Arthur’s birthday next year but I think I am competing secretly with Maria and George who are both making excellent progress with their Italian and I just don’t want to be left out. I have a super smart, too smart teacher, Sophia who massively overestimates my intelligence and retention power, bubbles with enthusiasm but cannot refrain from speaking so fast my brain starts to boil trying to keep up. I come away exhausted unable to remember the German for ‘Christopher Newell’ – it is Christopher Newell btw.

I continue to enter various writing competitions never to hear a thing back except variations on a theme of “nah.” Before getting ill I completed a short video made with my next door neighbour Geoff and his grand daughter. I will release it once they have seen it and approved. It hasn’t been possible to show them so far because we have been so infectious they don’t want to come in the house for a screening

On Thursday I will find out what the plan is for my treatment, as the current chemo has stopped working. Worked for three years which is excellent. Hoping it’s nothing too vicious but I will take whatever is thrown at me of course. I am on stronger beta blockers as well for my heart which are making me super lazy but then again I can’t unravel the effect of the cold on my particularly sedentary habits so we will see. I expect to be a lot bouncier soon and I must say I am looking forward to feeling like getting on with things again.

Hey one more thing.  Once you chuck away BBC news and the Guardian and TikTok you discover loads of worthy, arty videos on You Tube you have been promising to watch but just accruing in ‘watch later’ at the expense of a quick news fix. Bernstein’s series on music is brilliant. I have never realised before, that the reason I love Berg so much and don’t love Schoenberg at all is the incredibly emotional way he hints but doesn’t indulge in tonality. If you think of his music as tonal layered with atonality then it seems more accessible. Then again you need Bernsteins ear to hear it. Even the more accessible Berg is still quite often a right load of wrong notes for rather a long time but I think I understand it better now.