The omen crow is hovering

A halfway rest in the Nuttery

Whenever I see the hospital doctors (rather too often these days), one question they ask is, "how much exercise to you do?" I tell them, I try to walk the dogs each day, perhaps for 20 minutes walking half-a-mile, for I am a slow walker. But these days, I try to choose walks where I can sit down halfway round. Yesterday was sunny and warm, when Clare Park gets crowded, so I walked up behind the Swan. there are a couple of split tree trunk benches where I can rest when it's dry. I don't like to take selfies, but I did here to capture the moment of tiredness and my gratitude for whoever made the benches and kept the woodland for public use.

I am, I know slowly dying, a complication of being nearly eighty with two cancers, one of which has metastasised, and with my organs slowly fading. I cannot do much physically, and my mind too is slowly deteriorating as I take longer to grasp for the words I want or to remember things. I am not afraid of dying, for to paraphrase the carol, "In that deep and dreamless sleep the silent world goes by." Indeed, it will go by, unheeded by me and commented on by others, some still young, some still to be born. Yet I resent the presence of death circling round like the omen crow in my poem about Copernicus, The Timid Hero, from Girders in the Sand: 

Through hazy, damp grey vapours’ swirling chill,

An omen crow descended silently

Then waited on a framing window stone,

Grey in grey mist about a weathered tower.

I did not, of course, have myself in mind when I wrote this, some thirty years ago, yet now I feel I was describing Copernicus awaiting death with percipient clarity, yet I resent this crow for I enjoy life and would love to experience more of it. Indeed, returning to the Swan carpark, I had a pint of shandy in the warm sun and enjoyed it hugely, with the added virtue that the consultant had told me I must drink plenty to keep the kidneys working. 

Jetsom

I have never been so alone,

so cast out 

unkempt,

disregarded,

sitting on a rock,

not the beautiful mermaid,

but a barnacle

clinging to the remains of life.

by Annie Elliott

Of course, it is Ann who takes the brunt of this, not only in having to run around and do so much more, but from the agony of watching my illnesses develop. In this, she stands alone and I feel her pain, though the cause of it and unable to relieve it. Soon she will be alone, and already she thinks of the things she will have to do that hitherto were my job. That this happens to one half of all married couples is no comfort. To tell her, "he had a good innings," is salt in the wound: I never have liked cricket, so don't use cricket metaphors. But I must end this morbid piece; I'll be writing my own obituary next, and perhaps pre-recording it, so at least my memorial address will be words I have pre-approved.