The BBC weather forecast shows sunny spells for the first 4 or 5 hours of this morning. The Met Office seems to have come closer to the truth. It says cloudy, and I would say it is overcast, dull, and horribly grey as I write this. Both forecasts give zero hope that there will be a single glimpse of sunshine this afternoon, but it does say it should be 20° C. That would feel nice and warm in any sunshine, but not with a grey sky leering down at us. The only good thing you can say about today's cloud is that it stopped this morning getting too cold. There is always hope, but at the moment tomorrow's forecast looks to be almost identical to that of today.

  For the first time in a few days, yesterday was a good, and productive day (for certain values of productive). The day started with assorted aches and pains. The most annoying of which was (presumably) all the scar tissue in my chest, after my operation in 2013, aching in a way that was not a strong pain, but an exceedingly annoying pain. That, and maybe a few other pains, seemed to fade away by mid morning.

  One of the first things I did yesterday was to go to Tesco. It was an interesting test of my chest. If it were some sort of heart problem it would have got worse on the walk there, or more definitely on the walk back carrying heavy shopping. If anything the walk was what I needed to pull all the twisted muscle and ribs back to where they should be. I bought quite a lot in Tesco, and it was all rather heavy. Upon arriving home I was hot, mildly sweaty, very slightly short of breath (or just breathing fairly deeply, but far from gasping), and I was completely free of any pain.

  Maybe in my exuberance I didn't notice some stiffness of knees, ankles and legs in general. I think there probably was some, but maybe too mild to distract me from feeling good in other ways.  Virtually everything I bought was sensible stuff. The main exception was some KP branded flavoured peanuts. I did end up eating a whole bag of them. They were smoky paprika flavour, and while pleasant, they were sort of disappointing.

  Before I went out, and in fact as soon as I had finished drying myself with it after my shower, I put the towel in to soak prior to giving it a good clean. It was more than a shower. I also wet shaved and washed my hair. I guess I was feeling sort of good. Closing the bathroom window for the winter helped a lot. There was quite a cold wind coming in when that window was open - not nice when naked and dripping with water !

  I think I had lunch first before I went back to washing the towel. Lunch was a couple of fairly nice cod-in-batter fillets (with nothing more than a squirt of low sugar ketchup on them). I probably allowed 30 to 60 minutes before going back to the towel. I gave it 5 rinses after the soak in detergent, and then one dunking in fabric conditioner. With hindsight I reckon I could have dried it on the washing line, but I hung it on the clothes horse indoors with a fan on it. I was amazed when I found it dry, and ready to use by 5 or 6pm. I shall be using it when I take a shower soon.

  I put my feet up, and read for some time after I had hung up the towel to dry. I might have even had a short snooze, but sooner or later I started a project I had been wanting to try for some time. It was to try and transfer some analogue video onto my PC. I had installed a promising program called OBS Studio on my PC, and tried it with a few old and crap webcams. It seemed to work OK, and I hoped it would also work OK with a little USB dongle thing I was going to use.
  The dark grey dog bone shaped thing on the right of this picture is the USB connected digitiser. I wanted to transfer some old recordings shot on my old Sony Hi8 "Handycam". There were two problems I faced to do this. The more significant one was whether OBS Studio would recognise the USB audio source. Fortunately it did, but only as a mono source. I may have made a mistake at this point by opening up 6 different audio channels - two of which seemed to carry the camcorder audio. The problem was that there seemed to be a tiny delay in one channel that gave a slight phasey/echo effect to the combined audio. It was not awful, but spoiled a perfect transfer.

DEMU 205001 providing the service between Oxted station and Uckfield station.

  The second problem is that a combination of worn video head in the camcorder, and rather old, and sometime flaky tapes, means that it was easy for the heads to clog, and ruin playback. I had a little problem when I played the first tape, but it soon cleared up, and that was possibly because the first two tapes I tried were the very last I recorded on the camcorder back in 2002.  Hopefully you can play the video above. If so you'll see it is not a high definition video. In perfect lighting it could be almost as good as a DVD, and certainly far better than a VHS recording, but it seems I managed to take the camcorder out on a very dull day. Later in the tape you can see puddled on the platform at Uckfield station.

  I have quite a few tapes I could transfer, but I don't think I will transfer everything. Some of the tapes are no more than loads of short clips of nothing of any great interest. However there is stuff that I expect I'll show excerpts of here.  If I can sort of that phasey sound I will regard this experiment as a triumph !

  I was playing about with the camcorder and stuff until dinner time. Dinner was the other two battered cod fillets from the box of four that supplied my lunch. I had them with some Greek yoghurt based coleslaw, and a mistake ! The mistake was some thinly sliced leek. It was sort of nice, but a bit too strong. Worst of all was that I could not get the taste out of my mouth even after a good tooth brushing. I could still taste a residue when I went to bed after watching some stuff on TV.

  The last thing I watched was the first 10 minutes of an episode of QI. It was one where I thought the guests just didn't gel. I was soon bored with it, and went to bed to read not long after 9.10pm. I am pretty certain I managed to fall asleep by 10pm. However it was not good sleep, and I feel I didn't get any good sleep until a few hours before I got up at 6am this morning.

  My problem last night was that I felt too hot under the duvet for at least half the night. I'm sure my bedroom was only one or two degrees warmer than the last couple of nights, but it seemed to make so much difference. Fortunately I didn't have an incident where I woke up with the duvet covered in cold sweat. I am sure that is what triggered my chest pains. This morning I did have a stiff neck, and some back pain, but it has now eased off without any painkillers.

  Once again I forgot to carefully look through the ingredients, and the nutritional details of that cod in batter. It wouldn't have mattered because I wasn't going to throw those fillets away if it looked like their sugar content was too high. On the other hand it might have provided some proof of my belief that many batters used on various food contains a lot of sugar so it goes a nice golden brown when cooked - maybe particularly when not meant for deep fat frying.

  That there may have been a lot of sugar in it is my theory as to why my blood glucose is up a bit this morning. It is still only 8.6mmol/l, and anything starting "8" I regard as being OK even if I would prefer it to start with a "7". Apart from the aforementioned aches, I guess I feel reasonably OK this morning.

  Today revolves around two things. It is a Wednesday, and so with luck I shall be meeting Angela for a lunchtime drink. I am also going for my diabetic eye check today, and if my guess is right I will be leaving the hospital at about midday. I could walk back home, sit down for 15 minutes, and then walk back again, and a little bit more, to go to the pub, or I could go direct to the pub. I reckon I'll go straight to the pub. I doubt Angela will be able to, or even want to start her lunch break an hour early, but I'll try and pick up a copy of The Metro, and spend some time in the pub doing the crosswords.