The latest revision to the weather forecast lines up seven hours of full sunshine starting at 8am. As I write this there are some streaky clouds on the eastern horizon that could attenuate the sunshine unless they lift or otherwise disperse soon. All that sunshine will only warm things up to 13° C, but it could be significantly warmer behind the glass of my front room windows ! Tomorrow could be dry with a fair bit of sunshine, but clear skies will mean a rather cold morning. Just 7° C is forecast for early morning, but it should warm up to 12° C - which in full sunshine could feel OK.

   Yesterday featured a few very depressing hours, but most of the day was moderately OK. Overall it did feel like a lot of yesterday was wasted. I had a very slow morning, maybe slowed by writing just over 2000 words yesterday morning - enough for a short story !

  It was gone midday before I was washed, dressed, and ready to go out for a double shopping trip. As now seems traditional, I first did some shopping in Savers, and then crossed the way to Poundstretcher. As I mentioned yesterday, I was particularly after a big jar of high strength (1000mg) cod liver oil tablets. like many things, they are getting very pricey, but I feel they are an essential to help my legs keep moderately supple - probably.

  As usual I bought some bleach and toilet cleaner. I also bought a couple of scented candles. It seems Savers is the cheapest place to buy smelly candles. They were still knocking out Xmas themed ones in July or August. Of course any left after that would probably be made more expensive as they came into season again. One thing I bought two of is hardly seasonal. They were cheese flavoured rice crackers. I have no idea if they were cheap or expensive because I have never seen them elsewhere.

  Over the way, in Poundstretcher I bought an assortment of stuff. First in my shopping basket was a 6 pack of sugar free, apple flavour, Fanta. Unfortunately I later found I didn't really like it. It does taste of green apples, but it may be a little too tart for my liking. I will finish all of them, but it may take several weeks of more until they have all gone. Also from Poundstretcher was an assortment of instant noodles.

  I think I found a new flavour, "special chicken", whatever that may be, that comes in the same black coloured "mug" that the Firepit noodles that I gave some praise to a month or more ago. I have yet to try the "special chicken". What I have tried was a couple of 60gm packets of instant noodles. I had them for breakfast, but they weren't terribly exciting. On the other hand they are very cheap - just £1.50 for a pack of 5.

  I have a theory about how Poundstretcher have them, and why they are so cheap. Unless arithmetic has changed since I was at school, it would seem the manufacturer has completely ballsed up  the nutritional panel. There are two rows of figures. One gives the usual quantities per 100gm, and the interesting figure of the sugar content looks to be low for 100gm, and so obviously even lower for a 60gm packet.

  The next column of figures is for 360gm. Now that is very weird because to get 360gm of product you would need one multipack of 5 plus one from another pack. The sugar content shown for 360gm is considerably more than 3.6 times the 100gm figure. If 360gm was a misprint for 60gm, the size of individual packs, it would make the sugar content on par with a Mars Bar ! I think they just made a great cockup, and sold the mislabled pack off cheap. It is probably illegal, but I can stand a bit of illegality for £1.50 a pack of five.

  When I got home there were several things I could have had for some lunch, but I chose to eat the potato and leek pie I had found with a reduced price sticker in Tesco the day before. I cooked it as per directions, and I presume that gave the ultimate taste, but the taste was quite disappointing.  I think the pastry taste over rode the taste of the filling. I guess I should have realised that it would be like that when I bought, and not bought it.

  In the early afternoon I did a few things to get ready for a beer tasting session with Jodie, but I forgot that we were supposed to be meeting in The Fox And Firkin pub in Ladywell. I think it was shortly before 3pm that I decided I had enough time to go to the toilet for my second poo of the day. I only had my trousers half down when the phone started ringing. It was Jodie to remind me of where I was supposed to be.

  I went back to the toilet where I was surprised at how much I needed a poo. The worrying thing was that I wasn't 100% sure that I had finally finished for the day. Nevertheless, I had to put on outdoor clothes, and go and get a bus to the pub. I got the first bus, and it was both good and bad. It was bad because there are two bus stops near the pub, and my bus stopped at the one furthest from the pub. The good was that it was right outside Cash Converters, and I could look through the window and drool at a couple of cameras, and a very professional looking camcorder made by Canon. All were out of my price range.

  When I got to the pub I was shocked. It had changed a lot since I last went in there. I am sure the wall had been retiled, and the ladies and gents had changed places. There was a mainly brass band setting up on stage, and that gave me a very bad feeling. As some have told me, the garden is far bigger now. It seems that have bought, or rented the land behind the adjacent shop, and the garden could be called huge now, although it has few living things for a garden.

  It was in the garden that all the stalls were set up, and where Jodie was hiding somewhere. I went once around it, allowing 5 seconds to see what was being sold, and decided there was nothing for me, and I failed to spot Jodie. When I got back to the bar the "orchestra" had started tuning up, and were making a hell of a racket. I went to the bar to order two halves of beer. Despite obviously holding out a £10 note I was told no cash, cards only AFTER my two halves had been poured. If I had been told earlier I would have walked out the pub !
  Pictured above were the two half pints of beer I ordered. Both were fizzy keg beers, and one of them wasn't too bad, and the other was mildly unpleasant. They may say they were from The Firkin Brewery, but the David Bruce, the man who invented the original Firkin pubs, most of which brewed on premises, would be spinning in his grave (if he is dead) if he knew what they were brewing in his name.

  I say down at a ricketty table to call Jodie, and subsequently wait for her to emerge from the garden. By that time the orchestra had struck up at about 150 decibels with some godawful racket. By the time Jodie appeared, probably no more than 5 minutes after I had sat down, I had drunk all of one half pint, and was halfway through the next. I basically told Jodie that I hated it there, and would be going home once I had finished my second half pint - which took two mouthfuls.

  I assume Alan met up with Jodie a bit later, but I was across the road, and waiting at least a 5 minutes for any of the half dozen bus back to almost the end of my road. I felt thoroughly cheesed off when I got home, and I felt so bad that it even affected my eating. I had a snack of some sugar free, high fibre, biscuits with some cheese as a snack to keep me going until dinner time. I should have started to prepare dinner soon after that, but I couldn't be bothered.

  I had a flick around the TV channels, but nothing seemed worth trying to watch. In the end I watched another live stage show of the hit TV series "Bottom" with all it's fart and knob gags. i did pause it after 20 minutes to make a more snack-like dinner of rice crackers, corned beef, and some of the cabbage and onion salad I had made for my intended home made shish kebabs. It did go quite nicely with corned beef and rice crackers.

  I think Bottom finished between 8 and 9pm, and I headed straight to bed afterwards. I read a couple of short articles in the copy of New Scientist I had bought on Saturday, and then went to sleep. I didn't fall asleep straight away, but I don't think it took that long. After my second night of bad sleep, I took a couple of Paracetamol tablets last night, and seemed to sleep a lot better with only a short period of insomnia in the night.

  I had two dreams I can remember just enough to describe. One started off being on what I think was a District Line tube train. I think I was probably going to work, but it could have been school, or something completely different. The train reached my stop, but it seems the driver only released the doors for a few seconds, and I, and many other people were annoyed that the train started off with us missing our station.

  At the next stop we all got off, and went to the platform to go back to the station we wanted, but I noticed an extra platform. It had a squareish looking train in a blue and yellow livery waiting at it. I decided to get on it to see where it went because I had never seen a train like it before - in my dreams. In reality I had seen a train like it because during the day I was looking up where a station was on the Merseyrail network - a city rail network in and around Liverpool, and analogous to The London Underground, although maybe closer to the new London Overground network. I think I woke up before the train went anywhere.

  Another dream was rather less pleasant. I was in some sort of big building, possibly a shopping centre, and needed the toilet. I seemed to know where to find one that probably worked. It was where expected, and unlike some less pleasant dreams where I find nothing but broken toilets, this one was intact and working, but far from clean. I managed to get through a lot of toilet paper cleaning the seat, but is seemed usable, and I sat down to do my stuff. That seemed like an excellent time to wake up !

  It was almost precisely 6am when I woke up, and after seeming to sleep reasonably well, I got up. Oddly enough I barely had a desire for a pee, let alone a poo when getting up. I did go and have a small pee before washing my hand, and then checking my blood glucose reading. There was a bit of an oddity about it. Both my new, and older meters agreed on a fairly nice figure of 8.3mmol/l. The oldest meter gave a very much higher figure of 10.3mmol/l. I could almost worry about that except there is a probable reason for it. Yesterday I dropped what the very last test strip, and I suspect it may have picked up some contamination when I used it today.

  With my blood glucose readings done I dished out my pills for this morning, and also for later this afternoon. While doing that I felt a certain pressure building, and before I did anything else I went to the toilet and did a most satisfactory poo. After that seemed a good time to weigh myself. It seems I am still 700gm short of being a full 3kg lighter than when I saw the nurse three weeks ago. It is still a useful loss, and done with almost zero effort. If only it was summer I could probably put some effort in and do even better.

  Today is mostly controlled by a delivery from Amazon. In today's delivery, which I was forced to accept as a premium delivery (costing £4.95), probably because I still continue to refuse Amazon Prime with free delivery, I will be getting another 100 test strips for my oldest blood glucose meter. They seem moderately cheap. I just hope that they are still within their use by date. Also, to pad the order out, a rather nifty looking multi memory card reader that can be connected to both PC and mobile phone using a USB-A to USB-C adapter.

 I should have shown this further up the page. It is some good news from The Black Cat. On my way to Savers and Poundstretcher, yesterday morning, I noticed a poster on one of the support pillars outside Tesco. The top of it had been pulled off, but I could still see mention of The Black Cat pub. I walked to the pub to get a better look at it. There was no comparable poster, but a simpler poster near the entrance, and a chalkboard version on a sandwich board outside.

  It seems The Cygnet Committee band will be playing in The Black Cat from 8pm to closing on the 25th November. A bit of research show they are a covers band with a slight bias towards some milder punk music, and classic rock. I am going to do my best to go along, tooled up with my best camera and a flash gun in case the lighting is poor. I just hope they manage to pull in enough people to make the pub want to hire more bands in the future (but maybe not too crowded to make photography awkward).