Over the last few weeks of this blog I have occasionally given you a sense of how I feel. The thrust of the comments has been around the impact of steroids, and the chemo which I have every three weeks.
What I've glossed over a little is the tiredness. The tiredeness is relentless. I struggle to sleep at night properly because when I get comfy I can become overwhelmed with a hot flush which wakes me up, so I end up with a very disturbed night. This can be made worse if I don't go to sleep properly. If I don't go off fairly quickly after settling down, then I can be awake for hours.
I think this tiredness can make me difficult to live with.
So, if you ask me how I am, and I say"fine", you take that to mean "fine, but a bit knackered".
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How many of you knew that once upon a time I used to smoke? Not very seriously, in that I never smoked at work or at home or in the car, but put a pint of beer in my hand and the natural balance was a cigarette in the other.
Yes, I know they are bad for you, but when I started I thought it made me look big and grown up and clever......yeah, I know. When I started drinking out less I started to smoke less. Perhaps intensely for an evening once in a while, but overall the number of fags dropped off.
Now when I look back on that time, I can't believe how stupid I was. And that reflection is all the more stark as fewer and fewer people smoke because of the smoking ban in public places. I remember the shock of going into a restaurant in Barcelona a few years ago to be presented with a cigarette induced fug.
I am in favour of the ban. It's an unhealthy habit, and fairly revolting for non-smokers. But having come late to photography, I do have a romantic idea of smoke filled rooms. A single spotlight picking out a musician, or a lone drinker at a table in a pub. All the smokers now have to go outside, where the smoke dissippates quickly, so these opportunities I yearn for don't really exist anymore.
So we were having a coffee on Saturday at a table by the window when these two guys sat directly outside. It was a lovely sunny, if cold, morning, and so there was really only one reason for them to be there.
There was a window sill in the way blocking my view, but it didn't stop me taking a few shots of one of the men smoking and I really liked the smoke was backlit. Nothing stunning, but it perhaps illustrates how I'll take pictures of anything.
I even changed my lens to get the shots, which tells you that even on a Saturday morning stroll around the shops, I carry my camera and a selection of lenses with me. #obsessive
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Recently I have been looking forward to Monday's more and more. Why? Because Monday is when we get the latest episode of "Fargo" (which is utterly wonderful) and for the last two weeks "London Spy" with Ben Wishaw (I feel a new man crush coming on) and Jim Broadbent.
When they first season of Fargo aired last year I was apprehensive. Would the understated weirdness of the original film be maintained. I wasn't disappointed. Billy-Bob Thornton was wonderful as the hitman, and I even came to love Martin Freeman (I was worried about his casting, but it worked). The whole thing worked to the extent that I want to visit those vast icy plains of Minnesota and North Dakota. Season 2 takes us back to 1979 and isn't simply dependent on a romantic memory of the first series. It maintains the weirdness but in a context of the story, and not just weirdness for weirdness sake.
"London Spy" is not set in Minnesota, nor in 1979. I am a sucker for spy stories, so anything with Spy in the title will attract my attention. It isn't however, your usual spy fare, and I won't go into any plot detail in case you are tempted to pick this up on iPlayer. All I'd say is that is also a bit weird but again, not just for weirdness sake. The cast is wonderful, Jim Broadbent, Charlotte Rampling, and the eminently watchable Ben Wishaw. Paddington one week, Q after that, and a lost and lonely man in the middle of a web of intrigue the next. I really first saw him in The Hour, a drama set in the BBC in the 1950's.
If you haven't plugged into these series, then I'd thoroughly recommend them. Ok hun?
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