The price of a sunny day yesterday seems to be rain today. Last night the forecast for today predicted that it would rain almost all day, but the latest revision hardly changes the details in the screenshot of the forecast at 6am this morning. Although there is still a 10% (and 20% chance at 11am) chance of rain this afternoon, it may stay dry. I certainly wasn't earlier. There was heavy rain around sunrise, but after that it was little more than light drizzle. It seems the rain may start to fall again at 6pm tonight. In some sort of compensation for the grey skies and damp, it cloud almost get warm today. The afternoon is predicted to be 13° C, and it will stay that high well into the night. Tomorrow it will slowly cool to 10° C during a rather grey day with the chance of an occasional shower at almost any time.

   Before leaving the subject of the weather it is interesting to see what the current predictions are for Xmas day. The current prediction is almost certainly going to change a lot in the next 4 days, and even then may not match reality. At the moment a cold and dry day is predicted. Very early morning might see the temperature as low as 2° C. That is quite cold enough for snow, but the chance of any precipitation is predicted to be less than 5%. What's more, sunny spells are forecast. It seems the chance of a white Xmas is slim in the extreme !



   Yesterday was a classic case of split personality....sort of. I was torn between curiosity about what may have happened in the Linear park over the previous 6 days and the feeling that I ought to stretch my legs before they seized up completely, and the feeling that I didn't feel well enough for a walk in the cold. I also knew that some exercise would, or should help my blood glucose level a bit. It didn't for reasons I'll come to later.

  The desire to go out in the sunshine won in the end, and just after midday, with the sunshine at it's best, I set out for a walk that was to turn out to be quite uncomfortable. The cold seemed to make my right leg feel quite stiff and painful, and that was after taking some paracetamol to calm such aches down.

  The cold also had my chest aching a lot. I think it was after having a shower in the morning, and drying myself off, that I became aware my chest was not in a good state. It didn't hurt at that time, but I had that unpleasant bone grating against bone feeling as I towelled myself dry. I did get a little twinge of pain as I put a t-shirt on. Out in the cold it settled down to a more steady ache.

  I guess I must have been feeling masochistic or something because I felt a strong urge to try and walk a little further than my last 3 or 4 walks. I was going to walk as far as Lower Sydenham station, and that would have taken my walk up to  miles, and maybe more, but I finally opted to just go to the end of the park, and swing around Sainsbury's to end up walking 3.625 miles.
  I sent this picture to The Friends Of The River Pool with the message that there was an abandoned car by the pond in The Vineries area of the park. Their initial response was "oh no, not another one", but laughed when they saw the picture. It looks like more work was done last Wednesday to clear the pond of excess vegetation, and I suspect one of the volunteers found this toy car in the pond, and parked it at the end of the little jetty that extend out a yard and a half over the pond.
  The sun seemed to carry almost no heat to me, but I'm guessing the very broad leaves of this plant were soaking it up because I saw quite a few bluebottle flies basking in the sunshine on it, and nowhere else.
  As I was taking pictures of flies I became aware I was being watched. It seems very rare to see any cats in the park, and it is possible this is the first I have seen. As soon as it realised I was taking pictures of it, it sauntered off back to where it probably came from - the adjacent allotments and some back gardens.
  This duck didn't seem strange when I took this photo, but here in this photo it looks to have only one leg, and no arse/tail.
  There are lazy people, and then there are extremely lazy people. Whoever was sitting at this seat couldn't even be bothered to carry their rubbish from one end of the bench to the other !
  I reckon it is a new swimming pool. Others probably say it is just a gigantic puddle just inside the entrance to the park by the bow string bridge.
  I spotted this robin while looking for kingfishers. It was on a tree right next to the river, and very near to where I believe a kingfisher sits observing the river. It is a shame I didn't spot the kingfisher in a tree because seconds after taking this picture I saw it flash by, in a streak of blue, and was able to watch it fly low over the centre of the river for some way before it went out of sight. That it twice I have seen it in a almost the same place. I will be watching those trees over the river from now, until they are back in leaf, in the hope of getting a snap of a kingfisher.

  As I said nearer the top of the page, both my legs and chest were aching on this walk. The only thing to add is that my right legs was aching as I left home, and didn't improve. If anything, it got worse. My chest started to ache once I started to cool down, or maybe little more than a quarter mile from home. I was very glad to get home again after this walk. I guess to some extent or another I am always glad to get home after walk. On this occasion I particularly looked forward to some hot food. I don't think I was hungry as such, but I wanted something to warm me up internally.

  Once again my original intention was to have some low sugar soup, but I ultimately opted for instant noodles. I now think that was a mistake, and the biggest mistake was buying another Blue Dragon instant noodle bowl. They come in a nice, re-usable once washed, thin plastic bowl with a lid to keep the steam in while they are "cooking". I made some lobster flavour instant noodles in the bowl from the previous time I had some Blue Dragon noodles.

  Both lots of noodles were sort of nice, but most importantly seemed nice and warming. The previous Blue Dragon noodles were Thai flavour, and seemed nice. The ones I had yesterday were spicy chicken flavour (or something like that). They were nice, but I think the garlic flavour was very much not to my liking. Since Covid days my taste, which disappeared for a few days back in March, or April, came back slightly different, and some onion or garlic type flavours taste awful now. I suspect it is one individual chemical, probably sulphur based, that appears only in some onions or garlic, that triggers an awful after taste.

  The lobster flavour noodles did have a sort of very subtle seafood taste. It wasn't strong enough to be enjoyable, but on the other hand it was thankfully many time more subtle than the "flavour oil" that came with the noodles That, in it's undiluted form, stank like a fishwife (not that I have ever smelled a fish wife !). For all the pros and cons of these noodles, the worst is that they seem to have a lot of hidden sugar. I suspect it is the Blue Dragon noodles that were the bigger culprit because the last time I had one my blood glucose level was raised the next morning.

  I could blame other stuff for that raised blood glucose. I did seem to have a powerful hunger yesterday, and while I tried to be careful about what I was eating, I did eat a fair bit. It included a snack of four kiwi fruit. I am beginning to fel that kiwi fruit contains more (natural) sugar than, say apples. My dinner included roast carrots and tomatoes (as an accompaniment to grilled bacon), and both probably have a fair bit of hidden (or natural) sugars.

  The last thing I did before going to bed was to watch two episodes of "Allo Allo". I could have watched a third, but I thought I felt rather tired, Evidently I was not that tired because I seemed to sleep very poorly last night. It seemed to take ages before I fall asleep, and every time I woke up it felt like I would never get back to sleep again.  To pluck a figure out of the air, because I have no other figures to call on, I reckon I would have been lucky to get four hours sleep last night.

  The only bit of dream I can remember seemed to be actually be half dream, and then the idea carried on as an idea after I had woken up. It was actually a good idea - I think - and the idea did come as a dream. It was basically that a new EU directive ordered advertisers to include how they arrived at certain figures in their videos. For instance if they claimed a new road, for want of a stupid example, was 16ft wide, they had to show it being measured with a tape measure. For some claims in adverts it would be good to show proof of those claims. It is a shame that if the EU did bring in such a directive we would never see it now we are crashing out of the EU with no safety net.

  This morning, being a Monday morning, and particularly a wet Monday morning, it was the best time to go shopping in Aldi while it should have been quiet in there. Before that there was the morning rituals such as having a shower, and checking my health. My blood pressure, temperature, and blood oxygen saturation were all good, but my blood glucose had gone up from 8.3mmol/l to 8.5mmol/l when I hoped it may have gone down. 8.5mmol/l is not the end of the world, but I have to get it lower as soon as I can.

  Unfortunately that is probably not going to be today. I have already got off to a bad start after buying a pack of sandwiches from Aldi. They are guaranteed to raise my blood glucose. The only saving grace might be that I ate them early in the day, and that gives a bit more time for that sugar to be processed and dissipated..in a way. I didn't really buy anything else too contentious from Aldi, apart from possibly some plumbs. I did but some low and zero % alcohol beers in case Michael feels well enough to pop in for a quick drink with us on Thursday (despite such a meeting being illegal under Herr Boris' latest diktak).

  I now have to think what I am doing for the rest of the day. I am 90% certain I won't be going out again. I have got one bit of physical work to do - hand washing a few t-shirts and some underwear. One thing I will probably very likely do is to catch up on a bit of sleep by way of a few snoozes. With so little to do today, and no commitments, I may as well dream away as much of the day as possible - maybe at the expense of sleeping tonight.