It is Easter Monday at 6.37 p.m. However, it will be Tuesday when you are actually reading this blog. I am just back from a very wintry walk through hail and sleet. It is freezing out there and I wouldn’t mind, but we got caught in another hail shower out on Langness earlier today. Most folk would say that it has been an awful day. Yet it is only the weather that has been awful. The rest of the day has been absolutely fine. Every morning I listen to the weather forecast on the radio, but the weather forecast doesn’t really tell me what kind of day I am going to have. If the weather is going to be bad, I simply wear coat. No, the thing that decides in the main, what kind of day I am going to have is the news. It is the type of stories that make it into our news bulletins that determine our quality of life. I heard on Manx Radio’s 7 a.m. main news this morning, that over the Easter weekend someone stole a plant pot which had been placed on the pavement outside a Douglas shop. A full description of the plant pot was read out in the hope that someone would recognize it and maybe return it to the shop. As a blind person, I am glad that there is at least one less plant pot to fall over in Douglas for the time being, however, that is a purely selfish point of view. A couple of months ago, I heard on one of Manx Radio’s news bulletins that a man had been deported for 5 years for stealing a sandwich from a Douglas retailer. My immediate thoughts then were, what would have happened to him had he been a local! But then locals would know better than to steal our sandwiches! We must be incredibly lucky to live in a place where folks who steal sandwiches get five years deportation slapped on them and folks who steel plant pots from pavements have their crime reported on the main news bulletins. So just exactly how safe is it living here in Castletown? I don’t have any Government figures or statistics to go on. All I have is what life is like on a daily basis. I don’t have chains on my doors or, high tech burglar alarms installed in my house. I don’t remain indoors after 7 or 8 at night for fear of going out and being mugged or harassed by drunks who are swigging from cheap bottles of cider and vomiting in the street. My wife can go to the cash machine in the middle of the town at any time of the day or night without needing an escort. Every day I walk through Poulson Park and meet children playing happily alone. From my office window I hear kids playing every day and as far as I am aware, no child has ever been kidnapped or harmed in anyway through abduction. Of course it is not perfect. My bike might get nicked and if I am really unlucky my car might even get stolen. However, I would have to be unlucky or even careless. Yes people still fight, just as they always have done and, of course just like everyone else, we have a drugs problem.

As I sit here this morning though, I am 5 weeks in to chemotherapy for lung cancer and I am feeling good. I am being treated and looked after by a wonderful team of nurses and I am responding to the treatment. I have to say I cant imagine where in this world I might have been looked after better. I am being nursed through my illness and living out each day in a safe and secure environment. Even in the midst of lung cancer, I still wake up most mornings and, just like Louis Armstrong. “I Think to myself, what a wonderful world.”

Tom Glassey, well and on the banks of the Silverburn at 7.25 a.m. It really is a wonderful world.