Throughout this process I’ve always believed it would be a useful exercise to get some of my thoughts on canvas. I now have around a dozen square canvases ranging from 300mm x300mm to 1000mm x 1000mm, and the first has been “launched” by the impact of acrylic paint on its surface. This is a small canvas and I am delighted to see it happening at last. It is entitled “Chromodoris Annae” and takes its colours and design features from a nudibranch or sea-slug recently photographed in “National Geographic”.

Here’s my thought process. I am calling this series of paintings “Nature’s Palette”. Why? Because I am drawing my inspiration from some of the flora and fauna that this good earth provides naturally. This involves, colour, texture and form taken from insects, fish, crustaceans, animals, birds, flowers and plants, all shining examples of what could not (in my opinion) happen purely at random.

As an artist, when I look at some of our natural phenomena I somehow just “know” that a Supreme Designer’s mind is behind their creation. It’s simply not good enough to say that their appearance happened by chance, and, by committing them to canvas, I believe I will be at least making my view clear, that through the very appreciation we have for beautiful things - art, music, nature - we can be sure that there is a purpose behind it all!

By using the vivid colours, remarkable textures and intricate forms to be found everywhere on earth (and probably beyond), I am “borrowing” a palette of such wealth and power that I feel almost as if I am cheating by calling the canvases my own work. You will see no actual creatures or botanical specimens, but merely my abstract “translation” using the palette. I am concentrating my studies on a wide variety of life form, and these twelve pictures will, I hope, get it out of my system and into the open.

I will be publishing a photo of each painting as they are completed.

Anyone reading this - please send me if you wish any photographic examples (jpegs) of the kind of thing you may associate with nature’s design - all grist to the mill! Please send to ososki@btinternet.com

You, whose strange ethereal beauty
Haunts by day and in my dreaming,
So, so sweet!
I love to greet
Your happy features sunny, beaming,
Growing swiftly, granddaughter mine.

Every little thing you’re doing
Thrills my heart and stirs my thinking,
I watch you grow,
I love you so
Approving all those moments, drinking
In each step, each word you speak.

You’re the essence of my longing;
Through you, Alma, I will realise
So many hopes
I love to hold.
My survival is through your eyes
Living each day for my granddaughter’s steps.

Little Alma, dusky beauty,
Smiling angel of my waking,
Hold my memory!
I love to catch
Each breath of you, each second taking
Away my fears, granddaughter mine.

As he makes his mark on Bristol,
Silvo raises all the standards,
Takes the prize for handsome charmers;
Wins the trophy for the gamers!
And when he is tired of playing
Silvo thinks his thoughts of conquest.
Great is this tremendous warrior!

Mighty, he, the champion pupil;
Wonderful his schoolroom exploits,
And his excellent reputation
Follows him with spoken virtue!
His, the legend in the building;
His, the everlasting glory.
Silvo will be famous one day,
Will be master of his future
Will the ladies’ hearts go breaking
When his love is finally chosen.

Silvo’s exploits will make history;
His the name linked with discovery.
All the world will know his brilliance,
Some rejoicing in his shadow,
Praising Silvo’s claim to greatness.

My first daughter, precious jewel,
Nearly never made it.
Far too early she arrived,
Sick and jaundiced, but she thrived.
Mother’s milk delivered later
To her lonely incubator
Kept my daughter with it.

So of course she was so special.
Had to be, so flourished.
Born in her creative skills,
Latent wonders, magic thrills,
Yet her strongest and eternal
Were to be her gifts maternal;
Babies she has nourished.

Max, the Mum, so strong and loving,
Caring, she amazes.
All her children, stars so bright,
Testaments to her insight,
Echo Max’s clearest thinking.
Magnifying, spreading, linking
Goodness that she raises.

Max, the artist, deeply knowing,
Works with real feeling.
What she does is so precise,
Secure within her own advice,
Nurturing her thoughts aspiring
Just as she instructs her offspring.
Quietly revealing.

There has been a tiny but clear improvement in my swallowing. I am able to eat thicker liquids and, on occasion, small amounts of more solid food, chewed very thoroughly.

Last week I spoke to John Frank, (www.johnfrankonline.com) on the recommendation of a close friend. What he said surprised me and what I experienced on the phone talking to him was a bit astonishing, but immediately afterwards, on my wife’s instructions, I ate a small omelette and some mashed potato. Since then I have been experimenting with morsels of all kinds and this culminated in a trip to the Cotswolds this past weekend where I joined my wife and friends in some real food, viz. soups, a little bread and butter (minus the crust!), various ice creams (even a knickerbocker glory!), a scallop, some avocado, some melon, a whole lemon sole, a crab, a potato, a poached egg, a fried egg, a little black pudding, some porridge…

I have to say that this was all purely experimental. Eating these items resulted in some real discomfort (often for hours afterwards) and I didn’t keep it all down, exactly. But it’s a start, tempered by my over-enthusiasm which tended to make me overdo it somewhat. I know in myself that it will continue to improve. I am well aware that this period of over-indulgence was totally incorrect from the point of view of my cancer and my alkanization regime, but I just had to do this and I have done it. Now I shall return to my super-drinks but occasionally add a little something, and why not??? One has to enjoy oneself.

I also had some more radiotherapy last week for my back which had become exceedingly painful in the sacral region where the metastases are. Just one shot last Wednesday, and this would cause some side-effects of varying degrees, as everyone is different. The onset of the side-effects could be (I was told) as soon as the next day. Well, so far the pain has not got worse before getting better. There is a slight burning and dryness of the skin which I am treating with E45 cream, but no diarrhoea or bladder problems.

So far, so good, then. When in the Cotswolds (Broadway High Street) I bought a stick to help me favour my right leg, and this helps - quite easy to get the hang of, really.

My continuing objective is to gain a little weight now whilst attempting to alkanize more, so I just have to work out the right regime for each day. Because my once powerful biceps had almost disappeared I decided a couple of weeks ago to start weight training with my arms and this has met with some success. The arms are more toned now and the exercise is good anyhow. Whilst in the Cotswolds we must have walked three or four miles each day, so I feel generally more energised.

When I got back home I really expected to have lost some weight as the food I consumed was not as great in quantity as my superdrinks, and I was clearly using more calories during the break, but I was exactly the same weight as when we left.

Toby keeps me steadfast. Toby keeps me sane.
Toby holds my mind in check and limits my disdain.
He’s as old as all the hills, his wisdom strong and bright,
And though my youngest, he can see so clearly in the night.

Toby’s got the picture. Toby’s taste is clear.
He’s so individual and he keeps his mind in gear.
A motivated man, self-realisation is his “thing”,
And what he chooses for himself is worthy of a king.

Toby’s self-assuredness is a privilege to see,
His confidence and wit live up to all he strives to be.
Toby makes me happy, he’s excellent company,
And he can make me feel as though he’s much older than me.

Toby, he is tall and dark and handsome - makes me proud.
The girls all love young Toby, they praise his name aloud,
And he can have his choice of all the maidens in the land
But chooses to be true to one - the one that’s close at hand.

Toby sets me thinking. His thoughts are brave and true,
And, though we don’t always agree, I have to hand it to
Such youthful innovation, all logic and finesse.
Incisive words, distinctive stance, from where I cannot guess.

Toby’s like an oracle, his young opinions bold
Drive home to me the weaknesses and errors of the old.
His self-control, it conquers me; his eloquence so cool,
It helps me see a new perspective, break another rule.

I owe so much to Toby. His frequent trips back here
Now that I’m getting weaker, diminishing my fear,
Help me to see the future, embodied in his being.
My Toby is the now and the forever that I’m seeing.

This is v-e-r-y slow indeed, and I’m not sure very much is happening. What are the differences I detect? Well, I can eat thicker juices and soups, and liquids (especially rice milk) go down more smoothly. Also, I can manage to eat strawberries and very soft fruit if I chew them very thoroughly. I remain off the Ensures although I am losing a bit more weight each week. So perhaps the radiotherapy is beginning to kick in now.

On the debit side, my back is giving me constant pain and I am avoiding painkillers wherever possible.

I am going to Stoke Mandeville today for more tests on the bone. Could be more radiotherapy on my back. Downside - if I have more radiotherapy I can’t have artemisinin for another three months. Do I have that amount of time?

What I don’t plan to do here is to venture into quantum physics or related sciences. I know that there have been many books and papers published on the subjects contained within these contentious areas, as well as many well-known responses which deal with them in similarly esoteric vein. I have a schoolboy’s working knowledge of astronomy and that’s about it. So I hope you’ll forgive me if I start by saying that this little chapter places most people, I believe, right where we start, with little or no knowledge and a massive group of questions to which we could not begin to understand the answers, even if we had them.
When I go out into the garden on a clear summer night and look up at the heavens (or what I can see of them) I reflect that I am a tiny speck in the universe - so tiny that my comparative size is not a matter for calculation but rather that an attempt at calculation diminishes me still further. The solar system, if my memory serves me right, is a part of the Milky Way galaxy, parts of which I can see when I raise my eyes to the heavens, and that is itself part of something still larger called the “Local Super Galaxy”, which is part…  …and so on and so forth. The sheer immensity of the universe may well be visualized by the select few, but not me. It’s just very, very big.
But, infinite? Of course this leads directly to thoughts about temporal infinity. When did it all begin? What happened before that? And before that? And when will it end? How can it “end”?
So when we then get into the discussion of “just how big, how far and how long and where and when does it end?”, I’m frankly stumped. I can’t get my head around the idea of something that goes on and on in space forever, because that defies everything familiar to me. Everything I know about is finite, with a beginning and an end, a lifespan of sorts. Even rocks and the earth’s strata are subject to change and an ageing process, so how can anyone begin to know about such things? We can guess, or we can use such science as we have to make estimates, but KNOW? My feeling is that, clever as we are, a pretension of knowledge of this subject is more than a little presumptuous.
To my mind, mankind’s sphere of knowledge has changed through the centuries, and not necessarily always for the better. I have an instinct telling me that the magicians, wizard and sorcerers of olden days did have something to offer, but changing technology saw many of their skills falling into disrepute, leaving some of their genuine arts and methods to decay in the mists of time, lost forever until and unless they are rediscovered.
My brief period on earth has encompassed great change. I can recall the horses (which were for thousands of years the only form of powered transportation) which tradesmen used to deliver milk, bread and groceries to my parent’s home giving way to the internal combustion engine, and yet I am also computer literate. This tells me I am from an unique generation: my father would not have known a computer from a Cornish pastie and my oldest son only sees horses today being ridden for sport or entertainment. Millennia of horse transport; most likely to come - millennia of computerised or similar technology; mutually exclusive periods spanned by a single generation.
So you can understand my skepticism when I refer to “knowledge”. What we know today will be transformed  by what we know tomorrow. All the speculation concerning black holes and parallel universes is to me just so much incomprehensible “stuff” because, whilst its intellectual implications are evident, it provides nothing for me in the way of answers to my questions. I have managed to get deeper into my own mind with what little I now know about relaxation and meditation, and what I found there is honestly just as baffling… 
Now I want to explore this still further, find a meditation group locally, try to learn reiki - in every way attempt to dig into what I have for so long taken for granted - my own mind! This probably sounds trite and naïve, but as a 63-year-old who has always relied on creative thinking in his career, always been able to scrape the consciousness for ideas that have seemed to come so easily, this is a real breakthrough for me. It’s as if I have discovered a new invention and I’m really hacked off that it’s taken so long to make this encounter.
What’s the big deal here? Well, I thought I knew myself. I have fairly long-standing, if pragmatic, ideas about who I am and how I use my brain. The vast plethora of cultural and religious thought across the globe has been somewhat sidelined, largely because I have not taken the time to explore, and yet all it took was a 5-day break at Penny Brohn Cancer Care in Bristol to swivel my head in the right direction so that I experienced first hand many of the extraordinary and defining ways by which one’s appreciation of self can be so transformed. 
How, for instance, can relaxation and healing create a brilliant palette of shape, form and colour within the mind’s eye? Why is it so different depending on the healer working with you?
How can a brief spot of visualization induce visions of places and objects so clear that you could reach out and touch them, even things you have never seen before? How does the “still place” you discover in meditation peel off layer after layer of self so that the person you find at the end is someone you know intimately yet hardly scratch the surface of - yourself(!) ?
I have all my working life been a “visualizer”. My job is to see images in my mind and then translate them into, maybe, corporate branding, so my skills in this direction are normally quite well developed. But this is different. My recent forays into my own consciousness have surprised and interested me and I realise I have really been missing something.
All this connects with the concept of infinity insofar as the tiny aperture now open to me is letting in more light, more vision. I can no more understand or conceive of infinity than before, but it’s profoundly easier to see myself related to the universe. This sounds daffy, but picture this: I am confronted by an equilateral triangle, horizontal line at the top, point at the base. The triangle represents the entire universe, and the point at the base represents myself as the tiniest speck possible. Compared to the universe, I am absolutely nothing, a grain of sand in the desert, a drop of water in the ocean. Then I look again. Suddenly I am represented by the long line at the top, and everything in the universe exists only where it relates to me! Everything outside of my sphere of vision only exists in my memory. I am the most important being in my world.

A bit of a paradox, what! My entire existence, no matter how brief and transient, is all at once totally insignificant and yet utterly all-embracing!  A human being’s perception of self is unique to the individual, wrought in genetics, fashioned by conditioning and experience and honed to a fine degree by the environmental factors we encounter in our lives.

We mostly take it all for granted, this birthright, with an apparent acceptance far, far too ready than perhaps should be demanded. We live (most of us believe) inside our brains, controlling our bodies as best we can, gratifying our various whims at an utterly superficial level. So we want sex, love, power, fame, wealth, acceptance, happiness, health, influence and all those things we have been taught to desire, as well as (in some cases) respect, knowledge, understanding, truth and revelation, as we get to be more developed along the line.

Organised religion teaches us (and it is a matter of chance which hymn book we start to read from) the basic tenets of right and wrong, each version bringing with it the baggage, trappings and often contradictions that enable us to feel a “belonging”, itself giving us a noble comfort factor as well as a stance in life that may create bigotry and even enmity with other groups. Some of us, as we get older, either stray from these folds of conditioning or else seek deliberately to oppose them because we feel entrapped within a stark framework of beliefs and dogma with which we can no longer associate ourselves.

I feel convinced - call it intuition or some deep-rooted instinctive knowledge - that we are all, at some level or other, much more aware of “self” than would at first be indicated by the superficial standards by which we conduct our lives. When we look out at our world from our deepest state of being, we are all aware of our relationships with everything else in that world. We relate to our families and loved ones in a way directly connected to our experience, hopes and expectations. We respond to our friends, workmates and casual acquaintances in a similar fashion, using our understanding of social intercourse as a yardstick, and we react to complete strangers using the same language, tempered by the influences of media, religion and peer groups, limited (if we are law-abiding) by the legal system adopted by our country of residence.

We are not all automatons. We have the amazing gift of free will, which we can exercise for all our actions, and yet, for most of us, we do need a code of behaviour. What I’m searching for is the essential source that determines how and why I choose to follow one particular road and not another; where I draw the line at my preconditioning and decide to branch out into new directions; what makes me want to know the answers, and what will help me to recognise truth when confonted by it. I know I am not equipped to understand the concepts of spacial and temporal infinity. I would, however, like to know where I truly stand in the scheme of things.

( to be continued)

Before and After

Here’s roughly where I thought I would be by now. The shamefaced little sod should be well shrunk and in terror. Perhaps it is a little easier, however, as some thick drinks aren’t giving me quite so much trouble. (Fingers crossed!)

Frankly, nothing much has happened on this particular front during the last 12 days. In other words, perhaps the bleeding has diminished because my haemoglobin is up to 12.0, but my ability to swallow is either unchanged or so marginally improved I can’t tell the difference. Last night I tried 4 asparagus heads and kept them down, but only just, at the expense of soup which wouldn’t follow them down. But I like to think of those as maybe the beginning. What has changed, quite dramatically, is me - from the experience I have just had at the Penny Brohn Cancer Care Centre in Bristol. I’m so glad I went there! Read all about it (when I’ve written it!) under that subject heading. Wow.