The Met Office warns of rain, on a day when no rain is forecast. The BBC warn of strong winds, and the wind is very strong as I write this. They also predict one sunny spell at 5pm. The Met Office predict sunny spells for 10am (which seems unlikely when looking at the cloudy sky), and sunny spells for 3pm and 5pm - the latter being in agreement with the BBC, which could be a good thing. Both forecasters agree that 8° C is about all we can expect today. Tomorrow morning may start at just 2° C, but it could rise to 7° C, or maybe 8° C. The day may be dry, but not a single ray of sunshine is forecast to leak through even a tiny crack in the 100% cover of mostly white or light grey clouds.

    Yesterday was good on several levels. Maybe the best was that after good blood glucose readings in the morning I was free to eat, and eat less carefully (but still not without some thought about what I was eating). After finishing writing I washed my hair, and showered ready to face people other than myself.

  I mentioned yesterday that I wanted to go out shopping. I did go to Tesco, but I wish I had put on a warmer coat because it seemed really cold out. The cold air was starting to make me feel slightly wheezy by the time I got to Tesco - not enough to seem to restrict my breathing, but perhaps to make it very slightly noisy.  I had been hoping a brisk walk would feel good (within reasonable limits of "good"). It didn't. It seemed closer to a chore than a pleasure.
  Whisky was neither top or bottom of my shopping list, but I guess looking out for booze bargains was a definite feature of my shopping list (which in reality barely even existed in my brain).  I was happy to see that the ridiculous, but most beautifully attractive, special Clubcard price for one litre bottles of Haig was back on. A one litre bottle, bought with a Clubcard was just £23.50, or £6 less than the price of the smaller 70cl bottle. Needless to say, I bought one !

  Most of my imaginary shopping list was about salad stuff, but only to the extent of salad leaves and stuff to go with them. I bought another bag of iceberg lettuce, and a bag of baby leaf salad with rocket. I almost gave in and bought some tomatoes, but decided against them while my blood glucose has been harder to control recently. To go with the leaves I mostly went with chesses and some ham.

  I also bought some diced lamb and frozen sprouts. Maybe tonight, or maybe tomorrow I will have a hot dinner instead of a cold dinner, although the weather forecasts favour hot dinners for maybe the next fortnight or more! One oddity was a quiche for my lunch. It was no ordinary quiche. It was an edgeless quiche, and losing that extra pastry seemed to give it a very low sugar content.

  One thing I kept forgetting on recent visits to Tesco was small jars of Coleman's English mustard. Yesterday I remembered, and bought two jars. They should last quite a while. I worry that I would not get through a bigger, and probably cheaper by quantity large jar, and so stuck with the small jars. I also remembered to keep an eye out for Dunn's River hot pepper sauce. It is a bit fiercer than the usual pepper sauce that I like, and I bought a couple of bottles of it.

  It was nice to get home and out of the cold after finishing my shopping. The cold was getting to me on the way back. It might have been sensible to heat up the edgeless quiche I had for lunch, but sometimes I think they taste better when cold....but maybe not this time. It is probably just me and my worn out, and possibly Covid ravaged taste buds, but I enjoyed the texture of the bacon in the quiche, but I could barely taste it. The cheddar cheese taste barely crossed the threshold of no taste as well.

  I didn't have a lot to do after lunch, and I laid down to read, and tried to snooze. I am not sure if I snoozed or not. I definitely had my eyes closed, but I don't recall waking up for a snooze. Maybe I am still asleep and dreaming all this !  Eventually I did need to get off my bed, and do a few last minute things before Jodie arrived for a Sunday beer tasting session. Some of the beers were delicious, but one went mostly down the sink !


  I didn't mention that I also bought 4 cans of beer from Tesco as well as the food and whisky.  The silly thing is that I can't remember if the beer pictured on the left was very good, very bad, of merely "OK". What I do know was that the label, which had a sort of metallic sheen, that can't really be seen in the photo, was very groovy !

 Two of the cans Jodie brought over were very strange. One was an apricot and raspberry fruit pastry sour. It had the potential to be "interesting", but was so tart that I could barely feel my tongue after a couple of big sips, and I could hear my teeth dissolving. Jodie thought it was wonderful, but I poured half of mine down the sink.

  Another oddity was a Parma Violet flavoured cloudy beer. It seemed like it should have been nice (I used to like the little parma violet flavour sweet was used to but when I was only a kid), but it wasn't. I only drunk all my share (about a third of a can if I remember correctly) because the previous sour had numbed my taste buds enough to make it drinkable. One interesting thing is that when I rinsed my glass out there was still a quarter of an inch of "beer" in it that was thick with sediment. Once very diluted it really did smell like those little sweets we used to buy and enjoy.

  One of the best beers we had all after noon was one of several similar beers that have been in the fridge for 3 or 4 weeks now. It was Death By Chocolate Cup Cake. It had an intense chocolate flavour with added hints of a resinous tree, and another thing I can't remember. Second best was a Cinder Toffee flavoured stout. That slipped down a treat as well. As usual I had a few more beers than Jodie, and ended up slightly drunk, bit only slightly on this occasion.

  We knew it was due to happen, and Jodie came dressed appropriately for it - it was pouring with rain when Jodie left to get her 6.29pm train to get to Clockhouse station, and the Three Hounds bar just around the corner from the station. What a way to sober up ! As usual she was meeting Alan there for another beer or two before I think they planned to go home this time, and not be heading for a gig.

  Before Jodie left I put part one of my dinner in the mini oven to cook. It was a small pack of "southern fried" chicken strips. I must confess I didn't check, but my belief is that Tesco do not use sugar in their recipe like Aldi seem to do. They were moderately tasty, but it was not a lot bigger than a starter. I followed it with a sandwich made from very poorly sliced (it was a very weird shape that it was difficult to cat a couple of slices for sandwiches) rye and wholemeal sour dough bread.

  That bread seemed to be sugar free, but the ingredients list did mention barley malt - the same sugar substance that beer (and whisky) is brewed from. I almost got away with it. What I intended to construct was a cheese and iceberg lettuce, and mayonnaise sandwich, but it kept falling apart, and I probably ended up eating nearly half of it as two open sandwiches. It was sort of nice, and being stodgy it seemed quite filling.

  There was almost nothing on TV last night, and I eat my dinner watching a documentary that was about how Northern Ireland was a very important sea port during the second world war when food and supply convoys would race across the Atlantic, trying to avoid German U Boats, and getting to the safety of a home port. I don't think I had ever realised how important Northern Ireland was in that context, and I can imagine that even after the war it was still thought important enough that it fed through to the later "troubles" cause by the desire to keep it as part of Great Britain.

  I'm not sure when I went to bed, but I doubt it was much later than 8pm. It was mostly a case of it being more enjoyable to read in bed compared to trying to force myself to watch rubbish TV. I read for maybe an hour before trying for sleep, but I couldn't seem to get comfortable and/or relaxed. It was not obvious until around 1am, and even then still not desperately obvious, that I needed a poo. After fasting a lot of the day before yesterday it was no surprise that I didn't seem to need a poo yesterday morning, but by 1am this morning I did, and it was more than expected !

  After that it seemed modestly easy to get to sleep, but it didn't last long because I woke up just after 2am feeling cold. It was a bit of a cold night, and so I turned the heater up full. That still didn't seem to warm my bedroom up to a really comfortable level, but it was enough to sleep without needing too much duvet cover - too much felt too warm. I did a fair bit of dreaming last night, but I only seem to remember snippits of dreams.

  One dream was set at a slightly different looking London Bridge station. I think I was on my way home, but it seemed like there were few trains running. I did see a special train that seemed to have a string of carriage that hung beneath a girder as if they were part of a monorail, but the girder was attached to the chassis which the boogies were hung from. On reflection I wonder if my brain had invented a sort of tilting train of novel design.

  I seemed to spend a lot of the time at this London Bridge station sat at a table in the middle of one of the island platforms. I was using a small silver coloured laptop (presumably it was supposed to be a Macbook), although I can't remember looking at anything in  particular on it. For a while I was joined by Angela on the chair but one from me. We both looked at each other, and said things that I cannot remember. Then she wasn't there, and I saw a train departing from a different platform, and knew she must be on it. I also knew it was going to Catford Bridge, and knew I should have been on it.

  One other dream I can remember happened shortly before I woke up and got up this morning. It is very odd in so much as it seemed random in the extreme. I dreamed my old sister, still looking like I remember her before she got married, came into my bedroom to offer me half a dozen or more of small scented oil bottles, plus a page from a magazine suggesting ways to mix them for more interesting smells. It seemed my sister had experimented with them, got bored, and so dumped them on me. One oddity is that I knew I already had most of the oils, which in real life I have experimented with and got bored with them. That dream didn't seem to last more than 15 seconds.

  Despite getting to sleep, or at least proper sleep so late this morning, I still got up just after 6am, and strangely feel mostly OK. The first thing I did after getting up was to go for a proper morning poo. I was surprised it was so much after having been at 1am this morning. Even stranger is that I have just taken a break from writing to make another quite large deposit in the toilet. I feel sure I must eat without knowing it because some days it seems my output is greater than my input !

  I didn't try to keep my sugar consumption as low as possible yesterday, but I did try and avoid anything too obviously bad. In one respect that variability is reflected in my blood glucose readings this morning - one good, one not good, and one mildly bad ! The Contour meter read 8.7mmol/l. That is higher than desired, but in the OK area. The GlucoRX meter read a rather good 7.7mmol/l, and I would have liked to have all readings that low. The Sino Care read the highest at 9.0mmol/l. That puts it just in the very undesirable area, but really not that much different to the Contour's 8.7mmol/l.

  I think today I will not go mad, not go for fasting, but I will try to restrain my eating, or what forms part of what I eat.  I don't think I'll try fasting because today is looking like it could be an awful, boring, and tedious day. Not because anything is happening, but because nothing is happening. Although it will most probably be dry, it is still going to be very dull, and in the wind it will feel very cold. The forecasts say gusts of 40mph coming from the north, and this bloody cold. This is not weather for frolicking in the fields !

  One thing I have considered is going on a few trains, but it is so dull that photography will probably produce flat, rubbish pictures. I think I'll stay in. I have a got a bit of laundry to do - not a great deal, but worth doing while it will be less taxing. I still have TV recordings to top and tail, and remove the adverts before archiving (and probably watching). That, and hours of reading, seem enough to amuse me, but maybe not enough of a strong distraction to feeling hungry....although it would be good if it did.
 







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