07:48 BST

  Yesterday started very dull, but it did brighten up in the afternoon. There was supposed to be a shower at midday as the weather changed from dull to sunny, and I think a negligible amount of rain did fall - probably about 24 drops for the whole garden ! The temperature reached the predicted 20° C, and I think I noticed 21° C at one time.

  

  Today is another day when there is a choice of two different forecasts. The Met Office forecast, shown above, has heavy rain as it's central feature, and it is at a very inconvenient time . The BBC (Meteogroup) forecast predicts a dull day, with just a single light shower at 4pm. However, they concentrate on the wind in the middle of the day, and predicts gust for 40mph or more. The Met Office also says there will be some wind at the same time, but they reckon the gists will be around 30mph. Both forecasters predicts a temperature of 15 to 16° C this afternoon. Both say there could be a sunny periods or two just before sunset, and neither predicted the sunshine at 7am this morning ! Tomorrow will probably start with sunshine, but how long it last, generally as just sunny spells, depends on whose forecast you believe. Both forecasts agree it should probably be 17 or 18° C tomorrow.

  Yesterday had a few good points, but the very dull start flicked that switch in my brain that turned off most enthusiasm, but oddly enough this time, not my energy, or at least not much. Soon after I finished writing here I had a shower, and did about the only positive thing I did all day - I went shopping.

  The first shop I went to was Korona - a food shop specialising in Polish stuff, but I think they have other East European stuff as well. I was particularly after Polish instant noodles, and any interesting beers they might have. I bought a good selection of noodles, and 4 bottles of beer. I am very sure that one of them, a raspberry flavoured beer, was what Jodie brought with her to one of our beer sessions a few weeks ago. I seem to think it was nice, but probably had a catch, and Jodie didn't like it. The problem was that it was, or seemed to be, a basic lager with raspberry syrup in it.

  Being a purist, or believing herself to be, Jodie declared that was not the way to make a fruit beer. I had forgotten an important bit of information at that point, and it was that in the Netherlands, and maybe Germany too, it is quite traditional to add fruit syrups to wheat beers at the bar. My only problem was that the syrup would have been syrup based, and so the beer probably had more sugar in it than is ideal for me. From the same range as the raspberry beer, I also bought a honey flavoured beer, and a fig (I think*) flavoured beer.

  *Most things from Korona are genuine imports of local Polish products, and the labels have no English on them.

  After Korona I crossed the road to Poundland. As is traditional, I bought far more than I was expecting to buy, although on this rare occasion it was only a few extras over what I originally wanted. One thing I particularly wanted, because they seem cheap, and do the job, was white trainer socks. I think they work out at about 40p a pair, and so are almost disposable when well worn (plus they are really tedious little things to wash by hand !).

  When I got home I treated myself to another bowl of instant noodles (I had a bowl fro breakfast). It was from the packets I had bought in Korona, but not a flavour I had seen before. As far as I could make out, it was chicken with herb (possibly coriander) flavour. It was very nice, but not exciting. There are quite a few flavours of instant noodles that all taste so very similar, and this was one of them.

  I almost did nothing else after having those noodles for lunch. Of course "almost" is not the same as nothing at all. I did more eating for instance. I ate a small bag of mixed nuts, and I ate them because I was feeling a bit bored. There was also the sort of annoyance that the weather was rapidly improving, but my day was set by the grey start, and I couldn't raise any enthusiasm to do anything interesting.

  In the midst of all that negativity I did do two important things. The first was to work out how to open my Philips beard shaver. The rechargeable battery inside had effectively died of old age. I had given it a good charge (probably far too long, and that didn't help), and then tried to use it the day before yesterday. It started fast enough, but by the end of a simple trim it had almost come to a halt.

  Once I had found out how to open it up, I found it was powered by two NiCad AAA cells, and one of them was almost dead. It could be a simple job to replace them if I had a couple of good quality rechargeable AAA cells - but of the type that have solder tags on them. Soldering straight onto batteries is not a good idea, but that is what I will do. The batteries I intend to use are quite old, but have had very little use. Fingers crosses that they will last a few years !

  The other useful thing I did yesterday was to remember something. One of the aches that has contributed to some of more poor sleeps, and has been doing so for months now, is from my right elbow. I don't know why I didn't make the connection to an event that might have happened as much as 22 years ago. Oddly enough I can remember being well aware of it some years ago when cold weather would make my elbow aches. That ache has been worse in the last month or two.

  What I remembered was that all those years ago I had had an accident (falling as I got out a car in almost complete darkness). I didn't know it for several months, but I had dislocated the elbow. On the night when it happened I went along to A&E, and the doctor there ordered an xray, and then declared it was just "soft tissue damage" - i.e a bruise. It definitely wasn't because although the pain went away, I couldn't straighten my arm.

  Several months passed, and while repairing a TV (which was my job at the time) I got a small electric shock. Purely by reflex, because such shocks were not that rare (and most were just a bit of static tingle), I jerked my hand out of the TV, aqnd as I did so I felt a bolt of pain shoot up my arm as my elbow clicked back as it should be. The pain vanished as quickly as it came, and I was deliriously happy that I could straighten my arm, and the slight soreness had gone.

  Now, years later, that injury has come back to haunt me, but at least now I remember what caused it. The good thing is that maybe there is a cure for it. Yesterday afternoon my elbow was getting very sore while I was just sitting in front of my PC. I gave my best little tub of Comfrey Cream to Angela, but I did have some Comfrey, Arnica and Witchhazel cream. I massaged that in and around my elbow, and in a short time all the pain went away. This morning I am having hints it is returning, but it behaved itself well last night.

  One other thing of note that I did yesterday was to eat a whole big bag of corn chips. Now the odd thing is that the nutritional labelling said their sugar content was higher than is desirable, but maybe because if their very high fibre content, they do seem to cause less trouble to my blood glucose level than the nutritional information would suggest. I was still sufficiently worried about it to call the last of those corn chips my dinner, and I didn't eat anything else for the rest of the day.

  I don't know if it was just because I was tired, or whether just removing one of many sources of discomfort (my elbow), but I did seem to sleep well last night - I just didn't always realise it at the time. I guess it was one of those nights where you think that you will never get to sleep, only to find that 2 or 3 hours had slipped by, and no one told you about it. It may be that the temperature is stabilising a bit, and there is less struggle about it being too hot under the duvet, and too cold without. Last night it was close to warm enough without. I think it was 4am when I turned the heater on low, and was able to almost kick the duvet aside.

  I think it was about 6.40am when I woke up from a long dream filled sleep. I seemed to wake up instantly, and with that feeling that it is definitely time to get up. I was very pleased when one of the first things I did was to check my blood glucose reading, and find that it was very satisfying. I thought those corn chip type crisps I had eaten large quantities of would have raised my blood glucose to near 9.0mmol/l, but I was very wrong. The reading was actually 8.1mmol/l. It still makes me think that maybe the run of high reading I had earlier were the result of some sort of infection. I will admit that could have been some positive feedback to make matter worse - just the annoyance of a high reading could have lead me to eat "comfort food" which almost always would make matters worse. Maybe I did, maybe I didn't - who knows ?

  Today should be an interesting day. I will probably have the "excitement" of walking through heavy rain, and gale force winds, to get to the pub to meet Angela. I just hope she doesn't look out the window and see the conflagration outside, and decline to leave work. I doubt that will happen, and that she will be looking forward to our Wednesday lunchtime meeting at much as I am.