9.25 a.m. I have completed the morning walk. I waved to all 33 passengers onboard the steam train as it pulled out of Castletown station at 8.05 a.m. Skipper was extremely well behaved this morning and returned to me every time I called him.

It is a beautiful sunny day and I have had my bacon and egg butty sitting out on the deck in my back garden. Tomorrow I will be away fishing early and probably won't get back until late. On Monday I am off to Clatterbridge on the first flight out to Liverpool at 7 a.m. This is only for a day in order to have my mask made, and hopefully they will tell me when my three weeks of radiotherapy will commence. I am told I have to have a mask made so that the treatment can be directed accurately to the brain. I am also having radiotherapy to chest. The radiotherapy to my brain is in order to prevent the cancer from spreading there in the future. I expect that I will be off to Clatterbridge very soon after my return on Monday. There will probably be no blogs while I am away at Clatterbridge as so far we have not found a method of blogging. However, there is still time yet and Barbara is looking at hotspots for the laptop. Once we know when we are going, we can decide where we are staying and we will then be wiser concerning WiFi hotspots available to us.

Monday is also going to be a big day for Barbara. Barbara is terrified of flying. She wants to come with me on Monday, so she has no choice but to try and put that fear to one side for this event. Fortunately we very seldom leave the Island, and when we have, we have always been able to sail up until now. Indeed owning to Barbara's fear of flying, we are probably the holders of the longest day trip on record when we went to Norway. We took the Seacat to Liverpool, then the train to Newcastle, and finally the boat which took 24 hours from Newcastle to Norway. We spent 6 hours ashore and returned home. The time to get there took 30+ hours and of course 30 hours to return. Time spent ashore 6 hours.

Well right now for me it's a case of here we go again. There have been so many occasions in my life when I have had to begin a journey where I did not know the route and was unsure of the outcome. As a child most of them began with tears and ended with joy. I hated having to go away to School in Liverpool; I was the most home sick kid in history. Of course I wept tears of joy when I left school; however, I have much to thank the nuns of St. Vincent's for today. I did not want to go on to college in Birmingham. However, this is what I had to do and we got on with it.

I remember my first day at work which was at Davis Charlton in Hills Meadow Douglas. I remember thinking to myself on the bus on the way to work "Would I be able to do the job!" Also other little silly things like "Would I be able to find the toilets and so on!" Of course you do manage all these things. However, many years later I found myself sitting on a bus, making my way in from Ramsey to Douglas. It was my first day at the Royal Bank of Scotland, and there I was thinking to myself. "How will I find my way round this place? I wonder where or how easy it will be to locate the toilets!". Then I thought to myself, 'Don't be so bloody stupid glassey. You have found so many toilets now, and so often in places you didn't know, and been amongst people you didn't know. You came to no harm then so why should you now'. Today it feels a bit like that once again. Here I am going on another journey I did not plan for or decide to go on! Indirectly it was cancer that forced me off the island back in 1958 when I was 5 years old to attend the blind school in Liverpool. It was through cancer that I had lost my sight. Today it is cancer once again that is sending me over the water, only this time it's a head on fight.

Well people, all I can say right now is, in the past I always managed to locate those toilets and I always managed to find my way around. Just about every stranger I have ever met has become a friend. I hope to return from Clatterbridge in a few weeks time with the cancer sorted once again. However, in order to do that, once again I must head off to a strange place and learn where the flaming toilets are!!!

Well, I will blog a couple of times next week, and then we may have this enforced break.

Until Tuesday then people, this is Tom Glassey with News at 10, on the banks of the Silverburn River.