As I write this the clouds are thin enough that the sun is making a valiant effort to shine through a crack. So far it hasn't quite made it, but maybe there is hope for later. The latest revision to the forecast now shows sunny spells for midday and 3pm. Sadly the temperature hasn't been revised upwards. It seems that 11° C is the best we can hope for today. The Met Office's best guess for tomorrow's weather shows a mostly dry day, but with a few light showers appearing from late afternoon.  Once again the maximum temperature will be 11° C. The BBC weather forecast is a bit more gloomy. It thinks that tomorrow could be moderately wet.

   Yesterday morning was so disgustingly dull and so very wet, that I doubted I would be doing anything yesterday, but I still had a shower.....just in case ! It was probably around 11am that the sky seemed a little brighter, and the rain had reduced to a very light shower. I decided to be brave and go and get my shopping from Tesco.

  I assumed, and assumed correctly that Tesco would be very busy, with long queues for the checkouts. Maybe I slightly over reacted because he queues were not as huge as expected in reality, and I managed to find one where there was only one person in front of me, plus the person actually being served. I think the reason why there was only that one person ahead of me in the queue was because she had piled most of the contents of the store into one of the biggest trolleys.

  I then noticed there were only a couple of people waiting in the next queue, and both had moderately small piles of shopping. It seemed slow progress, but by the time I had paid I noticed the woman in the previous queue was only halfway through all the huge amount she was buying. To make matters worse she was very slow at packing up her stuff up. It would have made far more sense if, like in Aldi and Lidl, she had been encouraged to just dump it all back into the trolley, and bag it up away from the checkouts.

  I just used a basket, and it was only about 2/3rds full. Most of it was 4x 2 litre bottles of Diet Coke. Among my other purchases were some better cheese than I had in the fridge. That in the fridge was a Tesco cheap brand, and it was pretty awful cheese. I didn't think such a thing was possible, but I know now. In some ways I bought more than I needed if I carry out my probable plan of spending a lot of money on enough Indian takeaway for Xmas dinner, and dinner on Boxing Day, plus some assorted snacks or smaller meals.

  I had walked to Tesco in my warm winter coat. I didn't unzip the front while in Tesco, and nor did I went walking home. I arrived home feeling very hot and starting to sweat. It took longer to cool down than I imagined. I have a possible theory about that that I will try and mention later. In the meantime I had a sort of toothache and dentist situation.

  I didn't actually have a toothache, but the dilemma of trying to decide whether the toothache or the visit to the dentist was the more painful, was a bit like the real dilemma I faced. I was hoping that I might get a message from Angela to say she would be in the pub at dinner time. I really wanted to see her, and yet I didn't want to go out again feeling all hot, sweaty and dishevelled, and in the rain - which had got heavy again just after midday.

  Both fortunately, and sadly, I didn't hear from Angela, but I did find out that she had been released from work (or had released herself) and gone straight home at about midday. I left it to the last minute before I cooked some lunch. It was three (medium) slices of cheese on toast. I added some extra flavour by pouring on some Heinz "Creationz" - Spanish style beans. It was not the sort of meal I would have if I was paranoid about my blood glucose level. Actually I was still mildly paranoid, but I regarded it as a one off experiment in a month where my illness had ruined any chance of a decent monthly average.

  There was one other thing I did, and had started it after my morning shower. It was to wash a couple of t-shirts, and quite a pile (7) of underpants. Wringing out underpants is easy, but seven pairs gets sort of boring. I ended up doing the job in two parts (or three if you count putting the stuff in to soak earlier on). I hung it all on the clothes horse in the dining room with the fan heater on low to help it dry. By the time I hung it up it was too late for it to dry unless I left the heater on all night. I turned the heater on this morning to finish the job this morning.

  I finished the book I had been reading, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I won't reveal the ending in case you want to read Edmond Cooper's "Sea Horse In The Sky" yourself. With that book finished I turned the other new (secondhand) book by Edmond Cooper that had been delivered the day before (or the day before that ?). The preface says it was the second novel he wrote, and it shows. So far it has turned out to be quite turgid, and I can't raise the enthusiasm to read it in preference to other possible distractions. It may be that in the first chapters it is just scene setting, and it will (hopefully) liven up a bit later.

  About the only other thing that happened yesterday was dinner. Once again I threw caution to the wind, and oven cooked fish and chips. The chips were only oven chips, and not proper greasy chip shop style, and the same was true about the fish. I guess in that respect it came close to being healthy, but the fish was the "modern" style of Aldi fish burger patties that seem to use sugar to make them browner and crisper. The packet actually shows a higher sugar content than the old packets. The curious thing is that I didn't really enjoy that dinner. Maybe it was guilt, but with hindsight I am sort of glad I had it.

  After seeming not have have had a good night's sleep the night before (although as I explained yesterday, it may not have been as bas as I thought) I expected to have an early night last night. I did try to, but I couldn't seem to get comfortable. I finally found a comfortable position as 11pm approached, and was soon fast asleep. Once asleep I seemed to sleep rather well, and also seemed to wake less times for a pee.

  I probably had many dreams, but only a small part of one sticks in my memory - for now. It was a peculiar dream because it was more like reading a book than actually taking part. It was more a description of what was going on - very one dimensional...or something. I presume that there must have been some sort of section that provided some sort of explanation of the circumstances, but that seems to have been lost between the cracks of the unconscious universe.

  I can only speculate that the setting was near a volcano, or perhaps a chemical plant, or some sort of source of gold in a very fine, dust like form. People visiting a place....I have no idea what that place was, or who the people were - had to strip off and pass under an air or water shower (I am unclear which it was). Any gold dust would end up in a sort of dish that the stood in for the shower. I don't think I sat it happen, and maybe it was more like hearing it on the radio than reading it in a book. The final bit of information was that after several weeks of this procedure the owners of this apparatus had collected enough gold dust to make half the head of a pin.

  This morning it felt like I had all the time in the world, and in a way I have. I doubt I will see and interact with anyone for another few days at minimum (there will probably be one exception to this that I'll come to later). I decided I would see how long I could sleep for if I kept doing my best to go back to sleep every time I woke up. I managed to stay in bed until about 7.30am - which was not that late at all.

  For another morning I was shocked when I checked my blood glucose reading. For three straight days now it has been 8.7mmol/l, and the day before these three was 8.6mmol/l. It is as if my blood glucose "thermostat" has been reset by that illness at the start of the month, and is now working well to regulate the glucose level to a higher than normal, but adequately safe level. I did have a similar thing when I got my last Covid booster shot, and that lasted for about a fortnight if I recall correctly. Somehow there is a tie up between covid and my pancreas, but I doubt the finest medical brains could suggest what that tie in could be, and nor would they want to investigate it.

  My one interaction with the human race before the dark days of Xmas are over, will probably be at lunchtime. I have nothing better to do, and so I will probably got to the pub to see my favourite barmaid, and have one or two pints of Guinness. Later on I will order my gigantic selection of Indian food that I shall have for Xmas dinner, and possibly tonight as well. I feel I probably should cook my own dinner for tonight - I have meat and vegetables that may not last a few more days without deteriorating. This is one of those occasions where it would be nice to have a huge freezer so I could cook and freeze several dinners for later use.
  I almost forgot this picture I took yesterday. Michael said he thought he had given me the same Xmas card as last year. In a spare moment I checked out last years Xmas cards, and indeed, he did give me another of the same card. Of course inflation raised it's ugly head. Michael had scribbled on the back of the 2021 card a sort of price tag. It said £3.24. This years card also had a scribbled price tag on it, and this year it was £4.24 !