A recurring theme in September posts round here is whether or not I managed to hit my goal of always taking the whole of August off. It’s a dream that I’ve held dear since 2002 when I experienced it for the first time, not altogether intentionally, after finishing at the Audit Commission. It’s been feeling more important since the happy arrival of the Nugmeister, but this year it had another twist.
August 2026 was the month that I had radiotherapy and then about 90% recovered from it. Like the obstacles in Bear Hunt, I couldn’t go round it, I couldn’t go over it, I had to go through it. And now it’s done. In a matter of weeks, I’ve become a person who’s had radiotherapy.
That’s not to say the whole thing is over, I will have a review in early November to look at what we think has happened. And then I’ll be on regular PSA tests for 5 years to make sure that it’s not sneaking back up.
But I no longer have a cancer treatment somewhere vaguely in my future, as I have had for the last eight years, and that feels good too.
The newsletter I did to track what was happening and how I was feeling worked really well for me. The discipline of writing something as I went along kept me in touch with what was actually going on for me. And of course it also kept me in touch with some important people – if you were there, thanks again, I won’t stop saying thank you. Thank you.
So now it’s back to work, in the traditional back to school season. What to do? The question is compounded by the fact that I haven’t done any paid work at all this year as my already extended paternity leave slipped into sick leave. I’m very glad for all the money I put into pensions over the years – I hadn’t expected it to be covering new parenthood, but here we are. But they’re not unlimited pots and apart from anything I’d like to replenish them so that I can also have some of the things associated with being in my sixties – like having August off again next year, but this time without the visits to the space donut.
I’m still doing Living Culture Coffee Mornings on Fridays. The “real life” version is on the first Friday of the month, so there’s one in a couple of days. This week’s will be a special one celebrating the centenary of Ivan Illich, which gives us an opportunity to practice conviviality even more consciously than usual.
On the other Fridays each month we have a Zoom version, which attracts a slightly different crowd (although there’s some overlap) – not everyone can get to London on a Friday morning and not everyone gets a feeling of social connection over Zoom. But we’re plugging away at the overall question of what it means to “regrow a living culture” in both places and I’m fortunate to be the one who experiences them all.
I have a one-day facilitation gig pencilled in for early November, but apart from that, we’ll have to see – they’re increasingly hard to justify in terms of the time/travel costs and cognitive overhead unless the money’s ridiculous. Really ridiculous. The sort of ridiculous that’s actually best handled by an agent, rather than directly!
I’ve some ideas floating around about releasing more stuff that I’ve made and I’ve been slowly updating and developing web thingies behind the scenes.
And I’m drawn to having some sort of subscription/membership model here on the Perfect Path, with the simple proviso that it can’t be you paying me to write you more emails or putting any of my writing here behind a paywall – but the radiotherapy diary did show me that with a sufficiently interesting subject matter and a community of people I care about, I can write more often in public than I’ve become used to.
Then I’m also open to having a Social Art residency somewhere interesting, something with a stipend that allows me to experiment with some newer models of making beautiful things out of people.
Yeah, OK, those are all things to work on. I can get on with that.
