I went to my scheduled appointment with Phillip Parente this morning. The news was all good as far as the tests went; the PSA was 0.02, still undetectable. Phillip pointed out that, until recently, the test only went to one place after the decimal point. So, my inference from this is: while it was up by 0.01, that’s not worth worrying about.

The bad news: as a cancer patient, I am in a high risk category for the novel coronavirus. So I have to self-isolate for a few weeks. For details of what to do and not to do, he referred me to my GP and the Commonwealth Department of Health COVID-19 isolation statement.)

This affects my beloved too. (There is obviously not much point in my being self isolated and her not.) So she will be working from home: fortunately she brought her laptop home a few days ago. Neither of us will be going to exercise class, coffee with friends, book group, concerts (probably cancelled anyway), movies, or any of the social things we used to do. I will also be avoiding  catching up with my friend, a fellow prostate cancer patient, who is also writing a memoir. At least we can exchange drafts by email.  

Shopping is out too! We picked up a few things on our way home this morning. Our greengrocer, fortunately, does home deliveries. I can just text him what we need & pay over the phone. I have been doing little shops over the last few days, so we are fairly well stocked for the essentials. I even managed to get a four pack of loo paper! The bottom line (sorry about that): neither of us is displaying symptoms, we are pretty well prepped for a few weeks chez nous. The Guardian article “Never read Middlemarch or listened to Wagner’s Ring Cycle? Now’s your chance” fits our circumstances pretty well.  We have a courtyard in which to sit, and a park at the end of the street to walk down to. As the poet proclaimed (cliché alert):

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread–and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness–
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

(The Rubayait, by Omar Khayam. But you knew that! The Wikipedia article about the Fitzgerald rendition — of which the above is Quatrain XII — is most interesting.)