The forecast for today has a similar theme from both The BBC and The Met Office - it is going to be a very dull day, and it will rain this afternoon. It is the timing and strength of rain that seem to be unpredictable. The BBC adds some drizzle at 11am, but proper rain starting at 1pm and finishing at 6pm. They say light rain. The Met Office bunch all their rain up to be heavy rain from 2pm until 5pm, with maybe an hour of light rain after that. As well as being very dull, and sometimes wet, the temperature will only rise to 12° C, although at least that is three degrees higher than yesterday. The BBC also adds some strong winds this morning, and for the first half of the afternoon. A perfectly horrible day. Tomorrow will still see 12° C, but it should be brighter, and there should be less rain. There might even be a sunny spell or two.

  I made a terrible mistake yesterday. One whose impact will be felt this morning ! Other than that I had a fairly good day. In fact it could be described as a great day because I finally seemed to be feeling well, and able to do, and enjoy I didn't feel up to previously.

  I had decided I was going to go out for the first time in 6 days, although initially I didn't know if that was going to be a quick shopping trip, or something more ambitious. I preparation for that I had a nice hot shower, although I didn't wash my hair or have a shave. After that I made my tragic mistake. I put some laundry in to soak in detergent with the idea that I would do the rinses and fabric conditioner a bit later.


  Like a lot of the day it was bright yesterday morning, and there were a few proper sunny spells. They were enough to spur me on to go for a walk. I know that after 6 days of inactivity, and weeks, if not months of not doing any proper walking, it would probably be wise not to be too ambitious.

  I decided the best option was to go for a walk through the park to Ladywell, and than walk back again. It had the advantage that if I did start to have any difficulties I could loop back towards home in many places without having to walk back the way I had just come.

  I found I felt better than expected, but still a bit frail. I ended up taking it quite easy, but mainly by virtue of stopping to take photos now and then, and even stopping for a short chat with a couple of people.

  I was wearing my warmest winter coat without a hood, and I definitely kept my chest warm on the outside. Breathing in cold air did seem to start a feeling like my chest was going to hurt, but apart from an occasional mild twinge, I never did experience the sort of chest pains that were building up when I walked home from the pub last Wednesday. Those pains were worrying, but I now believe they were caused, or at least made to feel worse by the filthy disease I seemed to be suffering from. It does seem feasible that it was one of the new very mild forms of Covid.

  It was nice being able to take some fresh photos even if the subjects were a bit hackneyed. I had taken my Canon EOS 600D camera with 28 to 300mm zoom lens. There were times when a 600mm zoom would have been useful, but I wasn't even using full zoom to snap these ring necked parakeets together up a tree.
  A bit more zoom would have enabled a closer picture of this single parakeet. Although it is now easy to see these birds now the trees have no leaves, they still rarely present an unobstructed view.
  I have no idea of the name of this shrub (although I think I might have done once), but I do know that the yellow fronds of loads of mini flowers looked really bright in the slightly dim and hazy light. If there were red, or maybe blue, as more contrasty compared to the leaves it could have been a truly spectacular winter scene.
  This was a panned picture of a dog that is not 100% perfect. The idea was to pan the camera as the dog races past so the dog was in focus and sharp, while the background had motion blur. Sadly it looks like the dog is in soft focus. It is a skill I have yet to full master, but I am getting better. I was actually inspired to use the technique when I saw some pictures of steam railway locomotives in sharp focus while the background was just a streaky blur.

  Those pictures were taken in the days when film speed was quite low, and the photographer had to use almost a long exposure while keeping the camera pointing at the fast moving train. It is possible those old photographers did have an advantage over me. They were taking the pictures from a fair distance, and so the movement needed to track the train for hal a second or something, was much smaller, and they may have had a heavy camera on a heavy tripod to help keep things more steady. The dog in my picture raced past me like a dervish, and my camera was just hand held.
  This picture was just taken with a fast shutter. It had frozen the movement of the nice dog as it played with the ugly dog. The man in the HiVis coat was trying to call his pretty (black and white Alsation type of dog) to heel, but it was enjoying itself too much. The womanis not looking too worried because he ugly dog could probably rip the legs off the nice dog if things turned nasty. Maybe that is what the man was more worried about.
  There were no trains yesterday, and Ladywell station looks bleak and deserted.
  I would have hoped that the customer information screens at Ladywell might have had some actual useful information. Maybe something along the lines of "No trains today, Boxing day, but train services resume tomorrow, Wednesday 27th December 2023". I guess that was too much for some clerk to type.
  This lady was sitting in a cold park on a cold park bench singing hymns at the top of her voice. I am unsure what language she was using, but it may have been East European, and likely of Christian origin. It didn't sound like the sing song, guttural tone of something Arabic, and I don't think it was Jewish either. It seemed an odd way to enjoy a few hours at the park, but each to their own.

  I didn't seem to find any good photo opportunities as I walked back home from Ladywell. I did make several attempts at catching some gulls in flight, but my camera kept focussing on the trees in the background. It almost could have been a hard slog towards home, but every time I began to feel some strain I found a good reason to stop. On one occasion it was to talk to three men on one of the river bridge. They were speculating about fish in the river. It seemed easy to butt in and say that there definitely fish in the river, enough to feed a heron that was often seen nearby, and for a few people who fished from the banks at some times of the year.

 As I approached home I began to feel my legs starting to feel fatigued. It seemed that I had chose my route wisely....on the other hand there have been many time I had finished a longer walk with my legs really aching, but those were times when I was very sure about my capabilities, and was deliberately pushing myself to walk longer and longer distance - also when cold air wasn't going to start my chest aching.

  One thing was for sure, I had kept the outside of my chest warm. It was partly due to my high blood glucose as well as being genuinely hot under my coat, that I was feeling quite sticky with sweat when I got home. When I took my coat off I pulled the sleeves inside out so they could dry off. That sweating also left me being slightly dehydrated, and that showed up in a big way when I checked my blood glucose. Instead of going down, as might be expected after drawing on that blood glucose for energy, the readings had gone up even higher than they were in the morning. That was annoying, but at least I thought I understood the mechanism.

  The first thing I did once I had got back into indoor clothes was to transfer the pictures I had taken to my PC. I hadn't eaten any breakfast, and after all the fresh air I was feeling very hungry. There were a few things I could have eaten that would have been much more healthy, but I went for about the most unhealthy I could imagine. I knew I had to use up the last nan bread from my Xmas eve Indian takeaway, and I used it up yesterday afternoon for lunch. I converted it into a pizza with a very generous covering of cheese with some herbs and stuff. It was very big, very cheesy, and very delicious.

  Once I had eaten my "pizza", and selected and edited all the photos, I layed down on my bed, read for a bit, and then was almost snoozing when my phone rang, it was a mate from the past, and we had a catch phone call that lasted about 3 hours. By the time we finished I had missed most of one Star Trek, and I was feeling almost hungry again despite stuffing myself with home made, ersatz pizza.

  Fortunately, while waiting for that pretend pizza to cook I did the last bit of preparation of my dinner, slicing a leek into the lamb I had stewed 2 days earlier (with a good boil to kill any bugs on the second day). I gave that a 15 minute blast in the microwave, and it just needed 4 minutes to heat it up again just before I ate it. I have to admit it was not that nice. Over half, maybe 2/3rd of it was leek, and so a little boring.

  All I could find on TV last night was the two Star Treks I watched. 7pm seemed to be too early for bed, and yet I initially couldn't think of anything else to do. Then I hit on the idea of looking at my boxing day comments back from when I first started this blog. I was looking to see how I had fared on the previous Xmas day. Some of the early ones were not bad because for quite a few years on the trot I had a lunchtime drink with Kevin, and occasionally others, but that seemed to fizzle out after 5 or so years.

  There were then some years where all I seemed to do all day was to play about trying old versions of Linux on old PCs, with varying degrees of success - almost all day long. I think it was in 2016, after I had had my serious "fling" with Angela (when the future had looked really bright for a while), and Angela had dumped me for the man dying of cancer, she still remained very close and was still thinking of me by phoning me up on Xmas morning to wish me happy Xmas. It was apparently quite a long call. The next year the man with cancer had died, and "lover boy" was actually pissing off Angela by being annoyingly persistent in trying to chat her up again, but she still gave me a Xmas Day phone call. It wasn't as good as seeing her, but at the time it still lifted my spirits.

  Since then I have had one or two xmas lunchtime drinks, but I have spent more Xmas days out of touch with anyone at all. I can't say I completely like the idea, but long practice, including during Covid when I sometime went weeks without seeing anybody, has left my comfortable of being alone and isolated. I now treat Xmas day as like just another boring and tedious Sunday.

  It was about 9pm when I went to bed, but it was some time before I fell asleep. Apart from waking up around 3am, and feeling cold (I put the heater on full blast before going back to sleep) I seemed to sleep quite well, although I did seem to have a dream that seemed to last forever. In reality I know it probably wasn't even a continuous dream, but lots of "scenes" on a common theme.

  This dream was set at work, although my workplace seemed to have something more like a shop front, but with most of the work taking place upstairs. I knew it was going to be some special occasion, and it was all being organised as a surprise by one of the woman there who wanted to make a name for herself. I assumed it was with the owners permission, but he was nowhere to be seen on this day.

  I arrived at work to see that the interior of the downstairs area had been hung with random net curtains with coloured lights on them. It looked sort of pretty, but I couldn't quite see what it was all about. It seems it had no special purpose beyond beyond looking pretty, and maybe sort of dreamy too, but all the action was taking place upstairs. There was food and drink up there, and half of one room had been kept clear.

  That clear space was to be for a performance area. The woman organiser, along with a few other from the same department, and maybe a few from organisers former work which was arts and crafts based, performed what were supposed to be comedy skits. A few were sort of amusing, and others were difficult to decipher. As well as these short skits, there were other scenes in this long lasting, or so it felt, dream that are too difficult to describe - including one that was probably supposed to be sexual, but somehow wasn't.

  This morning, probably thanks to my pizza-like lunch, but possibly partly thankful to an excess of leek, my blood glucose readings were still too high, but not quite as high as the day before. I seem to recall the last time I had ordered an unwise takeaway it took 3 or 4 days to shake off the resulting high readings. My best reading today was 9.2mmol/l, and that is not awful, but still way too high. Two more meters read a similar 9.3mmol/l, and the fourth one went out on a limb and read 9.9mmol/l. At least all of them were below the read line (10.0mmol/l).

  This morning, despite the high readings, I have had a breakfast of one packet of instant noodles. This is because I am going for my usual Wednesday lunchtime drink in The Jolly Farmers. I expect I'll only have 2 pints of Guinness, but it is good to be prepared ! The only troubles at the moment are a late start, and I had a lot to write about this morning. Then there is the stupid mistake I made yesterday - thinking I could finish doing my laundry when I was hungry and tired.

  Before I can have a shower, and if it seems I have time to squeeze it in, to wash my hair as well, I have to get my big washing buckets out of the bath. I'll have to rinse out the freezing cold soapy water, and then put the second bucket with the wrung out stuff outside the bath, along with the now emptied bucket so I can use the bath for showering. Once that, and maybe my hair is done, I can fill the bucket with the clothes in with water that will be the first rinse.

  I can't imagine I'll have time to do any more to that laundry until much later. I doubt I will have any time to go to Tesco, as I had once imagined I might do. In fact I'll barely have time to go to the mini supermarket on Catford Bridge on my way to the station to (hopefully) pick up two copies of The Metro, and then get the train to Ladywell. There are a few useful things I can get from the little supermarket - including a couple of small trays of Turkish Delight in assorted flavours that I intend to present to Ayse my favourite barmaid for looking after us so well - including something very much like waitress service to our tables.