This morning started off close to -2.0° C, but it has now risen a bit, and should soon be 0.0° C. The best thing is that if it turns out to be true, the latest revision to the forecast says that there will be sunny spells between 9am and 11am. After that the light grey clouds take over again, and the temperature will have risen to 2° C - the highest it will be all day. No rain is expected. Tomorrow should see 3° C, but the sky will be light grey all day. This coming Sunday, and perhaps more so the following Monday, will see a heat wave ! Temperatures of as high as 11° C are predicted, but at the cost of loads of rain.

   Yesterday was a day where I seemed to think I was fairly productive, but with hindsight, maybe it was no more productive that recent days. Of course on some of the recent days I went out shopping, but yesterday I stayed in all day, and so my few achievements lose their already tarnished shine - sort of.

  When I compare my symptoms with some others have described, it does seem likely I have been suffering from an attenuated Covid. Of course the symptoms also seem very familiar to illnesses suffered before Covid was even a gleam in it's Dad's eye.  The real bothersome thing is not it's intensity but it's longevity. I have been "almost" over it for a couple of days now, but there are still occasional reminders that it has left it's mark, and that will take even longer to heal.

  I had a good demonstration that I am not over this yet just this morning, about 10 minutes before I started writing. While having my breakfast of instant noodles something spicy alighted on a sensitive bit of my throat, and induced some strong coughing. I coughed up a fair bit of mucus, and my nose ran like a fountain for a few minutes. The coughing and runny nose are all over again now, but I can still feel an odd feeling at the original site of the stimulus that started it all.

  Back to yesterday: For most of yesterday I felt fine - an even better fine than the slightly flawed fine of the day before yesterday. My body temperature, which had never risen to feverish, was a little higher than usual, but yesterday seemed to be back to normal. There was also the fact that my blood glucose, after days of being very high, was back to normal (although "normal" can still be higher than desired).

  Another notable thing was that I got through the day, and last night, without taking any painkillers. At no time has any pain been so great that painkillers were essential, but low level pain can be just as annoying if it is constantly nagging in the background, plus there are no great distractions from it. That is not to say I suffered no pain at all yesterday. It felt like I had been laying on a brick while reading on my bed.

  When I got up to do one of the few productive things I did yesterday, some laundry, I had some quite strong upper back pain for a short while until the muscles had unknotted themselves. It is probable that doing the laundry, just 2 t-shirts and 4 or 5 pairs of underpants, helped straighten out those muscles. I was tempted to do that laundry in two stages with a break between them, but it didn't seem so hard just to plod on and do the whole lot in one sitting.

  Like the last laundry I did, I dried it in the dining room with the fan heater on low for much of the day.  Since I gave in, and started using heating this autumn/winter my consumption has rocketed, but night time temperature now frequently below zero it is necessary. The warmth in the dining room didn't go completely to waste because I did spend some time down there writing out Xmas cards.

  I was very lucky that I had just enough stamps left for cards that need to be posted.  It is not essential at the moment, and maybe it won't be until this time next year, but I need to buy more stamps. The problem is that the nature of stamps is changing. I heard mentioned that they are now just barcodes, and that 1st class stamps are incredibly expensive (I've been using stamps bought 10 or more years ago when they were much cheaper). I don't even know if you can still buy the traditional book of 10 stamps from Tesco etc.

  The curious thing about yesterday was how fast it seemed to go on a day when I seemed to do so little, but on the other hand there were a couple of things that used up, or in one case, wasted a lot of time. Yesterday it felt like I spent ages trying to renew my Senior Railcard. So many things went wrong, maybe some of them were my fault, that I never did manage to renew my railcard. A lot of the problem appeared to be their website. It was randomly throw up error messages, and I had to keep starting the process from the beginning. If I am feeling brave I will try again today.

  Another thing that took a lot of time was making a note of what was on a memory card. On Sunday my worry about trying to get a Xmas present for Jodie (always a very fussy person) was made easier when she told me she had lost her Canon camera at a gig. I decided it give her one of my cameras. It was the same model, but mine was silver and her original was black. Before I handed it over to her I took out my memory card, and put a fresh one in.

  I had used that camera a lot on my long walks in the summer of 2020 - being pocket sized it was less of a burden to carry when pushing my walking to it's limits (roughly 6 miles that summer - a lot less at the moment). It took ages to go through the old memory card noting all the places I had used it, and the dates of those walks. All the files would have been copied to my PC, and there are two backups of my picture files, but I still find it a good idea to keep the original memory cards, unerased, as a further back up.

  It was probably another indicator of my recovery from this recent illness that I didn't seem to feel as hungry as I have recently. Admittedly yesterday's breakfast was two bowls of instant noodles (both small ones). I had a sort of novelty lunch of some warmed up ham that was getting a bit near it's use by date, and some ready made rice with beans and stuff in a microwaveable sachet. It was sort of nice, but not bas enjoyable as hoped.

  It got to about 4pm and I fancied a snack. Earlier in the day, maybe even the day before, my eyes had alighted on my jar of Marmite, and I thought I ought to have some on some rice cakes sometime. That "sometime" was yesterday. Those ricecakes, with a thick layer of Marmite were rather nice. It felt like one of those primaeval urges to have that Marmite. Marmite has lots of the various types of vitamin B in it, and when I get these feelings I wonder if it is my body silently telling me that it needed some special nutrient for some reason.

  The curious thing is that somehow those rice cakes with Marmite seemed to be sort of filling. Later on I had a (hopefully) wonderful mealball stew cooked and ready for my dinner, but as much as I was looking forward to it, I felt like a can of soup would be adequate. So I had a can of Tesco Irish Stew, which is like a very thick lumpy soup, and that satisfied me for the rest of the evening.

  I didn't seem to feel very sleepy last night, and so didn't rush to bed early. I started to watch the 9pm QI on Dave, but the first minutes seemed familiar. I turned off and went to bed where I read for sometime. I suppose it was a long time for reading in bed, prior to sleeping, but I was almost at the end of the book, and read until the end. I then turned out the light, but nothing seemed to happen. Evidently something had happened because the clock suddenly read 2 or 3 hours later.

  I have a very vague memory of dreaming about something, but until about 5am I seemed to sleep so well that it was like I didn't dream. Probably like a few times earlier in the night, I went for a pee, and then jumped back into my warm bed, and fell asleep almost instantly. It was about 6.50am when I woke again, and this time I decided to get up. The first thing I did, once I was out of bed, was to refresh the weather forecasts on my PC so I could later take screenshots of the BBC and Met Office weather forecasts (the screenshot I used at the top of the page.

  I also checked my body temperature, and once again it was back to.... I was going to say normal, but it varies most mornings. It's probably easier to say it was slightly lower than most of the last 7 or 8 days. After I had scrubbed off the hand cream I used last night, I then checked my blood glucose. I must admit I was a little disappointed - it was exactly the same as yesterday, 8.6mmol/l. I had hopes it might be a bit less, but 8.6mmol/l is still good - doubly so compared to all the dangerously high readings I had at the start of this month.

  There is another train strike on today, and so that rules out a possible distraction today - a bit of trainspotting. There is only one thing I aim to do today, and that is to go to Aldi. There are a few things I get there that I find easier to get there instead of Tesco. I can also post my Xmas cards on the way there. Other than that, I don't know what I will be doing today.