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What do you do when you have seven blogs to produce for next week and you’re tired and you have nothing to say, but you’re committed to publishing every day because you made a promise to yourself that you would, because?..... because you can’t remember why.

I turned around and looked at the wall behind me. There are my medals there that I have collected from triathlons and bike races for the past 10 or 12 years and I remembered that I never put them there.

I remembered that I took them and put them away in a box after I found out I couldn’t run anymore. And then Tim died. I took them out and put them on the windowsill in my office and then I went off work for a month. When I came back, my guys at work, members of my team had bought a bracket, screwed it to the wall and hung my medals up. There’s a picture of Tim next to them, crossing the finish line two months before he died and a poster from a play about cycling that Tim, Louis and I went to.

There’s a distorted picture of me telling me that we need to move the practice printed by one of the team alongside a picture of Russ Abbot (that’s how they see me I think)

There is a can of tomato soup, Andy Warhol style, that Ruby Dunne gave me and a photograph of David Nelson and I at the bottom of the Alpe, sh*****g myself before that bike ride, where I won the gold medal – the certificate for which is above the photo.

There’s other stuff too - a number from a bike race, a card from someone and at the top of it the sign that I put up when I took over the practice

‘the buck stops here’

Right behind me, if I cared to notice, when I found I had nothing to say, was all the evidence of a life that’s been lived and a life that’s been loved. I remember why I said I would write, to myself every day.

Every day I turn up, shoulders back, chest out ‘here we go again’ because what else is there to do? What else would you want to do?

Colin and I had a conversation in the car on the way to teach the course about retirement.

He is just at the stage where the people from his year at Dental School are managing to give it up after 30 years of NHS practice.

I never want to stop – working or writing the blog but some days it’s harder than others.

Some days to get out of bed is difficult. Some days the walk to work is harder than others but it doesn’t mean that you stop and it doesn’t mean that you don’t.

Everyone gets writer’s block in one way or another. The best thing you can do when you get writer’s block… is to write.

Blog Post Number: 1844