The latest revision to the forecast has cut the rain originally predicted for midday in the screenshot above, and now it should stay dry until 11pm. There is still a 10% chance of rain at any time though, and that comes as no surprise because most of today will happen under thick grey clouds. That does make for a warmer day, and from 2pm until possibly beyond the end of the day, it should be 11° C, This morning it was about 7 or 8° C at daybreak. From midnight tonight until 6am tomorrow rain is predicted, and then there may be more light rain from 2pm until 7pm. It will be colder today with a long spell at 8° C ending at 3pm, and then the temperature dropping down to 5° C by midnight.

  Yesterday was one of those days when it would have been easy to do nothing, and indeed that is how I passed most of the morning. As I said yesterday, I had a crazy idea that I might hear from Angela, although I knew it was 98% wishful thinking, but I still felt that it would be good to go out at short notice. In the end I didn't leave the house once all day (except to go out to put some rubbish in the wheelie bin).

  There was one other fact at play yesterday, and it was the possibility of a beer delivery. It would be the beer advent calendar that I went halves on with Jodie. It was Jodie who made the order, and she seem to be unable to find out if the beers have been despatched - despite the information apparently being available on the order status page of the companies website. She sent me the link to do that, but without being able to log in with her credentials all the information is not visible to me (but it does show the page layout with areas where useful information would be seen).

  The beer delivery didn't happen yesterday, but I made sure I kept a close eye on the doorbell (or should I say a close ear on it ?). It was even closer when I decided to do some clearing up in the dining room. I managed to fill, albeit only half full, two black bin bags with rubbish from the dining room, and that has allowed me to move a few things around to make it look a bit tidier.

  Some of the stuff I threw away was not exactly rubbish. There were a lot of VHS tapes that I have lost track of whether I have copied them to mp4 digital video files. I decided to just grit my teeth and throw the lot out regardless of whether they might have had something important on them. I have to admit that I find it very hard to throw out even stuff that has been gathering dust for years, and might never be seen/used again, but could still be potentially useful. I do seem to be getting better at it though.

  One of the things I had originally expected to do was to got to Aldi. I never did, but I am regretting it now. It seems that because there is now a new variant of Covid out in the wild, and no one knows how bad it will be except the doctors in South Africa who first detected it, and are treating it. Apparently it is an exceptionally mild strain, but just in case, Boris has to be seen to be doing something, and something is to order masks to be put back on in shops and all public transport (but oddly enough, not in pubs).

  It seems to me that a very mild strain of Covid is just what we want. People can safely catch it, spend a week with something no worse than the common cold, and then be immune to the virus, in any form, into the future. It could almost be the same as Edward Jenner using cow pox to immunise people against smallpox. The mild form protects against the really deadly strain. Wikipedia says that up to 20% of people in villages and towns died of smallpox before it could be vaccinated against. That makes it rather more deadly than the very worst Covid variant by a factor of almost 10, although back in 1790 supportive medicine was just about non existent.

  With no extra supplies of food from Aldi I didn't have a lot of choices of food yesterday. That was only a very minor problem, but still potentially a problem. I wanted to be careful about what I ate so I could aim for another nice low blood glucose reading today. I had eaten instant noodles for breakfast, and later on I had some soup for lunch. I did have a few snacks, but most were relatively safe stuff, although the chestnuts were a slightly unknown quantity.

  I could have cooked the skinless chicken thighs I bought during my recent shop in Tescos for my dinner, but for some reason I didn't fancy chicken two days running. In a moment of madness I decided to finish off the Warburton's sliced, non added sugar, wholemeal bread. I think I might have had a mid afternoon snack of cheese on toast, but for dinner I went further by having a cheese and bacon sandwich ! I think I had the last 5 slices of that small loaf yesterday.

  My sleep felt a bit weird last night. For some reason I thought I was sleeping badly, and that I was getting up a lot in the night, but I have reason to believe that some of that was dreams. (My evidence is based on the toilet paper left floating in the toilet paper - there was not much of it this morning, and that suggests I didn't get up for a pee very often). In fact, like most dreams, the memory of not sleeping well, and getting up frequently has all but faded away.

  One bit of one dream remains sort of fresh in my mind. I can remember what I said, but I can't really remember the circumstances of saying it in the dream. I was with a group of people, and I said something about what happened the previous day. I was told it had actually happened 2 days ago. My reply was "that the way this film we are in has been edited I have only lived half a day to your 2 days". It was another variant on lucid dreaming. I wasn't in control of the dream as such, but I did seem to be aware of the unreality of the whole thing. It was a rather curious thing to be a character in a film who knew he was just a character in a film, and not part of real life.

  Perhaps a better indication of my sleep being good was that once again I woke up, and it seemed to be the right time to get up. As seems to be usual this autumn (and maybe every autumn) I woke up early to turn the heater up full, and then went back to sleep until about 6.40am - a full hour before sunrise, but only 20 or so minutes before the first light of dawn. I was very interested to see how my blood glucose had fared after eating that bread, There was one other thing I remember eating as a sort of dessert after dinner, and it was a couple of quite small, but semi sweet apples.

  Maybe it was just the apples, ate in the evening, that were responsible for my blood glucose rising a bit this morning. It was still nice and low though at just 7.7mmol/l. That was low enough to take my running average for this month down to 8.47mmol/l, and that is about the third lowest so far for this year. The very lowest was last month, and that was just 8.37mmol/l. Apart from one month when the average was a lot higher, my usual average is quite consistent, and good enough for the nurse to tell me my diabetic control was very good back in July, or whenever it was. Oddly enough that was  during a time when my typical readings were slightly higher. I guess I am still doing a good or better job now.

  I was going to go to Aldi this morning, but I spent too much time eating breakfast, reading stuff on the internet, and generally wasting time. It is possible I might go later, but once again I am now on full alert in case that beer delivery should arrive. If I go to Aldi it will be after that beer has arrived. I shall be going without a face mask, despite the latest government diktat, but hopefully Aldi will not be challenging me, or anybody else, like they didn't do for the last 2 years.

  Other than the possibility of going to Aldi I guess I will passing this rather gloomy looking day doing odd jobs around the house, but maybe with particular attention to the dining room. I have a big box of tube/Underground memorabilia, and I am having trouble deciding what to throw and what to keep. The sensible thing would be to scan it all and keep it as digital files. The originals could be thrown away, but scanning loads of little things like timetables, or station information, and stuff like that, could take ages, and I haven't got the patience. Oh well, I'm sure the day will pass smoothly enough.