There was some early morning mist this morning, but it seemed to lift very quickly, and the rest of today should see blue skies and bright sunshine. It will also see the temperature only reach 7° C again, but that is rather better than the -2° C this morning. As I write this it should now be 0° C, but it still hasn't risen by more than a degree.  Tomorrow should be a less cold day. It is expected to be 3° C in the morning, and rise to 8° C in the afternoon. Unfortunately it will come at the cost of grey skies, although a few sunny spells late in the afternoon are currently shown as being possible.
 
   As is usually the case when I am expecting a delivery, yesterday revolved around waiting for that delivery. I knew it would not be coming until the afternoon at the most unlikely very earliest, and that did give me plenty of time to go out to get some shopping from Tesco. I also went to Superdrug too.

  I was specifically going to Tesco to buy food, but while I was out I checked Superdrug and Tesco, who both show blood pressure meters on their websites. They may show them on their websites, but neither have any in their stores - or at least not in their Catford stores. That justified me buying online, from Amazon, when there are some saying we should all buy locally to keep our local shops in business.

  I was mostly buying the bare neccesities from Tesco, but I did buy a few extras. One was a cold, ready roasted chicken that was reduced by about £1 on the reduced price shelf. I feel sure I bought something else from that shelf, but I can't seem to remember it now. One odd little luxury was a small pack of sliced garlic sausage, although with hindsight I am not so sure it was a luxury - it was not as nice as hoped for,

  I have just remembered the other things I bought from the reduced price shelf. It was two special cheeses - smoked tomato and herb cheddar. Both were reduced by about a third off. That is not a great discount, but I thought I would get two of them while they were there. I've only had a nibble of it so far, but it does seem very nice. I just need a good reason to eat something like cheese on rice cakes now.

  I wore my thick winter coat when I went out, but there seems to be so little wind that I was soon feeling very hot in it. After waiting to get to the pharmacy in Superdrug, where apparently the blood pressure meters would be kept if they actually had any, I was soon feeling so hot that I undid the front of my coat. I left it like that for the rest of my time outside, and it didn't seem to feel that bad.

  When I got home I pulled the legs and wings off the ready cooked chicken, and put hem in the mini oven/grill to heat up. While that was happening I ate the last two of the medium sized oranges I had bought from Tesco on a previous visit. I seem to recall the first two seemed quite sweet, but the two I had yesterday seemed almost tart. I wonder if that affected my taste buds because when I came to eat my chicken I found it to be almost bland.

  The rest of the afternoon, and into the early evening I kept an ear on the doorbell, waiting for the man from Amazon to deliver my new blood pressure meter cuff. It arrived just after 6.30pm, and so the experimenting could start. At first I got some very variable results. The problem was the positioning of the cuff on my upper arm. The cuff with my old Omron meter seemed to be almost insensitive to position.

  Eventually it occurred to me that the problem was that the new cuff had to lay very flat to the skin, and on the left arm it can't. A childhood scalding accident has only left a few clues to the event now, but the scarring on my upper left arm is still easy to see. More weird is that it seems it destroyed half of a muscle. The remaining muscle bulges a lot higher than the rest of that but of the arm. When I tried putting the cuff on my right arm it was a much snugger fit, and suddenly all the reading became consistent, and about what I would have expected. The only trouble now is learning to put the cuff on the "wrong" arm without having to think about it.  Incidently, the type of cuff that many doctors and nurses use is like my new cuff. I wonder if some of the very high readings at the surgery were something a bit more than white coat syndrome.

  While I was in Tesco someone sneezed quite violently in the adjacent aisle. Whether that was of any significance or not is unknown, but by mid evening last night I had developed a sore throat, and shortly after that my nose became very stuffy. It seemed like I had become infected by the common cold. I think that because of the very lazy day I had, I didn't feel the need to rush to bed early, and I stayed up watching the usual TV programmes until 11pm.

  I was expecting a bad night because of the sore throat and stuffy nose, and to make matters worse, my sore throat was also becoming a tickly throat, and I had a tendency to cough. I can't say there was no effect on my sleep, but it was very minimal. At about 2am I was feeling cool, rather than cold, and I suspected that maybe I had a high temperature. I didn't check in then, although I did notice my very first temperature reading was very slightly higher than usual, but a couple of degrees away from what is usually thought of as a fever.

 One indicator of illness is often high blood glucose readings, but this morning it had gone down to a good 8.2mmol/l. That was probably thanks to my dinner of shish kebabs. It was the rest of what I had ordered for dinner then night before last. I gently warmed it up to just over room temperature by zapping them in the microwave for a single minute. Not only does shish kebab generally be very good for my blood glucose, but the ones I had yesterday seemed so small, just 4 lumps of grilled meat in each, that even two of them barely made a dinner. I had two rice cakes with sliced garlic sausage on them for a sort of dessert.

  Despite feeling ill, I want to make the effort of going to the pub at lunchtime. Angela won't be there, unless she sneaks from the hospital next door in her night gown (assuming she hasn't been discharged yet), but at least I can tell Ayshe, the barmaid why Angela is not there. I must admit I probably ought not to go with a cold, but the pub is generally quiet at lunchtime, and I won't be infecting too many. Anyway, some fresh air often clears a stuff nose, although it could make my sore throat worse.