Filling your boots

For those not familiar with this British English phrase, it means pretty much the same as 'Go for it' or 'Dive in'. With the added idea of taking advantage of an opportunity.

Is the buffet open now? Yes, go on, fill your boots

Two weeks off and no kids going on holiday with you this time? You lucky sod. Go and fill your boots.

So it is very linked to Carpe Diem, with an implication that now is the time to do things that might not benefit your health or you wealth but will leave a golden glow of having taken the brakes off, and in the great words of Jarlath Regan, gone for a drink when 'you want to do some damage'...

And the principle of 'filling my boots' has obviously been more prominent in my thinking since I got the myeloma diagnosis back in July. But I would assert that it was already pretty present as I had just come back from a two-month solo train trek around North America. But now I am even more inclined to want to do it, only, I suppose I must concede that if you did it all the time you wouldn't fee the benefit. You need some kind of contrast to know that you are filling your boots, so for some of the time your boots have to be relatively empty.

But this weekend I will be filling them with all kinds of things, because next Tuesday they start one of the new high-tariff chemotherapy drugs which may knock me back into a number of angles ranging from slightly bowed to flat on my back. But it will put a brake on boot-filling for about three months. 

So tomorrow I am heading down to London, flute in hand, to catch up with my lovely London sisters, with the session that they often go to and all the people I know there, with an old friend from my dictionary days, possibly with my stepson, and then on Sunday with my son up in Norwich (for a beer or three). Finally, on the day before the new drug, I am having tea and biscuits and catching up with my two lovely and supportive neighbours. All three of us have suffered a loss over the last two years, two to death and one to illness. And through it all we have supported each other and kept that local network going. But last night as I was thinking I hadn't sat down with them for weeks, one of them mailed the other two of us and said 'we haven't sat down together for weeks'. So we will, and will celebrate all the other things than alcohol and music that you can fill your boots with: the company of friends and family, the joys of the natural world, all the pleasures of this mortal life.

And after Tuesday there will still be lots of things that I can do, but I know I may start to lose a bit of my oomph, as well as some of my hair. And as the month progresses I will have more of the stages leading up to the operation in December, which has to be aggressive to work. So just keeping my boots on may well be challenge enough.

But then, as I pass through the Winter Solstice a week after the operation, I will know at my sickest that the world has started its long trip back around the Sun and that imperceptibly each day will be longer than the one before. And I will go out into Addenbrokes gardens to look for snowdrops when they come up. And then crocuses. And, all being well, when I am released back home in mid-January I will feel better each week and start to look forward to when they give me licence to go out and start filling my boots again.