08:01 GMT

  Today has started with a frost ! It is dull now, and the forecast for sunny spells later this morning seems to be a bit dubious. Once again it should be a dry day, but it is going to be even colder than yesterday. The afternoon high may only be 7° C, and it is going to be dull and miserable. Tomorrow is going to be very cloudy, and that will make for a slightly less cold morning. It should start at 5° C, and then drop to 4° C. There may be two more brief peaks at 5° C, but that is the best tomorrow can offer. There could be a lot of light rain tomorrow, and originally it was shown as falling as sleet, but now it just shows rain. The temperature could be down to 1° C by midnight tomorrow. It is only mid November, but it is looking like mid winter !

  Yesterday was quite a good day overall, albeit with the slight problem that I did not have enough time to write a full account of everything. I expect what I didn't write about was probably not worth writing about.  This morning I will pick up the thread from after seeing the nurse.

  My appointment with the nurse at 10am yesterday, was quite good. I don't know if it was that she was just in a very bad mood the first time I saw her, but she seemed all stick and no carrot. She seems to have mellowed out a lot since then, and I guess I quite like her now. She was pleased with my blood pressure (based on my home readings), and very pleased with my blood glucose readings since I started on Mounjaro.

  I expected her to say that my weight loss was not good enough. In fact Mounjaro is not the wonder drug for that as many say it is for them. The nurse says that in her experience, it works really well for some patients, and not others. She does acknowledge that it is a miserable time of year to diet, and also that my faulty heart valve means exercise is difficult.  She asked if I was OK to go on to the next strength Mounjaro. It is standard procedure to start at the lowest dose, and then go up in strength every month.

   I said yes, and I can only hope that stronger doses will start to have a positive effect on my weight. The problem there is that it is supposed to work by reducing the desire to eat, and mostly does that by making you feel fuller, or like you have only recently eaten. It seems my eating is ruled by my head and not by how my stomach feels, and that is the root cause of my excess weight, but fingers crossed.....

  After finishing with the nurse I popped next door to the pharmacy to warn them that the nurse had sent through a prescription for my next strength Mounjaro, and that they would probably need to order it so I can collect it later today. Then I rushed home to prepare for Patricia's arrival. I was not sure when it would be, but I had warmed her not to make it before 11am.

  As I wrote yesterday, Patricia sent me a message to say she was in Lewisham, and would be here soon. At that time I didn't realise she had somehow travelled via Greenwich, and that is where she bought the empanadas that I had correctly guessed were the lunch she was bringing me. I think it was around midday when she arrived. It was so nice to see her, and she was very glad to see me. These treats are rare when she is often living on a different continent.

  Patricia was mainly here to help he sister through a very tricky divorce and child custody hearing.It seems her sister was unlucky enough to meet one of those men who wants to own a woman like a slave, and love has nothing to do with it. It is the custody of the child that is the major difficulty. It must be hell for her sister, but even Patricia was frazzled by the ongoing court cases and legal battlings.

  I had assumed that she had come to London on her way to take a flight back to Argentina, but that was not the case. She came to London, from down on the south coast, as a sort of holiday. She had spent one night with her Argentinian friend "Nati" (presumably a contraction of Natalia, or the nearest Argentinian equivalent), and then came to me to spend last night here.

  On top of everything else, Patricia is recovering from treatment for breast cancer. There were several times when she seemed so down that I did something I very rarely do except for a quick hello and good bye, I gave her a hug twice (and possibly 3 times). I think it helped. It helped me too - I rarely seem to have a chance to hug anyone these days.

  Patricia's presence helped me in another way that I think I only realised later. I was distracted from food, and even dinner was a fairly light affair. I had remembered to get a few things in like fresh coffee and jaffa cakes, plus fresh milk - that I didn't think had been in the fridge that long, but was a fortnight after it's use by date, and was rapidly fermenting in the bottles. One was getting perilously over pressurised.

  That milk reminded me of a sci-fi story set in the past where the hero was living among a nomadic tribe who had never learned to brew beer, but would drink fermented Yak's milk. In the story it was described as something you had to get used to. My bottles of milk seemed pretty stinky to me, but some brave souls in the past decided that yoghurt and fermented milk was both edible, and possibly enjoyable. In the meantime, Patricia had to drink her coffee black.

  After we had had lunch, Patricia said she fancied a lie down and a snooze - which after all the travelling she had done was not surprising. I too was looking forward to my usual afternoon snooze. Patricia seemed to have a long snooze, and I don't think I snoozed at all. After a while I tried to get back to writing yesterday's piece. I may have only managed a couple of paragraphs, and went back to relaxing a bit.

  It was probably gone 5pm when we reconvened in the dining room, and I got to thinking about dinner. I hoped I had something in the freezer, and fortunately I did. I had a pair of little pots of essentially noodles but with chicken and other stuff with them. One was chicken and chilli in ramen, and the other was ginger and coconut in ramen. It was the one that said chilli on it that was shown as just one chilli hot, and the other was three chilli hot. That was the one Patricia selected. After the noodles we had a big slice of walnut cake.

  We watched the BBC 6 O'clock news while we ate. Unfortunately the signal is not good in the dining room, and using the old iMac computer with a USB DVB-T TV dongle plugged in can give patchy reception on many channels - including BBC1, but it was good enough to follow the mostly depressing news. After that we chatted until about 8pm when we started yawning. Patricia went to bed (although I think she spent some time answering emails and stuff), and I got to finally writing the last of yesterday's rather thin piece of writing.

  I did end up watching some TV after I had finished writing. It was the usual stuff, and I think it ended with Have I Got News For You. That finished at 11pm and I went straight to bed. I think I fell asleep fairly quickly, but I got up at least 3 times in the night to pee. It was getting really cold in the night, and even though I had closed the bathroom window earlier, it was very chilly in the bathroom.

  The cold left me aching, and with pains like angina when I went back to bed. It was not a new phenomenon. Even my postman said he was getting bad angina pains when out on his rounds in cold weather. His got a lot worse, just like mine did in 2013, and he joined the heart bypass club ! In my case the trouble is something to do with my faulty heart valve, and I look forward to getting that fixed in the new year. In the meantime, I made sure I was tucked in well so I could get warm after coming back from the toilet.

  The only trouble with that was I ended up overheating - at least enough to start getting a bit damp and sticky with sweat until I started sleeping with an arm and/or a leg left uncovered. I think I did not get a very good sleep. I even remember a dream that was not exactly a nightmare, but was not nice.In the dream I seemed to be in an orchard of apple and pear trees. Most of the fruit was unripe, but a few seemed edible - and maybe not just for me.

  I heard movement around the roots of a tree. There was a lot of leaf litter down there (but not of apple tree leaves). I thought it was squirrel, but what emerged was a rat. I shooed it away, and to help it on it's way I tried to throw an apple at it. I could not seem to be able to throw it over arm, and and underarm throw went almost in the wrong direction. If a rat could have laughed, it would have done so at my completely failed attempts to throw the apple(s).

  I think I woke at about 4.30am to go for a pee, and this time I turned on a fan heater, on an extension lead, and aimed the hot air into the bathroom to take the chill off later visits. I though Patricia would appreciate as much as In would later. With the fan heater just on low it only took the chill off the air. Later on the toilet seat still felt rather cold. I got another hour or two of sleep before I got up a bit earlier than I might have done.

  I remembered Patricia saying she would probably get up at around 7am, and at 7am I took her up black coffee and Jaffa Cakes - her standard breakfast when here, and probably other places where she can buy Jaffa Cakes (except that normally it would be coffee with milk). I found her already awake and watching the news on her phone. She seemed to have a lot more to say, and it was a bit of a time before I got to my breakfast of instant noodles.

  Patricia announced she didn't feel she needed a full shower, and by the time she might have had one she was running out of time. She left at about 9am to get a 185 bus to Victoria coach station to get a coach back to the south coast. She tells me the coach does not take much longer than the train, and is something like half the price. If she knew her exact times and dates of travel she could probably by advance tickets for the train at a greatly reduced price.

  As I get to the end of today's piece I am looking forward to a lie down, and maybe a snooze. Then I think I will have a shower. Once clean and dried and dressed I can go to the pharmacy where I hope they will have my next Mounjaro waiting for me. I must remember that before that I need to have my next injection of the last of the lower dose Mounjaro - although it looks like there could be two doses left in the pen. After I have been to the pharmacy I may go to Aldi, or I may just go home and practice for the lazy Olympics.
  Another picture I took a few days ago, and forgot to show it until now. I took this picture at 11pm, many hours after sunset, but the lights of London were lighting up the underside of the clouds, and it looked sort of weird, and also sort of good. To the naked eye they seemed not exactly bright, but quite clear. To take the picture I used the night shot option on my Huawei P30 Pro mobile phone. It is a shame that I had to tilt the phone while holding it to the window - and not very clean window. The top was furthest away from the dirty glass and it has softened the top of the picture, but the rest is sharp, and shows how well that camera works in very low light conditions. I had to hold the phone against the glass to keep it still because it was quite a long exposure.









   2,251 words today.