The four beers in the pictures above came in a presentation box, and so were a little expensive, but more annoyingly, and I have no idea why I didn't spot it, they were duplicates of 4 out of 8 beers that came in a plain box from the same brewery. One subtle difference is that the beer on the right, the Chystic cherry beer, came in a 27.5ml bottle in the presentation pack, and so made it poor value for money compared to the plain box of 8 which contained a 33ml bottle of the same beer.

  The Blanch Super 8 was a typical wheat beer - not too soapy tasting, and rather refreshing. The Tongerlo also tasted a bit like a wheat beer, but maybe some barley was also used. The Primus tasted like a thinner, lower strength Abbey beer. Oddly enough it was the Chystic cherry beer that was my least favourite. Once upon a time I would have liked it, but constant exposure to sometimes quite nasty fruit sour beers, which Jodie really likes, has left me disliking fruit beers. The Chystic was very tart, and it made my cheeks sort of suck in, and I nearly took a bite out of my own cheek !

  Although it was still rather bothersome, there were some good signs that the nature of my cold was changing, and possibly coming to the end. Until late in the evening my nose had dried up, although it has never featured a lot in this cold. My tickly, and often dry, or semi dry cough had gone to be replaced by a different sort of cough. It was not tickly as such, but I guess the trigger was still sort of tickle. When it happened I would cough up a glob of sticky mucus from deeper in my chest. In my unbridled optimism it seemed like it was a sort of clear up operation after the infection was beaten.

  Fairly long pauses would happen between coughing, and it seemed like I would be coughing very little after going to bed. Sadly that wasn't the case. As soon as I laid down it seemed like it made it easier to cough up more. At the same time it seemed my nose was being triggered to run even more. Sometime it was like an allergy with this inside of my nose getting itchy. It took quite a time before I managed to fall asleep, but having done so once, it seemed easier to get back to sleep after waking up to go for a pee etc.

  I doubt I got more than about 5 hours sleep last night, but at least some of those hours seemed to be good sleep. This morning my nose is still very runny, and I am still coughing a lot. It is mostly a dry cough, and it is making my throat hurt. Evidently I still have some way to go to throw off this disease. However, if I ignore the cough and runny nose, I do feel a lot better. One other indicator of my (hopefully) improving health is that my blood glucose is still back in a sane area.

   At 9.2mmol/l it is higher than I would like, although it wasn't helped by wanting hot food yesterday. I think I had two lots of instant noodles for breakfast. A can of East European baked beans with sausages for lunch, and then a can of Scotch Broth soup for an extra warm up a little later in the day. My dinner should have been healthy except for possibly one thing. It was no more than skinless chicken breast cooked with curly kale, but I thought it looked a bit thin. I may have been rather generous with some chicken gravy granules. I added so many that you could stand a spoon up in the gravy. I don't think those gravy granules are a source of sugar, but I will check some time.

  There are things I will do today, and things I would like to do. I am definitely going to have a shower (I didn't yesterday), and I think I will wash my hair. I am definitely going to start, and hopefully finish a bit of laundry - just a couple of t-shirts and some underwear. If after the shower, I feel fairly OK I want to dare to go to Tesco. If nothing else, I need more bird feed for those poor starving pigeons !!