Keep on keeping on.
It isn’t quite a month since my first hormone implant and I’m beginning to feel its impact now in two ways. The first is that I find myself getting tired by late afternoon. I keep active, but a weariness descends; I do pick up again after supper though: the second is that it is changing trips to the bathroom – I’m peeing a bit more often and with greater urgency. I’m due another implant in January and I’m told that further and increasing weariness is an expected side-effect of the radiotherapy, which starts at the end of January and runs through February.
The idea, by the way, is that the hormones block testosterone which starves the cancer (and shrinks the prostate) and, under radiotherapy, cells are damaged but healthy ones grow back whereas cancerous ones don’t.
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I continue to write despite tiredness and make a point of writing at least a paragraph a day. In practice I find I have two or three productive days of several hundred words followed by a couple of days off during which I read. I’m quite happy with the direction the new novel is taking, albeit that it is in first draft and it will need a lot of kicking into shape when the first draft is done, especially around pacing and structure. How to fix both of those becomes clearer when the whole story is told and I can take a big-picture view. I don’t expect to get to that stage until later in 2026 once the radiotherapy is over and I get back to my normal routines.
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Meanwhile, I’ve been watching assorted programmes (online) including a spy series produced by Yorkshire Television in the late 1970s: The Sandbaggers. Unusually for a spy series, and possibly taking its cue from Len Deighton, it spends a lot of time on inter-Whitehall rivalry and manoeuvring, only occasionally venturing into action sequences and cynical brutality. It is undoubtedly ‘of its time’ in production values, stuffed full of tobacco products and, of course, rotary telephones with never a mobile or laptop computer in sight. Enjoyable.
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