It is a cold morning. At about 5am the temperature was almost as low as 6° C, but as I write this it is almost 9° C. There have been two revisions to the forecast since I took the screenshot above. The first took away most of the few sunny spells seen above, but the last one replaced one. Currently it says that there will be sunny spells at 1pm and 3pm. The afternoon temperature if 16° C hasn't changed. It should be 2° warmer than yesterday, but without any sunshine it will probably feel a lot chillier. It should be a lot warmer night with the temperature only dropping to 13° C just before sunrise. The afternoon temperature could reach 16° C again tomorrow, but it seems the chance of any sunshine to make it feel warmer is close to zero. Tomorrow evening, like late tonight, could see some light rain.

  I could say I had a very lazy day yesterday, but that would only be true of some of the day. I finished yesterday by saying I probably ought to do something, but that I didn't really fancy going out. I did have a shower so I could have gone out, but in the end I started something that would take up a lot of time, and produce very little.

  Before I started on my diversion for the day I received a message from Angela. She thanked me for the Get Well Soon card that evidently arrived earlier than my post usually arrives here.....or maybe not. I just checked and she sent the message later than I thought. It was just after 1pm.

  The only other bit of information was that she still felt dreadful. I am pretty sure she is at home, and hasn't had to be hospitalized. A further assumption, perhaps based on hope rather than any more concrete reason, is that she has the Omicron variant of Covid. I realise that it affects people differently, but generally it is considered to be no worse than 'flu, although even 'flu can be a killer. It is certainly not nice, but Omicron is usually fairly short lived, and the worst could be over in 4 or 5 days - not counting a sometimes final recovery time. I doubt I will see Angela at the pub next week, but maybe the week after might be possible.

  My main diversion for the day, and which took many hours, was to attempt, and occasionally succeed in digitising more old analogue camcorder footage for storage, and maybe later editing on my PC. Yesterday was another confirmation that almost all the tapes, except those made by Sony, can still play OK  with a bit of care. The first step of the special care is to fast forward the tape fully, and then rewind it. That helps it to run more smoothly.

  The next thing is to clean the revolving video heads inside the camcorder. There is a special knack to doing it that doesn't usually end in disaster. Those video recording heads ar very thin, very brittle, ferrite heads that can very easily be broken. Breaking them would completely write off the camcorder (unless I still worked for a certain company where I would have stashed away some spares for the future !).

  The thing about doing video, or even audio transfers from analogue recording to digital files is that it can only happen in real time. Fast forwarding, and rewinding a one hour tape is not a fast process. Transferring a one hour recording still takes one hour, and if the tape will not play properly it could be well over an hour until giving up. I wasted a lot of time trying to transfer some recordings made on Sony tape. Even after making sure the tape was running smoothly in the cassette, and carefully cleaning the video heads, only resulted in almost playback. Sometimes it felt so close to working, but I just wasted hours to no effect.

  Out of all the tapes I tried only about three were clean enough to transfer to digital files. Like some of the tapes I did previously, many of the recordings were of very little entertainment quality. For instance I managed to copy two tapes that had recordings of New England I had made. They were a band we followed almost up to the point when they disbanded because they couldn't advance their chosen career. They were very good when they started, but they headed off in a very heavy metal, almost thrash metal style, when it was already out of fashion.

  They also had troubles with the name. There was an American band who used the name New England, and "our" band had to change their name to Neuk (as is New England UK) before they could release their second CD via a minor outlet. It was only yesterday, after a bit of research, that I found there was also a band called Neuk in one of the Scandinavian countries where Neuk translates as a fairly offensive word.

  Those recording that I digitised were very nostalgic for me, but the recording quality was not very good (mainly very low light for old camcorders), and while they would be usable if the band had become famous, they would be meaningless to most people.  I suppose most of my camcorder footage only has some nostalgic value to me, and would be of no great interest to the wider world. Maybe what I saw while transferring the tapes is all I ever wanted to see for one final time.

  Yesterday was one of those days where I wanted to be very careful about what I ate in an attempt to keep my blood glucose low. It did actually work, although it is one of those time when it didn't feel like it should have worked. I think the big thing is that I had two cans of hot soup to warm me up before the sun really started to do it's business in the afternoon. One can of "soup" was a can of Tesco Chicken Korma curry, and the other "soup" was a can of Irish stew.

  Both "soups" were originally bought because their sugar content was shown to be low on the can nutritional information panel. Despite that it did feel like they were two fulfilling meals eaten one after another. I guess they worked because I ate no more, besides a small-ish amount of peanuts before having my dinner. Dinner was what I had cooked for the night before, but didn't eat. It was a lamb and cauliflower stew. It was quite tasty !

  I watched my usual small ration of TV last night, but I didn't fancy QI at 9pm. I am pretty certain it was one of the lacklustre episodes. That allowed me to go to bed very soon after 9pm, and catch up on some reading after hardly touching my book all day. It was probably very soon after 10pm when I fell into a deep sleep for almost 2 hours. I woke up just before midnight (at 11.59 if I recall correctly), and I woke up from a dream.

  All dreams tend to be weird, and this one was doubly so because it seemed to change subject mid stream. It started of, or at least the first bit I remember was sitting down in a very posh restaurant - all starched linen and stuff. I just wanted a big bowl of soup, but I was told the soup dispenser wasn't working, I volunteered to take a look at it. It was here the scene changed completely.

  The next bit of dream wasn't explicitly in a telephone exchange, but it obviously was according to what I could see. My investigation showed that the L and K relays were not working properly. In an electromechanical exchange, such as where I worked for half my working life, the L and K relays were those that detected the distant telephone handset being lifted, and connected the phone to the switching part of the exchange. I could see the L relay was sticking because it had been assembled wrong. I was able to re-assemble it correctly. I could now, in theory, have my soup, but I woke up instead.

  I think I might have had another dream about telephone exchanges, but no real details have stuck in my head. The rest of my night featured more long blocks of solid (or apparently solid) sleep. One annoyance is that most time I woke up my mouth felt very dry, and I did a fair bit of dry coughing until I could have a quick slurp of drink to wet the inside of my mouth. Curiously enough, the only time that didn't happen was after I woke up the last time, after an unexpected 90 minutes of extra sleep.

  I had woken, as I often do, at just after 5am (maybe it was closer to 5.30am this morning), and as usual I declined to get up because it was so nice and warm under the duvet. Of course I did have to get up for long enough to go for a wee, but before I went for that I spent a few seconds refreshing the weather forecast web pages. That is why my screenshot at the top of the age starts so early in the morning.

  After getting back in bed it didn't seem like I would get back to sleep, but suddenly it was just past 7am, and definitely time to get up. For some strange reason I didn't cough despite my mouth feeling gummy again. I shoved a thermometer in my mouth as soon as I had crossed the room to my PC. My temperature was 35.2° C - which was fairly typical for first thing in the morning, although I occasionally get temperatures as low as 34.4° C. It was a couple of years ago that I started to take my temperature several time during the day in the hope of pinpointing the exact time I started dying of Covid. There was one occasion a year or 18 months ago when I caught my temperature almost approaching "normal". That was, in fact, a fever for me, and I did feel a bit off colour for 24 hours, but it probably wasn't Covid. I may have earned my immunity to Covid when I caught it at about the same time that news of it was just starting to break.

  Having taken my temperature, and made a productive visit to the toilet, I checked my blood glucose. I was both very surprised, and very happy to see it was down to 7.3mmol/l.  That is even lower than my rarely reached, self imposed target of 7.5mmol/l. I seem to have re-learned the lesson that soup is good stuff - very good in cold weather ! Of course Sod's Law says that if I try and rely on it, it will stop being good, and my blood glucose will rise again.

  I expect my blood glucose will rise tomorrow because a lot of today's food will be sausages. They looked so nice when I saw them in Tescos (I think it was Tescos), and having bought them I have to use them. I foresee having sausages for lunch and dinner today. I only have one plan for today (apart from eating sausages). I intend to go to the pub at lunchtime, maybe only for a single pint of Guinnes. I know Angela won't be there, but I feel I want to tell Asia, the barmaid, about Angela, and why she is not there. I assume she was just coming down with the first stages of the illness when she decided she felt too rough to go to work last Wednesday.  If so I hope she is now close to the end of at least the worst part of it - although some of the aches and pains, and the tiredness could take a few more weeks to finally evaporate.