I had seen this statue from a distance, but I had never seen it close up before. The light seemed about right to take a good photograph of it, and I think I captured a fair picture of it. I'm not sure I actually like the statue, but I don't dislike it. It is probably good to have a picture of it before it accidently burns down during some sort of refurbishment. Things like that happen rather a lot in this borough. Incidently, Gerda Rubinstein has her own web page http://www.gerdarubinstein.com/

  Weather update: The latest revision to the forecast now admits that it is very gloomy right now, and worst of all, it now shows rain again. Rain might fall at 2pm, 6pm and 7pm. 8pm might feature the first sunny spells of the day.

  After taking my snapshot of the statue I wandered up to the little supermarket on Catford Bridge to buy some provisions. I think I bought over a dozen bags/packs of Polish instant noodles. I bought two bottles of booze - one was a beer, and the other a cider (which I now regret for reasons that I'll soon explain). I also bought a pack of some weird cheese, and some weird meat - although the Turkish sausages can't really be called weird (nice is a better adjective), and the smoked beef may also be nice but mundane. I'll know for definite when I eat it.

  I felt curiously short of breath as I walked back home with my shopping at full speed. I wasn't actually breathless, but I did seem to be breathing quite heavily. I could have slowed down, but that would be boring. I potentially could have speeded up and really got breathless, but of course that would not have felt nice. While it was like mild asthma, I think it is just a legacy of when they put my chest back together after my quad heart bypass operation in 2013. Since then it has always seemed that I can't fully inflate my lungs.

  Once back home I had a bite to eat. I really shouldn't have because my blood glucose felt too high again yesterday. At least it was a partly safe lunch of bacon, lettuce and tomato. I definitely made it bigger than it should have been, but that wasn't really about the size, but about how the first third of it tasted really delicious, but after that my taste buds were saturated, and I didn't enjoy the rest of it the way I did when I first started it.

  I had a lie down after my lunch, and it wasn't long before I dozed off. I was probably asleep for well over half an hour. It might have been as long as an hour, but that feels unlikely. All I know is that I felt very cold when I woke up - not shivery by a long way, but enough to feel uncomfortable, and particularly so when I went down to the dining room. Being at the back of the house it is never warmed by the sun like my bedroom is, and I turned the heater on to compensate for it.

  I left the heater on low all the time I was drinking in there with Jodie, and it never got to feeling warm. Jodie came up with the idea that maybe it was a good day (which it was outside in the sun) to make a start on the ciders I have been buying lately. I gave Jodie a can of Alska fruit cider, but I went for a more traditional "vintage cider" (An Aldi special). It was revolting. It tasted like it had been made from rotten apples that were riddled with mildew !

  Jodie had a taste of it, and also declared that it tasted dreadful. After forcing my glass down I set aside the remainder in the bottle (over half a pint), and eventually tipped it down the sink. I tried another cider, and it didn't actually taste really nasty, but I didn't get any enjoyment from it. I concluded that I am really not a cider drinker, but it might just be a poor choice of ciders. Some of the sweet ciders, and fruit flavoured ones might be more to my liking, but I have to be very careful about sugar content.

  After Jodie had striggled through her ciders she opened the fridge to look for something better, and found the fruit flavoured beers she had brought over last time. They were big, one pint, cans and we had half a pint each of both. One was very nice. It was superficially a cherry beer, but it tasted like bakewell tarts with maybe a hint of something woody. The other was a thinner cherry taste. The only problem is that both these beer were basically medium strength lager with added fruit syrups added - very sweet fruit syrups.

  I think I had one or two beers more than Jodie as I tried to wash that nasty cider out of my mouth, and I definitely drunk a lot more of the cider than Jodie was prepared to drink. I ended up very slightly drunk again, while Jodie caught the 6.24pm train to go and meet her friend Alan for more drinking. It was probably lucky I had precooked my dinner while we were in the early stages of drinking, or who knows what I might have eaten.

  I only ate what I had pre-cooked, and that was sausages. With hindsight I wish I had had something to go with them because they seemed a bit greasy, and that gave me mild heartburn later when I went to bed. They were Lincolnshire sausages, and so I was doing sage flavoured burps during the evening - not nice ! I had to wait until 8.20pm before there was anything to watch on TV. It was an old (Stephen Fry) episode of QI. It all seemed very familiar, but it was a good selection of guests, and worth watching for the 2nd or 3rd time.

  I think that QI might have actually been a QIXL because it seemed to last an hour. It was nearly 9.30pm when I got in bed to read more of "Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov. It is interesting that I remember more of the original short story than the full length novel, although as I read the full length version I do remember bits of it. It is interesting to read how some of the holes in the original plot have been filled in for the full length version. I can imagine it was quite a job to edit it so that it it seemed mostly like the original short story, and yet the holes were filled in. The original short story is sandwiched inside before and after additions.

  I don't know whether to say I slept well or badly last night. On the bad side I did seem to have trouble getting back to sleep after waking up, usually for a pee, in the night, but on the other hand it does seem like it may have only felt like a long time awake. Each was one of those occasion when you wonder if you will ever get back to sleep, and before you know it three hours have mysteriously passed - but maybe not without realising it.

  I seemed to do a lot of dreaming last night, and most of it seemed to be about what should have been erotic encounters that never actually happened (damm !!). There were too many to remember, or at least not in a way that can be described later, but a few bits seem to have stuck in my memory. One such dream seemed to be set in something like a hotel. I was looking through a door, and across a corridor with two open doors opposite me. Each door opened onto the head of a bed with a women in each. Both were nice, but I wanted to spend time alone with just one of them. Both were suggesting I should join them in their rooms (and maybe beds), but I didn't want to disappointment the other. The whole dream, that maybe lasted no more than 30 seconds, was just indecision, and no action.

  One dream, that seemed to be happening shortly before I got up, was set in a hospital. It seemed I had had another operation, but a much smaller one. I was telling the surgeon that the very small scar had caused me no pain at all until I actually saw it. I said it must be a good indication of his skill that it should be so painless until seen to exist, and even then it felt no more than like a very light scratch.

  In many ways it was a pleasant dream, but was spoiled in two ways. One was that all I could find on me was an ancient Nokia phone that only had one camera - and it wasn't a selfie camera (this was actually true when I was in hospital in 2013, although it was an old HTC phone, and not a Nokia). In the dream I was finding it really hard to take pictures on the Nokia phone because it seemed like there were missing buttons on the phone.

  The phone was annoying, but the more nightmare like thing was that I found a blood pressure meter strapped to my arm, and it was one that recorded a reading every few minutes. I could just about see it's display, and the harder I tried to relax to get better readings, the worse it got. I was having visions of never being let out because I couldn't get my blood pressure to get and stay down. It seemed to be a good time to wake up, and with it being light outside it did seem a good time for that reason too.

  This morning those fruit beers, and maybe one of the ciders, really wrecked my blood glucose. It was a very bad 9.5mmol/l. In theory I should be fasting for most of the day, and ideally going out for some exercise. The only problem is that this very gloomy morning has switched off my enthusiasm brain cell. I really don't fancy doing anything (except eat) today - even less than nothing now it seems likely to rain as well. Oh well, it will be good for the garden. Today may be another day when I do a bit more searching through my photo archives to add more train pictures to my huge spreadsheet that is now my master archive (or some other thing with an impressive sounding name).