Most of today will be just 6° C. The day should stay dry despite the sky being overcast, or dark grey all day long ! It is possible there may have been a light shower in the night because the road outside looked slightly damp when I opened the curtains this morning. Tomorrow could be similar to today, but it will be a bit colder. Most of the day will see 3 or 4° C, but it might briefly (a single hour) peak at 5° C.

    I guess most of yesterday could be called good, except for Michael. He sent me a message saying he was getting his wife taken to hospital, and later on I read that he had been waiting for 14 hours in the hospital. That obviously was no fun at all.

  Sometimes on a Thursday I like to dash out to Tesco, or sometimes Aldi, but I had (and have) more than enough for 3 or 4 dinners here, and so I didn't need to go out for more. The end result is that I had a very lazy morning. After the usual couple of hours of writing this stuff I had a rest, and that rest included a brief snooze - at least I think it did, but it was probably for no more than 5 minutes before I felt the urge to have a shower.

  It was a bit later than that when Michael contacted me about getting his wife to hospital, and so I wouldn't be seeing him early in the afternoon as usual. it also meant we wouldn't be seeing him later in the afternoon, but I would be seeing Jodie, and so I would need a shower sooner or later (if I was seeing no one I might not have bothered). After my shower I went back to resting, but not snoozing. Mostly I did some quiet reading.

  It would have been easy to get carried away, and spent half the afternoon resting in one way or another, but I suddenly remembered I had some washing up to do - which included the beer glasses we would be using later. The one thing I didn't need to do was to prepare any dinner - it was part two of my Indian takeaway from the previous day, and so only needed heating up before eating.

  Apart from Jodie missing her train again (this time blamed on long queues at her local Tesco), and turning up over half an hour late, the afternoon beer tasting session went quite well. The secret was that Jodie had brought me a copy of The Metro, and while she was engrossed on her phone, and ignoring me, I did the crosswords. It was slightly unusual in that for a while the cryptic crossword seemed easier than the quick crossword. At the end I only had a couple of unsolved clues in each crossword.

  Most of the beers were tried were acceptable or even nice, but of course one of Jodie's favourites was almost undrinkable to my palate. We were mainly going through more Xmas beers. In theory, even those with crown caps, which can slowly allow air in to oxidize the beer, should be OK for a year of storage, and the canned beers should usually be good for a couple of years, but apart from one or two specials, I doubt any will survive the next couple of weeks.

  Jodie left to get her usual 6.30pm train to Clockhouse where she would meet Alan in The Three Hounds. As soon as she left I warmed up part one of my dinner - chicken pathia with pilau rice. Part two was a large, but apparently still a side dish, mushroom bhaji with the remains of the pilau rice. It was very tasty, and initially seemed to have no negative effects. I ate it while watching Star Trek.

  I ended up watching quite a bit of assorted TV last night. As well as a couple of Star Treks, there was an episode of The Simpsons, two episodes of QI (one was a QIXL), and an edition of Have I Got New For You.  The last one finished at 10pm (or was it 11pm ?.....hmm, it might have been). I went straight to bed after, and didn't even bother to read. Instead I lay in bed feeling uncomfortably bloated. I think my hot dinner induced some fermentation in my gut (somehow).

  As I lay in bed trying to find a comfortable position I was releasing more and more very aromatic farts !  They definitely had more than a whiff of curry about them, but it must have been the previous night's curry. One big problem with the bloated feeling was that I was also burping up curry flavour burps, and with them came acid indigestion. That caused chest pain, and the chest pain was made worse by tossing and turning in bed. Some antacid tablets half calmed that pain down, and a couple of paracetamol tablets helped some of the typical pains from my ribs and scar tissue - but it took at least an hour to kick in.

  Meanwhile, with my top taken care of, I was still farting copious quantities of fart gas, and my belly pain was still there. I think it was around 1am, after several useless visits to the toilet that there was some useful "action".  My initial hope was that just the single visit would be enough, but that is rarely the case, and definitely not the case in the early hours of this morning. It did provide some crude amusement though.

  Maybe "amusement" should be read as a scare ! After my chest pains were fading away I was curious as to what my blood pressure may be. I sat down, put the pressure cuff on my wrist, and pressed the start button. At the same time I felt a surge of pressure in my bottom. I discovered that clenching the buttocks to stop early leakage can really raise the blood pressure. Maybe the fear of not being able to clench the buttocks hard enough didn't help either. The blood pressure meter went right up to a systolic pressure of 186mmhg, and that is well inside the danger zone. It was also a dangerous very fast walk to the toilet once the blood pressure meter had done its job.

  It seems that second visit to the toilet was all that was needed, but I stayed up until 2am before going back to bed. During the wait I was quietly reading some technology news on the internet, and after doing that for about 10 minutes I rechecked my blood pressure. it was still a tiny bit high, but a systolic pressure of 124mmhg is nothing to worry about. Soon after 2am I was fast asleep in bed. On the whole I slept well.

  Towards the end of the night I had a dream about being in a pub. I didn't recognise it as any I have visited in real life, but it seemed very familiar in the dream. I asked for a pint of their special strong beer. Unless you were a regular you wouldn't know it existed. It was served from what looked like a keg dispenser, but was a well disguised hand pump. The glass the barman got for it looked dirty, and I said I was coming behind the bar to personally wash it under the tap. There seemed no problem with that. The barman filled my newly cleaned glass, and the beer was delicious.

  When I paid of it I handed over a £20 note, but it was a new style, and had a large area of gold leaf on it. I said to take for two pints because I was definitely going to have another. My change included some brand new £1 coins that were so new and shiny that they looked like gold, and I also got two 50p special edition coins as well - neither of which I had in my collection.

  What  nice friendly dream !  Having effectively got to sleep so late I did everything I could to sleep for as long as possible. I don't think I slept all that much in the last hour, but I forced myself to stay in bed until 8.50am. That is exceptionally late for me. It was not long before I was doing my morning blood glucose checks. There were two amazing things about it. The first was all readings scraped under the 9.0mmol/l barrier - which seemed very good after beer and curry. The other amazing thing is that all three meters gave an identical reading of 8.9mmol/l - which is only just under 9.0mmol/l, but good enough to be mostly ignorable.

  I have to admit I ignored it a bit too much because I had two big bowls of instant noodles for breakfast this morning. One, curiously enough, was called "jumbo size" despite being smaller than the 100gm kimchi flavour instant noodles which was my other one. Both were very nice, but maybe I feel a bit full and sluggish now. Oh well, no worries because I wasn't planning on doing anything today. I did have a fanciful idea that it would be nice going to a gig in Raynes Park this evening.

   The gig, by the band Ransom, is probably only 5 or 6 minutes walk from Raynes Park station, and the station itself is only two stops down the line from Earlsfield where I used to go to for work for about 8 years. It is a very familiar route, and one I didn't like doing in the dark even as a commuter. I am not sure why I had even considered it as a possibility, and even less so when it is all nasty and cold out tonight.