It is a very chilly start to today, just 7° C, but it is gloriously sunny. If the forecast is correct the non stop sunshine will give way to sunny spells at midday. The afternoon high should be 16° C, and the wind looks like it will be light enough to not make it feel cooler. Tonight may not be as cold as last night, and the day should start with a single hour of sunshine. After that there should be sunny spells for the rest of the day. The temperature may touch 17° C for a single hour, but stronger winds may make it feel cooler.

   Yesterday was a fairly good day, or at least good in parts, and maybe some parts must have been very good. I guess that sounds unusually positive, but I will find some negatives things to say about yesterday as well. The biggest negative was the cold wind.

  I was looking forward to yesterday. I knew I had no deliveries to mess up my day, and I also had some good confidence that my guts were very stable. The bad thing is that my lower back pain was becoming a nuisance. After I had finished writing, and had my usual rest, I wanted to wash my hair and have a shower. I was unsure if I would be able to bend over the bath to wash my hair because of the lower back pain.

  Fortunately it seemed usually comfortable when bending/leaning over the bathtub, but there were a few time that were very painful. I very quickly learned my limits, and avoided positions that caused the worst pain. After I had washed and conditioned my hair I had a shower under quite hot water. That hot water seemed to relax the strained muscles, or whatever the problem with my back was.

  One curious thing is that after coming back from the bathroom I wanted to turn the heater off because I was feeling a bit warm after that hot shower. As I bent down to turn the heater off, my back sort of went pop. For a brief moment it was so painful that I almost saw stars, but after straightening up it seemed fine. In my fantasy world I had popped back whatever had popped out and was causing the pain.

  I still took a couple of both Paracetamol, and Ibuprofen before I walked to the station. Like when I went to Tesco the day before, the walk itself seemed to be a cure for any residual pain. I left in plenty of time to catch my usual train so that I could do a slow walk to the station. I think the change of speed was very small, and I arrived at the station in time to catch the train before the one I wanted, but that would have meant a bit of a rush to get over the footbridge. I think I could have done it, but the trains seemed to be running on time, and I only had less than 15 minutes to wait for the next train.

  That being the original train I was intending to catch. At times it was nice waiting in the sunshine, but those time were only lulls in the wind. I was wearing my sleeveless denim jacket, and had bare arms. I think I would say the wind spoiled the experience, but didn't really make it uncomfortable. After arriving at Ladywell I kept an eye out for anything worth photographing, but could see nothing that might make a good picture...

  ...except for one thing, but trying to take a picture of a black crows splashing about in the shallow river, in the shade of the overhanging trees, would only have produced a picture of a black blob against a very dark background. Now if I had one of my big flash guns, and one of my big DSLR cameras with me..... but I rarely take any more than a pocket camera with me when going to the pub.

  The pub was unusually busy when I got there. That forced me to head for a seat at the back of the bar. As I got to the bench seat I looked down just in time to see a mouse fleeing to somewhere unknown. I mentioned it to Ayse (my favourite barmaid). She said that she thought the mouse problem had been taken care of 5 years ago, but I am sure I remember there being some consternation when one was spotted only about 2 years ago.

  I enjoyed my two pints of Guinness, and did my best to complete at least the quick crossword in The Metro. I thought I was doing OK at first, but I gave up with about 4 clues unsolved. I don't think I solved a single clue in the cryptic crossword. I didn't seem to be in the mood to look further after looking at maybe 10 clues, and just ended up baffled. I fell back on actually reading the news in the paper instead.

  I don't know if it was just the two pints of Guinness I drank, but after I had walked from the pub to 3/4 of the way down the platform at Ladywell station, on my way home, I seemed to feel more knackers than I did after walking the whole way around the South Norwood Country Park last Saturday. I'm glad I had a good reason for getting the train instead of walking home.

  I got the train because I wanted to go shopping in the little supermarket on Catford Bridge - a minute or two walk from the station of he same name. I particularly wanted to buy some fruit from there. I ended up buying three shiny red apples, two large oranges, two big conference pears, and three almost black plums. The plums were very disappointing. I expected them to be very ripe and delicious, but they were very hard, and very tart.

  Other stuff I bought was some more sugar free butter biscuits, and more instant noodles in flavours that Tesco do not stock. One was rather expensive, and it was "quatro cheese" flavour. I had it for breakfast this morning, and it was nice-ish. It was definitely worth paying a lot more than the usual packets to try it, but it was not enjoyable enough to make me want to pay that price again.

  I think it was about 3pm when I arrived home. Like the walk from pub to station, the final walk to home seemed to be hard work. After putting my shopping away I made some lunch, a rather late lunch compared to when I haven't been out. It was two Ciabatta rolls filled with sliced beef, horseradish sauce, and aromatic baby leaf salad leaves. They initially seemed filling, but by 4pm I wanted a snack, and I had a naughty one of ice cream - possibly a bit more than "one scoop".

  When I think about it, I may have had that a bit later than 4pm. Perhaps I had something else around 4pm, and the ice cream was at around 5pm. I can't think what that something else could be unless it was a handful of peanuts. As 6pm approached I cooked (or heated in the microwave) another reduced price ready meal/
  It was this Beef Casserole & Dumplings - reduced from £3.50 to a better values for money £1.92. I made one mistake, and it was to try and eat it while it was too hot. It meant I could not savour the flavours and textures properly. Maybe that was a good thing, or maybe not. The "maybe not" might be correct. In between almost blistering my mouth, it did seem to taste fairly good. Even the so called dumplings didn't seem too bad. I expected them to be just tasteless amorphous blobs, but they weren't that bad.

  The BBC news at 6 O'clock was not terribly exciting, but it took 20 minutes for a really boring thing, something about football possibly, until I could go down to the kitchen to get my dessert of a single apple, pear and plum. The apple, apparently a "Red Delicious" was rather nice. The pear was perfectly ripe - firm but soft and sweet. The plum was not nice at all. As noted further up the page, it was hard and very tart - a long way from being fully ripe.

  After the news I started watching Star Trek: Voyager, but about 5 or 10 minutes in I remembered the episode, and how what started as an interesting story turned into a terrible episode. I turned the TV off, and started to do other stuff - mainly reading stuff on line, but later laying on my bed reading my current book. By 8:30pm, or thereabouts, I was started to feel sleepy. I don't know exact times, but I think I had put the book down, turned out the light, and was asleep a little before 9pm.

  I must have had a good sleep because I was almost ready to get up again soon after 5am, but I resisted that, and although it was very light, and intermittent sleep, I didn't get up until about 6.30am. I still slept in 2 to 3 hour segments, getting up for a pee in between each segment of sleep. One of my dreams also involved peeing, and not in a good way (except it was contained within the dream).

  The dream started off with me dreaming ! In that dream of a dream I realised I was pissing in my bed, and so woke up. It seemed like I had pissed a lot, but I only seemed to have a very small damp patch in my dream bed. Toilets seemed to be the theme of this dream. After getting up the dream moved on to possibly the kitchen, or maybe some sort of common room. I seemed to be living with 5 other people. I had a feeling that the house was mine, and so they must have been guests.

  I also assume that were true guests rather than paying guests because one fact about the house was that there was only one bathroom, although I think there may have been a single toilet downstairs. Being the perfect host (or something) I allowed my guest first use of the bathroom, and presumably the single toilet as well, because all that happened for the rest of the dream (maybe less than a minute in real time) was me thinking that if I didn't get to a toilet soon I would burst.

  When I woke up for real I checked my bed...just in case. Fortunately it was dry ! I did want to go to the toilet, but there was no sense of real desperation about it. I did go for a pee, but went back to bed after. Although I didn't think I had slept all that long, I needed quite a big pee when I got up, but no poo so far this morning. After my usual ritual of assessing my health, and counting out my tablets, I had one more small pee, an then weighed myself. To my surprise I had lost sone measly 100gm - which was better than putting that or more on.

  I felt fairly sure that what I had eaten yesterday could have been reason for some weight gain, but more significantly, higher blood glucose readings. That was the case. The Contour meter read 8.4mmol/l - which is fairly good, but not as good as yesterday. The GlucoRX meter was a bit higher at 8.7mmol/l - OK but not ideal. The Sinocare meter read 8.2mmol/l, and that lower than the others reading was a pleasant surprise.

  Today could wreck all this good/semi good heath stuff. (Even my blood pressure is pretty good at 104/45). Today involves booze ! I am not sure what I will be doing before this afternoon, although a visit to Poundstretcher seems likely. This afternoon, from as early as 3pm if Jodie is early again, we should be having a beer tasting session, and with two boxes of beer delivered this week, we have quite a selection to choose from. I don't know if Michael will join us this week. We still don't know why he couldn't come last week.