09:22 BST

  Yesterday morning was generally dull, even gloomy at times, but sometime after 1pm it brightened up, and there were occasional sunny spells until sunset. The temperature forecast was rather pessimistic at just 12° C, but felt like it might have been a bit higher than that.

  

  Once again the forecast is changing quite a bit hour by hour. The sunny spells shown above for 7 and 8am didn't really happen. It has been bright, but the sun has not managed to burn through the thin white cloud. The latest revision to the forecast offers full sunshine for 10am, but that is 30 minutes away as I write these words, and I am not optimistic it will happen. From 11am onwards, except 2pm when sunny spells are predicted, the sky will just be one solid mass of white cloud. It should still warm up to 14° C. Tomorrow may have a bright start, but before mid morning it will cloud over to give white or grey cloud for the rest of the day. The temperature is not expected to rise above 12° C. It is almost as if the weather clock has been set back to mid February !
 
   Yesterday was a rather good day for unexpected reasons ! It got off to a good start when the Royal Mail delivered my box of beers from the Viru brewery in Estonia (from a UK distributor of the brewery). As yet I have not tasted them. Jodie, who has seen the picture on the left, says she has had them when she was in Finland some years ago, and before she had ever heard of the Untappd website that she slavishly documents all her beer drinking on - it's a sort of social media for beer drinkers. When she gets around to tasting them again she can write her review of them. In the meantime, I rather like their tall and skinny Dalek shaped bottles.

  Once I had finished writing here yesterday I went to get some shopping in Tesco. There is little to say about that shopping trip. Most of it was just mundane stuff, but I did pick up two things from the reduced price shelf, but without going down to the kitchen, to see them in the fridge, or listed on the till receipt, I can't seem to remember what they were. The silly thing is that I do remember checking they didn't have a high sugar content like the vegan pasty I bought there last time. That had a very high sugar content.

  It was fortunate that I had time too rest and cool down after getting home with my shopping. It was a fairly heavy load of shopping. It included 4 x two litre bottles of Diet coke, and two 1.5kg bags of wild bird feed. I did my usual as walking as fast as I could without getting out of breath (although getting close to it), and I felt quite warm when I got home.


  I meant to take a slow walk through the park, but I just can't seem to do slow walks. In consequence I arrived at the pub a little early. I arrived there to find Kevin almost outside the pub having a smoke. I feel sure it was a set up (sort of). He was actually waiting for a prescription to be dispensed from the always exceedingly busy Boots pharmacy inside the hospital. (Once up a time it was a hospital provided pharmacy, but it was privatised to make sure the service reached a bare minimum for the cheapest price possible). Where Kevin was waiting would not be the obvious place to wait, but before any more about that, a couple of pictures taken on my walk there.
  I don't think I have ever seen anything quite like these strange green flowers before. It was a plant growing in the graveyard of St Mary's church.
  Also spotted in the graveyard, around the back of the church, was this grey "thing". I didn't see it last week, and I presume it to be new. My guess is that it is some sort of composter, but like the picture of the green flowers above, I will be consulting other to see if either can be positively identified.

  I invited Kevin into the pub for "a swift one", and he readily accepted. I have a feeling his timing, and where he had been waiting, was so he could join in my drink with Angela, and see what it was all about. What I didn't expect, but with the glorious benefit of hindsight I should have expected, was that he would stay for more than one pint of Guinness. Angela arrived as we were about halfway through our pints.

  There was no chance of any intimate chat with Angela, and in fact not a great chance to chat at all because she and Kevin had so much to chat about - Kevin hasn't seen Angela for 3 or more years. All too soon Angela's one hour lunchtime was up, and she had to go back to work. Initially I thought that we would all leave the pub at that point, and we would say goodbye to Kevin as he went in to collect his prescription. I would then have a few minutes of privacy with Angela as I walked her to her office door.

  Of course there was no chance of that because we, that is Kevin and myself,  stayed for maybe 5 more "last ones" ! In total we must have had 4 or 5 pints of Guinness, and 3 double Jameson's whiskies before we left at 7pm, (after a 1pm start). That left an awful long time to chat about this that and the other. Kevin has taken a liking to The Jolly Farmers after never ever having been in there in the past. It is very "traditional" in there, and he took a liking to Asia the barmaid. They actually have some common ground in so much that they have both been bus drivers in the past.

  It was interesting hearing Kevin's observations about Angela. Like most people he finds it hard to believe she can look so young when she is actually, barring a few months, exactly the same age as Kevin and myself. He can definitely understand why I am so attracted to Angela. I think among a lot of drunken slurring, he said that he could see that we acted, or gave off signals, or whatever, that we were a couple at that moment in time. It was interesting that even though I had to take a back seat when Angela and Kevin dominated any conversation, I still felt that strong bond between Angela and myself - ad it was a bond in both direction.

  Apart from a lot of fun swapping anecdotes and stuff, yesterday's session was a bit of a triumph for me. It was probably one of the few times, and maybe it was the first time that I have, so to speak, drunk Kevin under the table. He was very wobbly when we left the pub, while I seemed to feel fine. He had to keep telling me to slow down. When we reached the end of my road we stopped for a few minutes of chat to say goodbye. It was once we stopped that Kevin started to feel very drunk, and getting close to generating a "pavement pizza". He was actually drooling, and all I could off was some sugar free chewing gum. Just one "tablet" of gum stabilised him enough, and he staggered off home.

  The amazing thing was that I hadn't eaten since breakfast, and I had essentially been drinking on an empty stomach, and yet I still felt almost sober. Of course I was rather hungry by then, and my food frenzy was a very good indication that I was not very sober at all. It didn't start out as a food frenzy. Initially I thought I would try and eat almost frugally. All I was going to eat was a bag of giant beef flavour potato rings. They were a type I don't think I have seen before - they were made of that sort foamed potato, and the nutrition panel said the sugar content was well into the green, although that was probably no the case when you scoff the whole bag.

  The unfortunate thing was that once I started to eat I enjoyed it so much that I wanted more ! I had thought that I couldn't be bothered to do any cooking, but then I had the urge to cook and eat a couple of Turkish sausages. They don't need much more than a vigorous heating rather than actual cooking. Ten minutes I was enjoying those sausages all by them selves. They lead on to something to join the sausage in my stomach, and I decided on three rice cakes with some blue cheese on them. Having said that I now remember what the reduced price things I bought were - portions of an Italian (I think) blue cheese. It seemed lovely on rice cakes, and I used almost all the cheese on them.

  It was son late that I was still eating the last of my dinner while watching the first of two episodes of QI on Dave (once again a short and a long one). As I was watching the second episode I became really tired feeling. During one commercial break I brushed my teeth, and I think I switched off the TV during the next commercial break. I went straight to bed, and I don't think I even bothered to try and do any reading. It can't have been much later than 9pm before I was fast asleep.

  I really was fast asleep, and I only have a vague memory of waking up for a pee sometime between midnight and 1am. At 3.30am I woke for another pee, and I couldn't get back to sleep after that. It was almost as if it was time to get up. I didn't really seem to feel sleepy, but it was all made more difficult by some aches and pains. None were unusual, but maybe the combination of them was, although it all depended on now I was laying in bed. The most annoying ache was from my elbow joints. It would switch from elbow to elbow depending on which side I was laying on.

  Even a couple of paracetamol tablets couldn't relieve that elbow pain. The only cure was not to lay down. It was very annoying. I did get up and look at stuff on my PC, and that felt much more comfortable. The only trouble was that as I read I could feel my head getting heavier and heavier, and my eyes kept closing. I thought that was the obvious clue to get back to bed, but as soon as I did I felt uncomfortable again. I did eventually get as much as one hours sleep between 3.30am, and when I gave up, and got up at about 8am.

  This morning I definitely have a hangover. Even worse is that my blood glucose had shot up to 9.8mmol/l. That is far too high, and I decided to skip breakfast today, but I can't hold off eating for too long. The worst thing is that I can't explain the blood glucose reading so high. I guess it is a combination of things. Eating so late, and then checking my blood an hour or two early, probably did me no favours. Those giant beef flavour hula hoops were possibly a big contributor after the amount I ate (a whole big bag !). I know a few pints of Guinness has little effect on my blood glucose, but maybe 5 pints (if that was how many we had) is not quite so innocent.

  It is all rather bad timing. This afternoon Jodie and I will be sampling some of the Ukrainian beers I bought. I need to eat something reasonable for lunch to soak up that booze, and some of that booze will be sweet beers that will raise my blood glucose in a way that Guinness doesn't (much). I think I can look forward to another high blood glucose reading tomorrow morning, in it could be over the red line, and into the danger area.  Just once is not too bad, but it means I will have to take drastic steps tomorrow to try and correct it.