Cancer update: I had my appointment with the oncologist last week, which confirmed the news I already posted two weeks back. The chemo has largely worked: it is holding the cancer where it is, though it is not notably diminishing it. As I\u2019m no longer having any problematic side-effects, it seems sensible to carry on with \u2018maintenance\u2019 chemo (with two of the three chemo drugs that I was taking) for the indefinite future. So this is my new treatment regime.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m off the critical list, but continue on twice-daily morphine (to hold stomach pain at bay), and shouldn\u2019t expect energy levels to rise (I\u2019m sleeping a lot, and returning to bed after any activity). So \u2013 cause neither for celebration, nor for tears. Until the cancer bites back (which I should expect in the next year to two) this is my life.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not working much, and am far from bedbound, so that leaves me with the usual question that people face on retirement: what do I do, day to day?<\/p>\n
One answer I\u2019m exploring is househusband. Gill works, we still have three children living at home (ages 22, 18, 9) so I can do more of the cooking, cleaning, washing, washing up, getting Raffie (the little one) ready for school, getting cups of tea for people in the morning, even sewing buttons on shirts (which I just did! Feeling so pleased with myself! Even if it did take an hour and was my own shirt so scarcely selfless.) Doing all those jobs that the good Mum does to keep the household rolling along happily.<\/p>\n
(I hear Gill (my wife) scoff in mocking disbelief. Her view is that she continues to do, say, 90% of the tasks, whereas mine is that I\u2019m now up to around half. It seems that this is just an Irreconcilable Difference of Perception (as nicely explained as the availability heuristic<\/a> by Daniel Kahneman is his great book, \u2018Thinking Fast and Slow\u2019). Also I\u2019d better acknowledge, we do have a cleaner coming in once a week as well. And I should also apologise for nesting my brackets, which comes as second nature to mathematicians and logicians but is not permitted in the grammar of written English (see Nunberg\u2019s The Linguistics of Punctuation<\/a>). It is a pity it is not allowed, but it is not.)<\/p>\n The househusband role is puzzling me. I\u2019m used to seeing my work as contributing to knowledge, in the noble academic sense, or to company profit, as hallowed by economic theory. Both of these are quantities where \u2018more is better\u2019, where time is a limited resource, where one dreams or more time to make more knowledge\/profit. Househusbandry isn\u2019t like that: it neither has a theory to give it grand status (as feminists have long been saying) nor is there more to do once the house is clean etc. (OK, you can always find more jobs, but once the house is cleanish and tidyish, I say enough!)<\/p>\n Time \u2026 as Larkin put it \u201cWhat are days for?\u201d (Days)<\/a>. Now that I\u2019m (semi-) retired, knowledge and profit are no longer answers. With that, I head off for my birdsong walk<\/p>\n [[Interlude as I walk]]<\/p>\n The birdsong is at its most wonderful just now, outside our front door between 4 and 5 a.m. on a March morning, before the seagulls start drowning out the songbirds. It is a daily treat, with visual delights for most of the last week too as we have had clear skies and a full moon.<\/p>\n Househusbandry, and birdsong walks, and talking with friends through this blog and via other means (more on that in a future blog) \u2013 not such bad answers to Larkin\u2019s question.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Cancer update: I had my appointment with the oncologist last week, which confirmed the news I already posted two weeks back. The chemo has largely worked: it is holding the cancer where it is, though it is not notably diminishing it. As I\u2019m no longer having any problematic side-effects, it seems sensible to carry on … Continue reading Neither celebration nor tears<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":384,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions\/384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}