The headline for today's forecast says drizzle, but at no time does it say when, and the highest probability shown for any precipitation is just 4%. The road seems dry at the moment, and so it seems unlikely there was any drizzle earlier this morning. My guess is that the forecasters are trying to jazz up what otherwise seems to be a very dull, very boring day. It's hard to say that 9° C is anything to get excited about under a grey sky. Since taking the screenshot above, nothing has changed. Tomorrow's headline feature is light rain, but it seems we will have to wait until almost sunset before seeing it, and then it might only last a few hours. Much of tomorrow is going to be as dull as ditchwater - exactly the same as today plus that sprinkling of light rain.

  Yesterday could have been dominated by my ongoing cold. In absolute values it quite a mild cold compared to some I have known, but that still doesn't stop it being an awful nuisance. Perhaps the biggest nuisance value is it's variability. Sometimes it is bad, and sometimes it can be almost ignorable, but always it has to be treated with some sort of respect. (No, I don't know what that means either !). Yesterday I definitely felt OK to go shopping.

  I must admit I didn't think I could possibly have coughed so little when out shopping in Tesco. Probably the very worst bit was when I arrived home. My nose had slowly filled with mucus, and was just about to drip out onto my shirt before I could get a hand free to give it a blow. I thought that in terms of any cold symptoms, I had had a generally comfortable shopping trip. The best thing was that I didn't suffer an outburst of coughing when I got to the checkout. I can remember one highly embarrassing time, many years ago, when after going round the store with hardly a single little cough, I suddenly started coughing at the checkout, just as the assistant was putting my stuff through the scanners, and I just could not stop coughing until I was almost half way home.

  I guess it is almost a paradox that while I felt generally physically comfortable while out shopping, my mind was probably not working on the best level. This was evidenced by some of my choices of stuff to buy. I was aware that I should be selecting stuff carefully, but I still went and bought some reduced price (almost half price - feels like a first for Catford Tesco) sandwiches (actually they were wraps). I think they were almost the only actually naughty things I bought.
  Two purchases just had to be bought ! The jar of Marmite on the right has a new label that I wanted to add to my collection. Peanut butter and Marmite has always been a great sandwich filler, and now it seems you can get it ready mixed. The current difficulty with these two purchases is that I am avoiding bread, or other stuff you could put these on. The Marmite with the new label is no problem - it is just the label that has changed, and contents should last for ages - well beyond the "Best Before" date - maybe by a factor of 10 !  The current jar I am consuming is a couple of years beyond it's BBE date, and still tastes perfect.

  Of course the Marmite Peanut Butter is a new product (to me), and so had to be tested. The only way was to taste it in raw form - licked off a knife (not one with a sharp blade !!). I can say it is definitely nice, but when making a sandwich using the two ingredients from their own jars, I would use much more Marmite. I guess this (presumed) new product is good for amateurs, but the cognoscenti would prefer more Marmite in the mix.

  I hadn't got off to an early start yesterday, and so it was at least 1pm when I returned from Tesco. After having tested a quick lick of the Marmite Peanut Butter, I started on the reduced wraps I had bought. I am not sure if I really intended to eat all three, but that is what I did. I feel sure that it was those that made a major contribution to my high blood glucose level a few hours later.

  I am not so sure I didn't make it a lot worse when I had a whole pack of faggots for dinner. I don't think I dared to check the nutritional information on the packet for fear of scaring myself. At least I didn't accompany them by something like mashed potato. With nothing to accompany them, apart from a bit of hot chilli sauce, they did not seem like a particularly big meal. Even so, I haven't dared try to weigh myself this morning.

  Yesterday evening was, on the whole, a little boring, but later in the evening there were a few distractions on TV. BBC2 was showing some old Clive James documentaries. I always thought that Clive James should be a boring old Australian, but most of his TV output was actually quite compelling. I guess he had the sort of dry wit I like. He may have even seeded some of my own personality traits - or at least what I believe my personality traits are, but I could be very wrong. It is really for others to decide.

  I guess there was an element of putting off going to bed because I thought I wouldn't be able to sleep from coughing. That was an incorrect assumption. I had been coughing during the evening, but it was very random, and there could be long periods without any desire to cough. In fact I had very little trouble with coughing during the night. That is not to say I didn't cough at all - I most certainly did - but on the whole it was quite restrained - very much so compared to the previous night.

  The thing that did disturb my sleep, and disturb it badly in the middle of the night, was my nose. After almost three hours of good sleep I woke up needing a pee. I think it was while I was actually peeing that I noticed my nose was filling with mucus. By the time I was back in bed my eyes and inside my nose seemed itchy as if I had been exposed to an allegen. Maybe I had, but I can't imagine the air in my bathroom was any different to the air in my bedroom just 20ft away (unless I am allergic to my own farts - some were quite vile !).

  Even back in bed my eyes seemed itchy and watery, and I kept having to grab tissues to blow my nose. For a while I got up because it was more comfortable to blow my nose while sitting up or standing. It might have been 90 minutes or more before I managed to get back to sleep again. The next time I woke up my nose blowing had subsided, but I may have been coughing a bit more mucus up. I still managed to get back to sleep ago.

  I was quite surprised to see it was gone 9am when I next woke up. Since then I think I have convinced myself that I feel like I am on the tail end of a cold. Whether this turns out to be right will be revealed in the future. At the moment my nose is a bit stuffy, maybe even occasionally a bit itchy feeling, but it is not running. I am back to just occasionally clearing my throat rather than anything remotely near a hacking cough. (Actually I don't think I have had anything quite as bad as a "hacking cough" throughout this whole episode).

  I don't think I have any plans for today, but I do have two aspirations. The first is to try and get my blood glucose back down to where it should be by eating more carefully. The second is to try and get a bit of light exercise in by going for a gentle walk of some length. I think today might be a fair, but not good, day to take my new bad weather coat for a walk. I fear that if I walk too far, or two fast in it, I will melt. One point of the walk is that it doesn't have to be, and isn't really intended to be a long walk, and so it is probably a good time to test that new coat without waiting for it to snow - which is probably the sort of weather I bought it for.

  There is one other thing I may do today. One thing I forgot to mention is that I washed a pair of jeans yesterday. for most of my life I have been scared to wash jeans in case they shrink. It has happened in the past, and those jeans have had to be consigned to the back of the cupboard in the hope I might be slimmer one day. At the moment I am in the position where old jeans are becoming wearable again, and current jeans have some slack. The jeans I washed yesterday could shrink by over an inch, and still be wearable. In fact they might even become a better fit. I have one other pair of jeans that are a bit muddy, and could benefit from a wash. I expect I'll be washing them today. It could even set a trend for fresher jeans - which would be a good thing !