And not just any anticyclonic gloom either. We’ve also got so much pollution stuck beneath the heavy clouds that are a sign of this unloveable weather condition that the air quality has been unhealthy for the first time in the fifteen years I’ve been monitoring it,. Not poor and not just for one day. The last four days have been unhealthy, as in don’t go outside and especially not if you have stage 4 lung cancer or asthma and respiratory allergies. And guess what my menfolk have?
Yup, you got it right, and can I just say that my husband is coming into his tenth year of having lots of stage four cancers courtesy of an amazing treatment called immunotherapy He’s one of the hospital’s favourite patients because he was one of the first ones they treated and his cancers have (crossed fingers, toes and everything else I can cross) stopped growing. He is now officially more likely to die of something else. Amazing, isn’t it?
Amazing in a very different way is what I can best describe as smog. It stinks. It cuts at the back of your throat. It makes your eyes hurt and your cats as good as glue themselves to the settee or any other comfortable spot. A lot of it is due to pollution due to very poorly planned systems to ‘encourage cycling’ which actually encourage cars queuing with their engines running. More comes from the decision to hold more clinics at the hospital (good, obviously) without thinking about where people can park and leaves them queuing outside the car park with their engines running, blocking the road and making it dangerous for anyone trying to cross it. And a lot is from people using unseasoned wood in their woodburning stoves, and I only hope they don’t set their chimneys alight doing it. Not for their sake, I’m ashamed to say, but for everyone else who’d be protected by it.
Anyway, I won’t rant about that because it goes against my promise to myself when we were told that my husband had six weeks to live (nine and a half years ago now and boy, are we going to celebrate the tenth anniversary of that day if God lets us see it) Each day is going to be a good one because I’ll have plenty of time to cry afterwards.
Instead, I’ll think about little pleasures. A hot wheat bag against painful joints. A fleece blanket with arms and legs attached under which I disappear, with an attendant cat who is sleeping just behind my laptop and right on top of the heat bag. One of my best ever Christmas presents which is an electrically heated fleece that I can set for exactly the right temperature to soothe my joints. The devil's food cake recipe I made for Valentine's Day to follow steak, chips, onion rings and mushrooms which is one of my husband’s favourite meals. A cup of coffee beside me as I write this in the early morning.
Getting more of my pillowcases marked for my embroidered pillowcase project because a clean, freshly ironed pillowcase at night is so much better and nicer than one on which pollen and anything else my beloved men can find to be allergic to has settled. Finishing my crewel work embroidery, which Amy got me back into. And here’s a picture of it. It's one of four and they're going to be very posh cushion covers
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Managing to laugh at myself when I discovered why the canvas bags to embroider that I was amazed to find so drastically reduced had had to be reduced. It’s because the instructions don’t match the pictures! I spent quite a while turning the bag and the instruction picture around to try to make them match before I summoned aid in the form of two eagle-eyed autistic young adults and an engineer husband and they pointed out what I was suspecting. Still, they’re gorgeous, as you can see here and I’m having fun making it up as I go along. (And what, I hear you asking, is new about that?)
I’ve even had time to look at the book for which I got my first kill fee more than twenty years ago. That’s when a publisher commissions a book and then cancels it because, in this case, the American company was pulling out of UK publishing. So that has now had a drastic rewrite to the point where I abandoned the last ten thousand words and rewrote them. I also took out all 3 sex scenes because they don’t fit the style I write in now and I’m on my way to being pleased with it.
So, it may have been unhealthy gloom outside but writing this has made me see that it’s actually been a pretty good week. Thanks, amazing readers, and fingers crossed for an even better one to come for all of us.
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