It is supposed to be a sunny day, or at least it was, but the latest revision to the Met Office (but not the BBC forecast) shows 9am as being dull. That actually matches what I see outside. Maybe an hour ago, when there was some sunshine, there did seem to be a lot of light cloud, and it seems it has thickened up now, and the sun is now blocked until, and if it blows away again. I guess the chances are that the sky will clear, and we will have full sunshine again for most of the rest of daylight hours.It should take the temperature up to at least 27° C. Today is similar to how the BBC predicted it would be in yesterday's forecast. Who's prediction for tomorrow will be closest to reality ? The met Office predict tomorrow will be like a version of today where a fair few of the sunny hours are replaced by just sunny spells. The BBC shows 9am to 5pm as just sunny spells, but with full sunshine before and after. They also say it could reach 28° C.   I guess I have to chalk up yesterday as being a good day, although not as good as the glory days when I had the health and enthusiasm to go on some very long walks. They, of course, were a mix of masochism and great exhilaration from seeing and exploring places I had never seen on foot before. The blisters on my feet were like medals !

  Back to yesterday, and the first good thing was going to the pharmacy to collect my repeat prescription. It should have been no more than ordinary, but after the last couple of times, when sometimes it wasn't ready, and last time when two important items were missing, it seemed like a very good thing that it was made up and ready to take home with everything in it.

  Once I was home again I stacked up my boxes of pills ready for use when the last of the last prescription runs out. In fact one of my pills, Bisoprolol, a blood pressure drug, had run out yesterday morning. Many others will run out tomorrow. You might think they would all run out at the same time, but some were new drugs added halfway through the cycle, and in the case of the Bisoprolol, they are tiny little tablets, and over the years a couple have slipped my grasp, and probably fell down the back of the little chest of drawers by my bed.

  I almost forgot, the very first thing I did when I got back from the pharmacy was to put a couple of frozen steak bakes in the oven to cook. I did it early so they had time to cook, and cool down before I had them for my lunch at about 1pm. With boozing taking place later in the afternoon I thought it prudent to get some solid food inside me. The only other significant thing in the early afternoon was collecting 4 two litre bottles of Diet Coke from Michael who had bought them for me while out shopping for himself and wife. He gave them to me as a birthday present.
  A truly lousy selfie of me ready to drink. I should have used a "selfie stick", or grown longer arms ! I wore a 1997 Catford Beer Festival t-shirt. It is sort of amazing that 26 years later the t-shirt is still in very good condition, and probably still fits me as well as it did then.

  The boozing started just after 3.30pm with Michael being the first to arrive. Jodie arrived maybe 15 minutes later. Despite having a fridge full of beers she had personally selected when I ordered them, she brought 4 cans of some new beers she had just discovered. Unfortunately they were all sweet/sour/acidy fruit beers, and I only wanted small tasters of them - probably a small wine glass amount. Unfortunately it seems that my and Jodie's beer tastes diverge further and further. It does not make for a good beer drinking session !
  When I ordered this big, paper wrapped, bottle of beer I hadn't even thought of my upcoming birthday, but it did seem a great excuse to open it.
  There is a lot of irony that after describing how my and Jodie's tastes are diverging, that I would order, and then use this Sour Cherry Ale as my "official" birthday drink. I can, of course, come up with some excuses for it. For one thing it is made in Belgium where they have been brewing such beers for hundreds of years, and so know a thing or two about how to brew them.

   One probable big difference is that I think the sugar from the cherries is part of the fermentable sugar, and so it is all converted to alcohol. The essential flavours remain so it still tastes of cherry, and is sour because of a lack of sugars. A lot of the beers Jodie likes would seem (at a guess) to have the fruit juices added after fermentation. It preserves the flavours a bit, but fruit juices contain a lot of sugar, and for one thing, I have to watch my sugar intake very carefully. It also makes for what I find to be sweet/sour taste I don't like.
  I am not sure if Michael is pulling such a face because he has just taken a mouthful of my birthday beer, or whether it is his natural reaction to when I take a picture of him ! It is sometimes like he had too many of the old style "flash cubes" go off in his face when people took pictures of him with their old "Instamatics". At least Jodie looks happy, and Alan has a contented look.

  Yesterday was a better session than what is usual now, but I can't help but think they would be better if Jodie could concentrate less on wanting to try every beer in the world, and enter her tasting notes to her Untappd account. The original "Thursday club" session were to talk bollocks while drinking enough to get sozzled....sort of. Going all serious seems to lack the same pleasure, if indeed sometimes there is any pleasure at all.

  Jodie and Alan left at about 6pm, and Michael left just before or just after that. I was quite ready to sit down, watch the usual Star Treks, and eat my dinner - but I didn't have any dinner ready, and nor did I have many ingredients to make one. I think I had probably made an unconscious decision to treat myself to a takeaway much earlier in the day, and thatw as what I did.

  I knew full well that was plenty of reason to think it would be a disaster for my blood glucose control, but I set my mind on having a Chinese takeaway. I also knew it would be very expensive because I would want to get quite a variety of stuff, and have enough left over for breakfast, or maybe even dinner. I did indeed spend a fortune on an order, and of course maybe a tenth of the price was the premium because I ordered it via Just Eat. I seem to think I have seen suggested that premium could be as much as a third of the price ! This explains a lot more - https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/the-hidden-costs-of-the-food-delivery-revolution-the-surprising-premium-added-to-your-next-takeaway-a9kAZ8K7lB30

  My dinner arrived fairly quickly, and I was filling my face not too long after 7pm. That is later than usual. I am tending to eat dinner by, or often before 6pm lately. It was all very enjoyable provided I managed to ignore how much I paid for it. That payment problem was made worse by the fact that I ended up throwing some of it away. One dish was just a thin layer of roast duck on boiled rice. I decided against eating most of the rice, and I three the rest away. I also threw away the "free" prawn crackers. The dry BBQ ribs were, as expected, mostly bone, and that seemed like a lot to throw away. Lastly there was a container with what I only later realised was the crispy noodles to go with the stir fried three sea food dish. I didn't like the latter, and threw a lot of that away (after extracting the prawns and muscles).

  The biggest portion I ate completely was the Singapore style chow mein. That was very nice. Next I tackled the dry BBQ spare ribs. They were very nice too. Maybe too nice. They were indeed dry, and while stripping the small amount of meat of maybe the fourth or fifth rib a bit of meat got stuck in my throat, or tried to go down the wrong way - it all happened so quickly that I can't be sure. Obviously I started to cough. I didn't want to spray my PC (with brand new keyboard) with half chewed food, and trying not to do that made things worse.

  The next bit is rather unpleasant, although more unpleasant for me ! As I choked I started to part vomit. I had to catch it in my hands and run to the toilet. Fortunately is was just, literally, a handful which I dumped down the toilet. I was still coughing a lot, and rinsing out my mouth was tricky doing it between coughs.  It was obviously time to stop eating, and time to go to bed.

  I didn't sleep well last night. It was probably the salt and MSG in the Chinese food that gave me a really dry mouth last night - the worst being in the first half of the night. I would wake up and have to pry my tongue off the roof of my mouth, or anywhere else it got stuck, and then keep sipping cold water until I felt OK to lie back down and try to go to sleep. It felt like I was wake for half an hour each time I woke up, but I expect in reality it was half or even less than that.

  Later, towards morning, I had another dream of being back at work. This one had a slight twist. I was not doing my job very well, and instead of the usual "I don't care because I am only doing it as a hobby, and can quit any time", I started to think along the lines that I had maybe take it a bit more serious because being at home all day would be boring. Maybe it has taken several years and a dream to accept this is true !

  Despite the belief I had slept badly, I was up fairly early this morning. It was more because I didn't think I could think myself back to sleep after all the trouble I had in the night. I was fully prepared for a mega high blood glucose reading this morning after some sweet beers, and definitely after a Chinese takeaway. In fact it was just 9.2mmol/l. That is higher than ideal, but well below the red line.

  That reading made having the leftover Singapore style fried rice for breakfast that much sweeter. I'll probably have the last 3 or 4 dry BBQ spare ribs for elevenses, or maybe lunch, although it would make for quite a small lunch (which could be good if it didn't make me yearn for more). It means I ought to go to Tesco today and stock up on stuff for future dinners - probably including tonight.

  Other stuff to do today is a lot of washing up. Some of it will just be rinsing takeaway containers before I put them in the recycling bin. I also have a lot of glasses to wash up, and a few bits of cutlery and stuff. It would probably be a good idea to do some laundry today while there is still a good chance of it drying in the sun (although it continues to be lightly overcast as I write this). Both forecasters are still adamant that 11am, or half an hours time, will feature full sunshine ! After all that it seems very unlikely I will have the energy or inclination to go out for some exercise, or justy taking pictures of trains or something.