Nicholas Quirke was forced to look inwards on September the 6th, when the meetings of the Mens Therapy Group he was a member of reconvened after summer recess. After a full day of work, he was looking forward to his meeting despite having started work at 7am for his first client. It was a 5 hour shift but as part of that work included a walk round Bramber Castle and then a few games of Casino in the Castle Inn it wasn’t too strenuous and the fact that he had missed breakfast didn’t seem to affect him at all. It did mean however that he didn’t have time for lunch as he had to get to his next clients to prepare her lunch and do some cleaning. He did manage to find the time to post his latest update on his ‘Shelf of Shame’ Instagram page in between his next client in Whitehawk and more cleaning for her and her lovely Stafordshire bull terrier. Nicholas now had 4 clients and he really was astounded by the world he was discovering of aging, incapacitated women, cut off from society by their chronic illness and was pleased that he could bring some relief to their lives. He called in to see his Mother and was pleased to see Eileen was there visiting too. They had a nice time though they became aware that they had no idea where either of their offspring were, but Nicholas concluded that this was not a bad thing for him, though not so good for Rocco who was looking more likely to spend yet another day with Eileen and Richard. He received a call from an agency with more potential clients to look after, he seemed to be in demand in this new carer role. He got home and realised that he had less than an hour before he needed to set off to his meeting which meant he could finally feed himself and he also took the time to message his friend Terry in Denver, after noting that it was exactly 6 months since they had met when he was in Kunming in China.  It was good to see his friends from the therapy group again and he felt challenged by some of the questions that were raised. It felt indulgent to be so focused on oneself, but the benefit was that he began to have an inkling of what he would probably need to do and to lose to achieve his goals, which meant that the only thing stopping him was actually himself. It felt like a good discovery but also a scary one and he was not sure if  he had the courage to do something really radical right now. It was home and to bed to contemplate the future.