I think the early morning temperature in the screenshot above may be a degree higher than reality, but it is sunny now, and plenty of sunny spells are forecast, and they will warm things up a bit. Sadly, the latest revision to the forecast is now showing a bit less sunshine. Midday and 1pm may be just cloudy, but the temperature is still expected to reach 14° C by late afternoon. It seems the curse of winter may finally be over, but a year ago April saw temperature approaching 20° C on some of the later days of the month. Tomorrow may see a lot of sunshine, and the temperature hitting 16° C, but not until after the sunshine has given away to clouds as early as 3pm.

    I was thinking of going out later in the afternoon when it would have been a bit warmer yesterday, but by 1pm it seemed to feel about right - and it was. I didn't wear a coat, and once in the sunshine I felt perfectly comfortable. There was only a brief time when I was on the river bank, shaded by a lot of trees that it felt a bit cool, but still not uncomfortably cool.

  There were three main reasons for this walk. The first, and most obvious, was that I wanted to take advantage of the warm sunshine to try and get my stamina back for some longer walks once it starts to get a lot warmer. I hope that this summer I will be able to do 6 or 7, maybe even 8 mile walks.

  The walk was also important in view of my recent high blood glucose readings. In that respect it failed, but only because of what I had for dinner last night (at least I hope it was just that). The third reason was that I wanted to get some snaps of the now re-opened Perry Hill pub. In February it had been closed for maybe a couple of years, and I saw a lot of fittings being ripped out. I thought it was about to be demolished, and a huge great blocks of flats built in it's place.

  I was wrong about that. As I am sure I mentioned recently, I had message from Angela to say it had re-opened. On Friday Angela posted a picture of the meal she was eating in the pub. I guess I could add a fourth reason for my walk - vanity. I like to get some early exposure to the sun to start tanning my skin in a gentle way before the sun is more like an exposed nuclear reactor in the height of summer. That early tan seems to give as good protection as sun block....maybe.
  This is not an ideal picture. It would be a lot better if the bird was against a more neutral background. Most of my bird pictures I'll be showing here are failures for one reason or another, and the others, not shown here, are even worse ! For a while I thought it was a gold crest, but they have a distinctive yellow stripe on their heads. There for this is most probably a grey wagtail.
  Another picture that could have been good, but is fairly crap. There is a short section of river that always has some sort of scum on it. I think there is something dumped on the river bank that causes this. Mummy duck and her ducklings didn't seem to worry about the scum, but the colour of it makes the ducklings stand out less.
  This duck came out OK. It is catching the sun, and it's colours look nice and bright, but ducks are two a penny on the river.
  Well, the image is sharp enough, and bright enough, but you can't really see many details on this small bird. A twitcher could probably identify it just from the shape of it beak (or bill as ornithologists prefer to call it).
  I know enough about bees to know there are many more species than is commonly known, but like birds I can't identify them well enough to make bold claims as to their species. I am about 80% sure this is an ordinary honey bee, or worker bee as found in their thousands in beehives. Yet I still have that 20% doubt that is something similar but different.
  If those twigs were not in the way I might have got a nice snap of what is probably a sparrow, but this is another failure.
  These kids were soon to discover that there are some deep bits of the river. The young girl on the left, with the blue top, went running along in the river and suddenly found herself waist deep in the water. She thought it funny, as did the rest of her friends, and then there were dares for others to go that deep. I have an idea that they were originally in the water for something like a nature ramble, or even to clean up the banks, but it ended up as a cold and wet frolic !
  Crows can make nice subjects for photography because the tend to stay still a lot. This one posed nicely for me, but I still couldn't get a great picture of it. As soon as I raised the exposure enough to stop it being a silhouette, and allow some detail to be seen, it lost it's black colour. The strong sunshine was reflecting off some feathers and made them look light grey. It was good, but also bad, mostly bad.
  This was my best bird picture. Most of the bird is visible, and the delicate colouring of this starling is visible.
  I'm pretty sure this is a rare sight - a dead pillar box - laying with it's legs in the air. It is on the corner of Winsford Road (the road up from the park) and Perry Hill. My guess is that rather than being hit directly by a car out of control, it has been side swiped by a big lorry turning out of Winsford Road.
  My other objective - to get a snap of The newly re-opened Perry Hill pub. This a pub that really needs to photographed early in the morning when the sun would be lighting up it's front. As you can see by the shadow of the lamp post (with the Perry Hill road sign on it) the sun would be shining on the back/left of the building. I had to over expose this shot to get any detail of the front of the pub, but that has the unfortunate affect of bleaching out what was a lovely blue sky behind it.

  On this walk my legs were mostly behaving themselves. I could occasionally feel a little discomfort from around the back of my right knee, but it was very minimal compared to some recent walks. Hopefully whatever it is, is now on the mend. The big problem on this walk was my feet. They seemed very uncomfortable. If they had been comfortable I feel I might have pushed myself to increase the almost 3.6 miles I walked to something closer to 5 miles.

  I have a theory about why my feet were complaining so much, and I think it is because of the socks I was wearing. I can't remember how many weeks ago it was that I changed my socks because they were looking a bit thin in places. I thought I replaced by another pair from an original pack of five socks, and so they should have all been identical, but while the old socks were really comfortable, these new socks are definitely not. I have two brand new pairs of socks from a multipack that I seem to remember were comfortable in another pair of boots, but I haven't worn them because they are brown socks instead of black.

  I don't like brown socks, but I don't hate them either, and if the should be a lot more comfortable on my next walk, I could learn to love them. The weird thing is that superficially all these socks are the same. There is obviously some difference, but generally I have found ordinary black dress socks are more comfortable than chunky hiking socks, a lot lot more comfortable. I guess those hiking socks would be OK if I bought the next size or two of boots, and I was walking through snow and ice.

  Oh well, it was good to get home and take the weight off my feet. I did feel quite tired after that walk, and a few hours later, after I had made a start on the photograph selection and editing, I laid down for 5 minutes, and ended up in what must have been in a deep sleep for at least an hour, and maybe 90 minutes. My sleep was aided by it being very warm in my bedroom. I felt very warm when I came in from my walk, and perfectly warm while sitting at my PC doing stuff with the photos, but before I laid down I turned the heater on because I knew I might feel cool if I laid there too long. What I hadn't realised was that when I had turned the heater off at the socket in the morning it had been on full. An hour of that, plus some sunshine coming in my bedroom, raised it up to tropical temperatures.

  I had intended to fast for most of yesterday, but I ended up eating quite a few dry roast peanuts while sitting at my PC - too many of them. Their sugar content is higher than you might imagine, and it seems to depend on the make, and sometimes on individual batches of the same make. I think the dry roast peanuts I was eating yesterday were probably of the higher sugar content.

  My dinner was partly constrained by what I had in the fridge. I was down to some burgers or some bacon. I chose the burgers. The were described as "West Country burgers with cheddar cheese and chilli". Just like some flavoured sausages, they would seem to be based on poorer cuts of meat mixed with other stuff to disguise it. They weren't actually horrible in any way, but I didn't enjoy them. It was hard to believe there was cheese in them, and I am sure they forgot the chilli. I put my own chilli sauce on them to make up for the lack of any internal chilli.

  I didn't bother to check their sugar content. There was no reason for a burger to have any sugar in it, and yet I have my suspicions it wasn't that innocent. The marrowfat peas I had as one vegetable are known to be a source of sugar, and it is only with hindsight that I remember why I had one of a pack of 4 "snap pots" of mixed bean baked beans. They were made by Heinz, and being an American company it was inevitable they would have a lot of sugar in them.

  I had two lots of fairly good sleep with almost an hour of insomnia in the middle last night. I had some dreams where hardly anything happened. One dream concerned a load of people with the plague being shut up in a cave, and then released when it was realised they were the clue to curing the plague. This whole dream was like reading a short item in a newspaper. Nothing else happened - it was "this happened, and then this happened". I don't know why I bother having that dream when something like being in the middle of  Roman orgy might have been so much more entertaining.

  The big thing this morning was checking my blood glucose. It was back up to 10.0mmol/l - hovering at the danger line. I know that I ate too much stuff with sugar in it yesterday, but I thought that at least some would be burnt off by the walk, and my blood glucose could have been nearer 9.0mmol/l. In theory I have to fast again today, but I have already broken that, and I'll be doing it again at lunchtime.

  It is Sunday, traditionally a dull and boring day. It is looking like it could be a good day to try out some new socks in my walking boots, but that is impossible because Sundays are now boozing days. This afternoon Jodie will come over for some more beers. Some of the beers will be fruit beers, and they can be quite sweet. At this rate it won't be long before I am on insulin !