The lowest figure I saw on one of my outside thermometers at about 7.30am was -0.3° C. It could warm up to 5° C for a few hours today, perhaps helped by two hours of sunny spells (midday and 1pm according to the latest revision). The rest of the day will be either dull, or very dull, with a 10% chance of rain. By 11pm the temperature will be down to just 1° C. It is worth noting that The BBC weather forecast says a possible 3 hours of sunny spells today. Tomorrow will continue the cold with both early morning, and late evening seeing temperature close to, or even under zero ! Once again the BBC offers several hours more of sunny spells. Further ahead, they seem sure that Sunday will be cold enough for some sleet.

   Yesterday was quite a good day, although it didn't end that well. I shall describe the gruesome details about that later. The morning sunny spells were a good source of inspiration to do a bit more than planned. Once I had had the full trio of shave, shampoo and shower, I felt fine to meet the outside world.

  My first destination was to go to Catford Bridge station to pick up a copy of The Metro. I did this a lot earlier than usual because I wasn't heading for Ladywell, and the Jolly Farmers. I had heard from Kevin that although he couldn't leave home until 1.30pm, he would be meeting my in the Wetherspoons, and the crossword would be useful if I got there earlier, and had some time to kill - which turned out to be the case.
  I was only at Catford Bridge station for maybe 5 minutes, and that was because I noticed the next Hayes (Kent) train was due in a couple of minutes. It turned out to be 376018, and it was one I didn't have a photo of. I have now, and it has been entered into my huge ledger/spreadsheet. I had to take the picture with my phone, but it turned out to be as good as using a proper camera because the conditions were so good.

  After the station I wandered down to Poundstretcher. There were several things I thought I might buy, but top of my list was tubs of crispy fried onions. I was sure I had bought a single tub from there, but the last time I looked I couldn't find them again. I came to believe I might have bought them elsewhere, but yesterday I spotted them again. I bought three tubs this time so I have a small stock of them in case they disappear again.

  As usual, I also bought a selection of instant noodles. I have not got around to comparing prices, and it would be difficult to do because Poundstretcher has noodles I don't see anywhere else, and so a fair comparison is impossible. All I know is that they feel like they are quite cheap - cheap in price but not quality. I like them ! One "naughty" purchase was a six pack of beef flavour crisps. I though a few packets stuffed inside me would help buffer the beer I would soon be drinking.

  As Kevin said, he didn't leave home until just gone 1.30pm, and I guess it was a 10 minute walk to the pub. I was there not long after 1.15pm. That gave me time to complete the quick crossword in The Metro, and maybe 3 or 4 cryptic clues, while drinking my first pint of beer. I had the last mouthful of that pint just as Kevin arrived. One notable feature of the pub was that like the Jolly Farmers last week, their heating had failed. They had a few electric heaters around the place, but they didn't even seem to get the place warm enough for coatless drinking.
  We initially had two guest beers to try. My first pint was of Twickenham "Winter Star". It was a bit thin, and not very strong for a winter ale, but it was very nice. The Windsor & Eton "Knight Of The Garter" was also pretty good. A bit later a third guest ale came on, and that too was very nice. It was Sambrook's "Tomahawk". Perhaps it wasn't quite as good as the other two, but with it, it took my final dose up to 5 pints (but possibly just 4).

  Once again it was great to have anther session with Kevin, but this time we stuck to self imposed rules of no spirits, just beers, and not staying out too late. Kevin is obviously feeling a lot better after being so ill for a lot of the year. he was proposing that we ought to do some rail trips to a few exotic places. The only thing that slightly puts me off is that all his suggestions centre around visiting certain pubs. I would rather have the beers once back in Catford, but we'll see how it goes whenever we do our first trip, and that will all depend on the day of the week, and the weather.

  Although it was a comparatively light session, it did go on for quite some time, and I missed all of Star Trek: The original series episode on last night. It was just after 6pm when I got home. One thing I did was to pop into the kebab shop almost next door to the pub, and order a large chicken shish kebab to be picked up after I had finished my pint. It was nice to bring home a hot meal.

  The only trouble was that it did not satisfy me. I thought it was just the beer making me feel hungry. It would turn out that I had misdiagnosed how I was feeling. I wondered if the solution was to have something I knew to have a low sugar content. It was a sachet of lentils in a curry inspired sauce. I had bought it, and a similar sachet of dark lentils in sauce, from Poundstretcher out of curiosity.

  The reality was that while both were sort of tasty, they seemed to be mostly sauce/gravy with little solid content. If there were in a bowl I could have drunk them, but I was spooning them off a flat plate, and that left quite a bit of the sauce behind. I still didn't feel satisfied, and so I shoved a sachet of kidney beans in a Mexican inspired sauce in the microwave. I had bought that sachet in Aldi (I think) earlier in the year. It was nice-ish, but what I didn't realise was that it was in foil lined bag, and so there were fireworks in the microwave oven !

  As I watched Star Trek: Voyager my vague feeling of hunger mutated into a feeling of churning guts. The actual problem is that I had been semi constipated the day before, and my output was not prodigious yesterday morning.  It definitely was last night ! I spent as much as an hour pacing backwards and forwards between my PC and toilet. It all went through the four classic phases: A bit soft, mud, gravy and then rusty water !

  I was not 100% sure it was all over when I went to bed. Fortunately it didn't disturb my sleep. What did disturb it was that it was a very cold night. For a while it was mostly my legs that felt far too hot under the duvet, but it felt freezing to leave them uncovered. By 2am, or possibly earlier, I turned the heater on full blast. It was an extravagant thing to do, but at least I got some good sleep out of it....or seemed to.

  I do wonder if I was awake more than I realised. I was having a dream, or dreams, on a very odd subject. They were about chicken wire frame and Papier-mâché covering dinosaurs or monsters. I am unsure what my role in the dream was. I seemed to be either directing the work, of just making suggestions about how it should be done. What was confusing was a sort of blur between reality and dream. Sometimes I seemed to be awake thinking about it, and suggesting the storyline should include Drashigs (from the Dr Who universe) and also some Klingon inspired monsters (from the Star Trek universe). Maybe I was not awake for those moments, and they were all part of the dreams.

  When I got up I felt it slightly suspicious that I didn't seem to feel hungry as I expect to. One possible reason was despite all I did the previous night, I seemed to go to the toilet perfectly normally this morning, and maybe there is more to come. Of course all those lentils and beans I had last night are going to inspire something or another, sooner or later !

  The other reason for not feeling proper hunger was that my blood glucose was a bit high this morning. This morning it was the turn of the Contour meter to give the highest reading. It said 9.5mmol/l. I suspect it may not have been a clean reading, but I didn't take it again because the Sino Care meter read 9.0mmol/l. The GlucoRX meter read a far more safe reading of just 8.5mmol/l. I thought I would leave it as that, rather than taking second readings, because the monthly average of the daily averages was just 8.22mmol/l, and that is the lowest end of month average so far this year, and lower than the end of year averages of the previous two years.

  It is possible, although maybe not that likely, that I will go out this morning for more shopping. I still fancy having a rummage around Aldi sooner or later. The more definite is a beer tasting session with Jodie and Michael this afternoon. There are a few potentially very good beers in the fridges, and many others that could turn out to be rather special.