As I have already mentioned above, I tried out my new winter coat. It is thick and padded. It has a hood, and is presumably waterproof. What I do know about it is that it is a very snug fit. It is not uncomfortable as in too tight, but it does restrict airflow. That may be very good when in a sub zero blizzard, but even with the air around 5° C, it just got too hot for me inside it - and I didn't even have the front done up, or the hood up ! It was just one of several discomforts that prompted me to do a much shorter walk than I would have liked to do.
  In theory it was very nice outside. Most of the sky was blue with just a few fluffy clouds floating around. The sun was shining, and most things looked very bright - except to my Casio camera. This was the camera I bought for under £5 from the British Heart Foundation charity shop. I thought I liked it, but I increasingly find I don't. It seems to be a correct feature that every time the battery is changed the internal clock loses it's setting. Curiously enough, it still remembers all the other settings. The controls are too small and fiddly for my fat fingers, but worst of all is that most pictures seem to come out under exposed, and need brightening up. The picture above still seems dim, but to make it brighter would mean losing detail in the clouds.
  I did brighten this picture up a lot, and now it looks slightly odd, but at least it gives the impression of bright sunshine, and also shows evidence that the police horses have passed this way recently !
  A picture that seems to lack detail, or maybe it's because I zoomed in too much to show it in context. This is just before the weir that raises the water level enough for some of it to flow around the man made stream in the playing field. The weir, just by the bridge that connects the park to the hospital, also traps lots of floating debris. After all the rain that caused the river to run very high, and some of the very strong winds recently, the weir has caught a huge pile of mostly wood, but also other stuff.
  The cafe in the park seemed to be closed all through the week, but was open again yesterday. It may not look it at the precise time I took this picture, and from the angle I took it, but the place seemed to be doing a fair business. There were actually some people eating hot food out on the grass behind me. I presume they bought it from the cafe, and the cooking smells from the cafe seemed to confirm it.

  I did not enjoy this short walk for several reasons. I have already moaned about overheating under my winter coat, but there is more. My feet did not feel comfortable. I was testing out another old pair of boots I had cleaned up, and given another spray of water repellent. I had also redone the laces, and I think I did the laces up too tight at the toe end. I have now slackened the laces to give a bit more room. I hope that stops the problem, and gives me another pair of boots that are as comfortable as the ones I revived several months ago.

  For unknown reasons I was getting some pains in random places below the bottom of my rib cage. Sometime they would feel like trapped wind, and at at other times almost anything you could imagine - inflamed kidneys, gangrenous liver, appendicitis, ruptured bowel, exploding prostrate - or even worse. The difficulty in diagnosing them is that they were generably mild, and kept moving around, and seemingly never in the same place for more than a few minutes. Maybe I have picked up a parasitic ferret of something.

  It seems like my costochondritus, to give it a name that I now think is wrong, has returned. It is another flare up of assorted pains around my rib cage. I had hoped I had got over this malady because it seems ages since it last flared up, but it is back now. As I walked it sometimes felt like a stitch in my side, but at other times I was getting the same old pain in the same old places - above the left breast, and just below, and very slightly to the right of the right breast. Sometimes the pain is from the sternum, and that is the one that can feel similar to a heart attack pain, but the sternum never makes cracking, popping and grinding noises (or sensations) when having a heart attack.

  Lastly, and possibly for the same reason that my rib cage has flared up, I am also getting varying amounts of discomfort from my right shoulder, and right elbow. Although it wasn't a problem when walking, I noticed my right knee seemed a bit sore last night.  I think I should rightly blame all these aches and pains on the weather. I can remember dreading this winter after a lot of discomfort last winter. Not having to commute in pain during winter, was one factor when I decided it was time to retire from work.

  Once I got home, and into the warm, most of the discomforts seemed to quickly fade to a much lower level, or even fade away completely, but then I was overcome by something like, but not exactly fatigue. I spent an hour or so getting the pictures I had taken (on two different cameras, and on my phone) together and edited for a photo album. After that I lay on my bed to, initially, quietly read. It wasn't long before I fell asleep, and I think I slept for over an hour.

  My eating was a bit strange yesterday. I had a big, but almost healthy snack sometime after getting home from my walk. It was a Tesco ready made salad with the addition of cubes of cheese and some pickles. I dressed it with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. That seemed to keep me going for many hours. When it came to 6pm, when I usually have my dinner, I almost didn't feel like eating. I wasn't exactly not hungry, but I just didn't fancy most things. In the end, my dinner consisted of three cans of chicken soup.

   It was only going to be two cans, but I accidently opened a much newer can instead of the can that was already 2 years after its best-before-date. I decided I would continue with the plan to use that one, and so it ended up as three cans. I did fortify each can with some added chilli and spices. That soup was nice, and sort of satisfying, and yet I didn't feel like I had eaten much. In theory my dinner was only about 600 calories, and fairly low in sugar, although my additives may have added a fair few calories.

  I decided against having any whisky last night, after over doing it the night before, but I did have 4 bottles of beer - little more than 2 pints in total. It was enough to make me feel tired, and after going to sleep by about 10pm, it also seemed to give me some erotic dreams. I think all these recent erotic dreams are something to do with Spring getting closer. Of course the best dreams were in the last hours of sleep - or more likely they are the only ones I have any memory of. In fact I have little more than a few snapshots of the best bits of the dreams, but snapshots convey no narrative, and it's probably better to keep my filthy libido out of the public domain.

  As far as I can tell I had a quite good sleep, and yet as I think about it I can't stop yawning. I have had little chance to test my body yet, but I hope it is feeling a bit better than yesterday. I can remember my ribs crunching a few times in the night, when turning over, for instance, but my chest seems to feel OK-ish at the moment. Nothing else is giving me any notable discomfort at the moment. The surprising thing is that despite feeling like I had not eaten that much yesterday, my weight seems to have gone up another notch. I am hoping it is water retention - I did seem to pee less in the night. As yet I have not bothered to check my blood glucose or blood pressure. Last night my blood pressure was so high that it was almost on the lower levels of normal !

  This brings us to today. What am I going to do today ? I feel I ought to go out into the sunshine, but even with it being so cold I will not be wearing my winter coat. I don't feel like walking very far at the moment, but I'll judge that properly once I am walking. Maybe I'll only be out for 5 minutes, and maybe it will be closer to a couple of hours. Quite what I will do for the rest of the day is almost a complete mystery, but the items accumulating in my laundry bag might give a clue to one little job. Maybe I might see if Michael is around today, and go and have a drink with him if he is up for it.