The forecast says it should be just 2° C, but all my thermometers say it is 4° C. As I write this I am enjoying nice warm sunshine coming through my windows. The northern sky looks to be almost all blue, but to the south there are some clouds, but I think it possible that the forecast full sunshine may start earlier than the 2pm of the forecast. Whether that will warm the afternoon up to more than 4° C is unknown, but seeing it is already 4° C, it does seem likely. Tonight will be another cold night. Tomorrow it is back to being very grey, and with a very small chance of some rain. Sadly it may be no warmer than 5° C.

  Yesterday was not a good day. It started off basically OK, but just got more and more bad as the day progressed. The only thing that was a temporary patch was some strong beer in the afternoon. I'm not sure when it started, and it may have been before I had finished writing, but I suffered from chest pains yesterday.

  Those chest pains were more similar to acid indigestion than any heart trouble. They seemed to actually be more like an old trouble I had not experienced for quite some time - what I would call my twisted rib. It wasn't a rib in this case, but it was still a legacy of my quad heart bypass operation back in 2013. From time to time my sternum, the bone down the front of my chest, and which was sawn in two to get to my heart, would sort of click, and fortunately usually painlessly.

  Sometimes it was not painless, and assuming it was the sternum yesterday, it was most definitely painful, and once again it was making clicking noises when moving my arms (for example). It didn't do this every time, and there were times when the pain would ebb to almost nothing. Sometimes it would be a very sharp pain, but the worst pain was when I went to bed. It was not a stronger pain, and possibly a slightly lesser pain, but at night with no distractions, pains can feel far more annoying.

  Back to about 11am, and I had an early lunch of two rolls. One had ham and mustard in it, and the other had cheese and sweet pickle (Aldi's version of Branston pickle). Both had the last of my bag of aromatic baby leaf salad leaves in it, and both were very delicious. I am not sure how, but eating those made my chest pain a bit worse. After lunch I mostly just rested, and did very little.

  Laying on my back reading did provide some distraction from the pain. There was very little I had to do to prepare everything for a Thursday afternoon beer tasting session with Jodie. Mostly everything was still clear after having cleared and cleaned everything for Patricia's visit, and so I did a lot of resting and reading. I feel sure that before 3pm, the earliest that Jodie might arrive, I had a lunch part 2, but I may be imagining that because I can't remember what it may have been.

  Jodie arrived a bit later because after arriving at Catford Bridge station she walked all the way down to Lidl where she bought a selection of stuff. She then walked towards Aldi because she was going to go in there too, but decided she was already carrying too much. I think it was probably almost 3.45 when she arrived. By then I was drinking a strong barley wine to try and ease my chest pain - and it was working.

  Once Jodie was here I sent a text message to Michael to remind him we were drinking. He couldn't make it in the end because he had to stay with his wife while possibly as many as 4 people tried to fix a non working light in his wife's room. Apparently it was not the bulb. I am not sure what Michael hoped to achieve by getting in the way of presumably more than one electrician who was trying to fix whatever the fault was. I can imagine his wife getting angry with him for getting in the way too.

  Jodie and I had some good beers, and some of them quite strong beers, although I had more than Jodie. The strange thing is that I didn't seem to feel drunk, but I must have been. The beer did work as a good analgesic, but sadly also an appetite promoter. I came very close to ordering a takeaway, but I was not drunk enough to do that. What I ended up eating was probably more unhealthy than some takeaways.

  I started off with a very quick to prepare instant noodles. I had bought them from Poundstretcher, and came in a plastic takeaway food type container. Inside was a sealed bag of noodles that just needed microwaving for 2 minutes, and and three sachets of seasonings. It was sort of nice, and I may but more of them sometime. I prepared and ate it while two big burgers were grilling in the mini oven/grill.

  I had two (not very) crusty rolls left and the idea was to make hamburgers with them. I even had some pickled gherkin slices to go in them for that authentic touch (I like gherkin in them even if many hate it). The two of them added up to quite a big meal, but I wasn't finished yet. I had a dessert of the last half of a tub of peanut ice cream. That ice cream is one of those ideas that I stall can't decided is good or bad. I don't have to worry now because it is all gone.

  After dinner I watched a bit of TV, and at 8pm I recorded two episodes of The Simpsons that looked unfamiliar. I recorded them on my mini (10 inch screen) TV. The TV has a very similar interface to my big Panasonic TV, and seems like it should be possible to schedule recording, but it seems not. While it was recording I laid on my bed reading. At 9pm I stopped the recording and turned the TV off. I then tried for sleep.

  I laid in bed, and as I mentioned further up the page, with no distractions my chest pans came to the fore. Eventually I had to get up, and take painkillers, and also antacid tablets to see if they helped in any way.  I wondered if going for a poo might help, and for a moment I thought it did, but it was freezing cold in the bathroom, and that cold just made the chest pain worse - another probable indicator that it was a muscular and/or skeletal pain.

  Nothing really helped that pain. I don't really know what time it was, and so I'll say midnight for convenience, but there came a time when I felt so tired that I was able to lie down and have a sleep. I was getting up for a pee every two hours, and the first few times I got chilled enough to make the pain worse. At some unknown time that stopped happening, and after quite an extended sleep, I got up and found the pain had almost vanished.

  I did seem to pee a lot in the night, but it seemed to be less than expected considering all the beer I had drunk in the late afternoon. They almost certainly started much earlier, but it was not until the morning when I had one dream that left a small memory of it. It is only one bit of what seemed like it must have been a longer dream, than I remember. The bit I remember was finding I had a talent for getting the local parakeet population to come and sit on my hand.

  I almost got up around 7am, but I decided I deserved more sleep than that. I was probably still considering the idea when I fell asleep, and it seems it was a rather good sleep. I was awakened by a phone call from my once friend Lee. His news was that his father, who had been in hospital for the last week or two, had snuffed in last night. What he actually wanted was another small loan. I was not happy about it, but realising he was going through a bad time, and needing to feed himself and his mum, I transferred £30 to his account - £10 more than he was going to ask for. I can't imagine his mum is going to last much longer now his dad is dead (I think she is in her nineties).  The poor sod is going to have a heel of a time when she is gone, and finds himself totally alone in the house.

  This morning my weight was back up to what it was the day before yesterday (which had a useful drop). That sort of surprised me because I knew I had eaten a lot more than was good for me yesterday, plus there was all the beers. The sort of good thing is that now I have been up for a couple of hours, I do seem to feel almost good, but only almost !

 It is true that diabetes can be a silent killer, because this morning my blood glucose readings are horrendous. Two meters, The Contour and the GlucoRX gave readings well into the danger zone, 10.4 mmol/l and 10.1mmol/l respectively. The Sinocare meter, once thought to always over read has continued with it's often good readings, and read a safer, but still very undesirable 9.4mmol/l this morning. I have suspicions that different cartons of test strips give different results, and the latest lot maybe slightly under read.

  One of the re-assuring things yesterday was that all the time I had the chest pains my blood pressure was never bad - at least not while I was looking. I did get a couple of readings with a Systolic pressure of 125mmHg. That is higher than my usual, but consistent with some obvious stress. My "official" or recorded reading taken early last night was a very typical 115/46, and I believed, rightly or wrongly, that the chest pain was nothing to do with heart problems. This morning my blood pressure is 113/48. That is slightly higher than usual, but still well inside the "Optimum" zone on my blood pressure meter. The 125 I got yesterday is still considered to be "normal" by the meters inbuilt diagnostics.

  It is difficult to known what I am doing today. One thing I obviously have to do is to try and fast until a light dinner tonight. It would help if I was out of the house for a lot of today. It is still going to be very cold, but maybe the sunshine might lure me out. One possible thing is to go out riding on trains, and doing some train photography. Maybe a slighly more likely possibility is a walk in the park, but that would not use up may hours, and I do not feel confident I could walk for a long time. The lack of walking of going everywhere by train, and not leave any station until I am home again, would be more attractive. The most likely thing is that I will spent a lot of the day laying in the sunshine, as it falls on my bed, and just reading and snoozing.

   I'll have a quick wash, but I can't be bothered with a full shower today, and see how I feel. Another thing that may be likely is to do a bit of laundry. I haven't done any for some time now, and I only have enough clean underwear for about a week and a half now. I guess that should take priority. I have enough t-shirts for nearly a month, and so I can just do underwear - which is a bit easier to do. I'll tell all tomorrow and reveal what I did achieve today.