Just to recap where we got to last time.:

I had just arrived back chez-moi after my trip to the Lakes for some walking. After all the bad news that I had recently I was very depressed and it was getting worse.

Just to recap on the bad news:

It was all about my transition to being a female. My doctor had referred me to one of the national Gender Identity clinic which happened to be very close to me. I had not heard from them and tried to find out how long I would have to wait before my first appointment. It was thirty-three months. That is nearly three years! That is, basically, the week after I died as far as I was concerned. I also found out that I could not have anything else done, even privately, until the second assessment from the NHS. I will have to weight for thirty-three months for the first assessment, who knows how long for the second one.

My plan was to live as a woman from the beginning of next year (2019) and to help with my confidence in walking around dressed in a frock I was going to have some cosmetic surgery done on my face to make it look more feminine. The NHS will not fund cosmetic work, which I understand, but the bastard will not even let me do anything privately!

No wonder I was depressed! By the way, this is the first time in my life that I can ever remember getting depressed and knowing the reason behind it. Normally it just comes on for no apparent reason.

The depression came on in the normal way that is does with me, that is a lack of desire to do any thing or to want to speak to anyone. When I get bad I can not even answer the 'phone. I just want to hide away from everyone and everything.

I think that the only thing that I did do was walking. I can do that with my head down and ignore everyone. When I am in this sort of mood I can walk for miles because I am in my own world of pain and things like sore legs and blisters can not enter it. I managed to get up to about twenty-four kilometres in the week following getting back from The Lake District which is not too bad. I know that the "Hundred" is one hundred and sixty kilometres but Rome was not built in a day.

                                                      My boat at its mooring                                                                       A view up the Grand Union Canal

I live, as I may have said, on a boat on the Grand Union Canal. As a consequence I tend to walk up and down the canals which is great because they are very, very pretty, generally quite and you can not get lost. Just follow the water back home. There is one problem with this however, they are very flat, water is like that. The almost total lack of hills means that I can go well on the level but on the up and down bits I get remarkably slow. I do find that there is a limit to the amount of power that my body can produce and that this limit is too low for hill walking. I will have to do something about this but probably not now.

I simply have to keep pushing up the distances and keep walking as often as I can. I will get there in the end.

I was going to go to a friend's fiftieth birthday party which was to be over a week-end. The location of this very near the Monsal Trail and I have wanted to walk this for a long time. However at present going to a celebrational week-end like this one was completely beyond me. This was going to be an excellent trip where I would meet up with shed loads of friends from University but I had to cancel the trip.

You know I really thought that I was getting my life sorted out and that I was going to get rid of the depression and all that and live happy ever after, but it seems that it is not to be. I absolutely hate our political parties and all the shit so called leaders that we have, they are totally under-funding our health services and ruining a lot of people's lives. Politicians really are the scum of the earth, bullets are too good for them!