I am on the next stage of recovery, resistance work in the local gym. I am following a set of core exercises suggested by an exercise specialist at Prostate Scotland. Today was my third session.
The core issue is that the hormone implants and radiotherapy tend to reduce muscle mass and the resistance work is intended to restore it and also help create a cancer-suppressive environment in the body. The exercises I have are targeted at the main muscle groups and include deadlifts, a first for me. I’m not a complete stranger to resistance work but in the past it has always been as an adjunct to cardio training, mainly running; this time the resistance work is the main course and any cardio is an adjunct to it, at least for the first few months until things get back into balance.
The target is to find the weight for each exercise where I can manage 8 – 10 repetitions before having to stop, then doing three sets of them. Once I get used to that weight and can do, say, 10 to 15 repetitions, I raise the weight a notch, and so on. I would like to get back to running, but it isn’t a priority at present.
I won’t know how well the hormones and radiotherapy worked until early June when tests are scheduled.
***
I’ve been reading a lot lately. I mentioned Stevie Smith a couple of posts ago but I’ve also been dipping into Thomas Hardy’s poetry (there is a lot of it, of varying quality), Malcolm Guite’s first volume of the Arthurian corpus in epic verse, Galahad and the Grail, and Patricia A McKillip’s Ombria in Shadow. The latter is an object lesson in writing Fantasy to a very high standard and has given me plenty to think about as regards craft and technique in general.
I also read The Hobbit for the first time since the girls were small; it is an odd book. I enjoyed revisiting it but every so often the writing irritated me. Still, I enjoyed it enough to make the mistake of revisiting the first of the Peter Jackson Hobbit films to see if time has improved it; it has not.
I had intended to go swimming today but felt quite fatigued (the hormone treatment is still active in my system and will be for a few weeks yet) so I decided to go for a walk instead. As it happened I ended up walking 13.3km (8.25 miles) to Dean Village and back along the Water of Leith Walkway. It’s a walk I know well and like very much. I keep my eye open for wildlife, especially dippers and kingfishers and the outside chance of an otter. None of those today though there was an audible but invisible woodpecker. I also let my mind and thoughts wander.
And wander they did.
For some reason it occured to me that 50 years ago, in 1976, I was, or should have been, working towards my Highers at school. At the time I was studying Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Engineering Drawing, Art and English. At the end of that school year I had acceptances from Glasgow and Strathclyde universities for courses including Applied Physics and Mechanical Engineering. In the end, I completely changed my mind and returned for sixth year, initially studying English, Art, French and Latin. I dropped the Art for additional French.
That fifth year in 1975/6 included one of the few things a teacher said that I can remember clearly as if it were only said moments ago. Higher Art and Design included a module on the history and appreciation of art. One day, while we were considering one of the impressionists, I forget which one now, I said, in the way that only 16-year-olds can, that I didn’t like the work of one of them. ‘Laddie,’ said Mr Bennett, ‘ Yer no’ here tae like it, yer here tae appreciate it.’ One of the most profound and long-lasting lessons in all my school life.
I thought too about the post I made the other day about the persistence of quiet faith and remembered something I noticed in China some years ago. Buddhism is generally tolerated rather than encouraged by Chinese authorities, especially in places where tourist income can be generated. But the Buddha is everywhere when you look and become attuned to it, and more often than not small statues become small personal shrines, even in Beijing (which I wrote about here). Memorably, there is a large room in the magnificent National Museum of China on Tiananmen Square devoted to statues and images of the Buddha, and it is noticeable that these usually attract small devotional offerings. Again, faith persists.
It persists too in some of the odd things that are known to appear along the Water of Leith Walkway, workings in wood and string and feathers that may or may not be amateur folk art but also give off a distinct hint of paganism.
***
I have a current YouTube obsession with the channel of Ben Maton, the Salisbury Organist. Ben was an Organ Scholar at St Peter’s College, Oxford and, unlike Anna Lapwood who is known for playing grand organs that respond to the merest touch of the keys, he focuses on playing small instruments in village churches that may or may not have been well-maintained. I hate to use the ‘A’ word but there is an authenticity about Ben’s videos and a gentleness that I really like. I have no idea about Ben’s faith because he never mentions it, but it doesn’t really matter.
I’ve embedded four videos below, one playing Elgar in his birthplace, one playing Vaughn Williams in Down Ampney, one playing a tiny organ in Compton Valance, Dorset, and one in which he is a child in a toyshop at the console of the organ of Wells Cathedral supporting the organ restoration fund (watch out for his smile at 13’39.)
The journey to East Kilbride last Saturday did not go as expected. Quite aside from the smelly old bloke who boarded the bus trailing clouds of stale urine in his wake and plonked himself down next to me, problems on the M8 meant the bus was redirected on the old road through Shotts. Man was it bleak.
I hadn’t noticed the diversion at first: I was trying to tune out the odour of the old bloke and concentrate on Stevie Smith’s The Holiday, of which more some other day maybe. I looked up to see a monotone landscape dominated by stunted trees with split trunks, one of them stretching a single long bough above a sea of tall grass, groping for light from the uncompromising horizon.
In some ways it reminded me of the high road to Annfield Plain where my dad was born, a hard landscape contrasting against the soft light on distant hills. The view through the grimy bus windows was of rubbish littering the roadside verges, brightened by the occasional clumps of daffodils. Every so often we passed some forsaken housing scheme where even the bedraggled starlings looked marginalised and oppressed.
As we pulled into Buchanan Street Bus Station 40 minutes late, two bus spotters photographed the bus, a new one for me.
I mentioned the church service that I attended for Mum; outside of Mum’s piece and a rededication of the church building seventy years after the laying of its foundation stone, it was a conventional Sunday Eucharist. I was struck, as usual, by the dreadful tone of so much of the words, the focus on humanity’s fallen state wrapped up with misery and guilt. It is one of the many things that I find off-putting about Christian orthodoxy, the theological equivalent of a late-running bus through Shotts on a miserable day.
I was in East Kilbride this weekend. I was there to attend a service this morning at the church in which I grew up, St Mark’s Scottish Episcopal Church. Amongst other things, the service was to mark my mum’s ‘retirement’ from active service in and to the congregation. Mum is 93.
I have a complicated relationship with Christianity and the Church; I am not a Christian but, then, neither was Jesus. My memories of St Mark’s in the 1970s are of a large-ish and active congregation. The congregation now is diminished and aging, which is not unique these days whatever the denomination. The appearance this morning of me, my sister and my nieces and nephew with their partners and children pretty much doubled the congregation and halved the average age.
Over the past week I’ve had a number of thoughts about attending the service and the extent to which I would participate without feeling hypocritical. I journaled those thoughts and some of them might appear here one day, but not yet. However, what struck me quite forcibly this morning was that, however ostensibly diminished St Mark’s is, it persists. Every week a group of people meet, share time with each other and participate in a ritual that has meaning for them.
St Mark’s is 70 years old now, a stripling in terms of ecclesiastical architecture but even so a place where people – including Mum and Dad and my family – have gathered and served the community with quiet determination over many years and there is a subtle power in that. And so, despite my non-belief, I was happy to join in with communion this morning not just out of respect for Mum and for the memory of Dad (I wore his cufflinks in my shirt) but because of that quiet persistence.
By happy coincidence, the Gospel reading for today was Matthew’s telling of the expulsion of the money-changers and merchants from the Temple. That (and particularly aspects of Mark’s framing of the stories in his gospel) parallels a lot of my own thinking about personal ethics and organised religion in general, reflecting something older than Messianism or, in Greek, Christ-ism. But that’s a post for another day.
It has been a tiring and expensive week. Expensive because Kirstin and I have booked to go away for the first time in a couple of years save for two city breaks in York. We’ll be in Italy for seven days in May and I dare say that you’ll read more about that in due course. It marks the end to the cancer uncertainty, a significant birthday for Kirstin and also, later in the year, our 40th wedding anniversary.
More expense: I was at the opticians and bought new glasses with a new prescription. Even using the various promotional deals on offer, new varifocal glasses are not cheap.
And finally I bought a new sports watch. I have previously owned two Garmin Forerunner 235 watches that I used primarily for running though they can also be used for swimming. I bought both of them second-hand and very cheap on eBay 3 years ago. One of them gave up the ghost but the other works well enough although the battery is going and it gets cranky sometimes; I’ll keep it as a backup. I bought a new one, albeit one model back from the current and as discounted ‘new old stock,’ because it has more functions that directly relate to the work I need to do for cancer recovery in the gym, and also for recording assorted metabolic functions that the Forerunner does not include. The new one is another Garmin, a Vivoactive 5 bought at substantially less than its old retail price and much less than the current Vivoactive 6.
Keeping it Understated
I’m tired mainly because I made a start on getting back into the exercise this week. On Monday I was swimming, pootling up and down the local 25m and feeling better about it than I expected. Tuesday was a brisk/vigorous 5k walk. On Wednesday I thought I’d go round our local hill, an old favourite route of mine; I aimed to alternate walking and light jogging with the emphasis on the walking but in fact I jogged most of it. For both the swimming and the jogging the aim was not to attempt anything heroic but simply to do the activity as best as I could to get my body back into an exercise frame of mind. I’ve also been doing some light resistance work in the house. I can report that I am feeling aches in all the right places and plan more of the same for the coming weeks and months, building in focus and intensity.
On the same theme, I had a phone call yesterday from Lisa, a prostate cancer specialist at Maggie’s. We had a very good chat about my stage in process (still in treatment because hormones are still in circulation in my body and the radiotherapy is still doing its work even though the daily sessions have stopped) and about my approach to exercise for the remainder of the treatment period and for recovery thereafter. I’ll write more about this once I’ve worked things through, however by the time she phoned I had already made a donation to Maggie’s in return for two running/gym vests. I’m happy to promote Maggie’s and happy to wear the shirts in the hope that they might prompt questions and discussion.
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