Belated New Year wishes! I hope that you had a good celebration wherever you were at the time and that the return to normal life has been bearable for you. We had a great time over the season, with my brother Simon coming down from Scotland and my brother Phil and family coming over from Paris. We are all back to school now and reminding ourselves every morning that the nights are getting shorter.
This is just a brief post to update you on the chemo. Many of you have been kind enough to email and enquire. I will be half-way through the pill taking on Friday, and then there will be a week's break from the pills which will take me to half way through the whole treatment. For those of you who have been praying that I get away lightly in terms of the long list of side-effects, keep going! It's working. I can honestly say that, other than tiring quickly in certain circumstances, I am free from any side-effects. (This is all against the back-drop of the hopsital recommending that I stop taking the chemo three days before Christmas so that I had energy to enjoy the day with the children ... ie. it is surprising.)
So what's ahead? I am really looking forward to doing some 'living room' poetry readings with some very talented friends. Two readings booked for York, one for London, one for Kettering and another due to be booked for London later in March. They are great fun to do and very cathartic for me, so if you haven't invited me to read in your living room ... why?! As well as that, Mary and I are escaping to the Lake District for another child-free weekend away. Oh joy! Kind brother Phil is heading over to look after our cherubs. He is seriously building up treasure in heaven. Talking of which, Joel has just started saying "Oh dear," at the top of the stairs which means that he has done something regrettable that will probably cause his mother and I to be perturbed for an hour or two ... like last Wednesday when he somehow managed to empty a bathful of water onto the bathroom floor and through our kitchen ceiling. When I made it up the stairs and was treading water in the bathroom, looking him in the eye as he sat in the empty bath, he furrowed his brow and said, "Cold ... "
Yep, live and learn, son.
