I have yet to see any breaks in this morning's sunshine, and to my mind it is sunny, rather the the forecast sunny spells. This is actually recognised in the latest revision to the forecast. Whether full sunshine, or sunny spells, it is all due to end at midday with a few hours of rain - some of which might be heavy.From 3pm it might be dry, and 6pm may see some sunny spells. It will be another very cool day. My thermometers say it has only just reached 7° C, and earlier still we probably only dodged a frost by a couple of degrees. The current revision to the forecast says the temperature will reach 10° C by 1am, but after an hour or so it will start to cool off again. Tomorrow may feature a few sunny spells, and several hours of light rain. Most of the time should see white cloud, so it shouldn't be too gloomy, but it is going to be another cold day with a maximum of 10° C predicted for only a couple of hours. Of course a lot could change before tomorrow arrives !

   Yesterday morning was full of excitement, well, sort of, and yesterday afternoon felt tense and edgy - for the second day running. It seems there may have been a rather spooky reason for that, and I'll explain it further down the page today. Back to the morning, and one thing I was going to do, I didn't !

  Yesterday was the day the circus came to town in the form of a huge film crew who were videoing a mere few seconds, by my estimation, as part of an advert for M&S (known to my, and several later generations as Marks & Spencer). I had intended to wash my hair, and have a good scrub before going out to mingle among the film crew. In the end I just washed with a wet flannel, and I am glad I didn't go for the full shower and shampoo or I would have missed everything.

  Another thing that happened yesterday morning was getting a text message from my doctor's surgery to say my prescription was ready to collect from the pharmacy. That seemed unlikely consider they usually say to allow 48 hours after ordering a repeat prescription before it will be ready to be collected. It turned out to be the surgery being a bit premature, but as I'll explain a few paragraphs later, it all turned out rather well.
  My prime reason for wanting to be nosy during the filming was to have a look at their camera. The crew can often be very busy, often appearing to be doing nothing, but sometimes that is waiting to get orders or something, but most try and be friendly. When I asked if I could take some pictures of the camera they just to go for it. What I didn't know at this time is that they had finished filming here, and would be carrying all the gear into the park for more filming there.
  This picture of the other side of the camera looks pretty sharp, but I was sort of disappointed that I couldn't do in the movies, and zoom in deeply enough to read the fine print on the sided of the camera. I reckon I could zoom in 10 times on the original picture before stuff started showing signs of blur. That is pretty good, but not good enough !!

  I did learn a few things when studying these pictures. First of all the camera was (probably) hired from Panavision who are very big in the movie business. It seems the camera was operated by two people. In the top picture the man with the Mackeson sweat short may have been a camera technician - responsible for getting it ready to use, and approximately focussed, pointed in the right direction, and the exposure set.

   The actual cameraman may be the girl seen smiling at the side of the frame in the top picture, and also on the right of the second picture. She is wearing a grey sweatshirt, and is standing at a console that is certainly monitoring the camera, and I suspect has fine control over it, but of course this is all guesswork. If I had gone out at a better time they may have had time to talk to me.
  I knew what direction they were shooting at, but I have no idea of the scale of the picture they wanted. As far as I am aware, the video they shot could have been done on a still camera because I was told that no actors and extra were involved, it was just the bicycle seen leaning against a road sign (which has been taped over). I was told that they would electronically superimpose a billboard in post production.
  This is my best guess at what the final video will look like. One thing occurs to me as I write this is that they may have started with a long shot, similar to my first picture of this scene, and then zoomed into the bicycle. That would make using video, instead of using just a still picture, more likely. It is possible, maybe probable, that in post production that road name sign might get a fictitious name electronically added.
  If you could see the original, very high resolution version of this picture, you could zoom in, and count all the people it showed. At least two people are partly hidden, and for one of them all you can see is his feet. I think when I did the count up yesterday I counted 16  people. That is just those in this picture. I estimate the entire crew was at least double that. That is a lot of people for just a minute or so of video ! Apart from a nice slow, electronically controlled smooth zoom (in or out) I reckon I could have shot it in the same quality using my Nikon D610 locked down on my bed tripod - just one man and his camera !

  While I was out with my camera I was wearing my new £5.99 trainers I bought from Aldi the day before. They seemed quite comfortable. That was rather good, but I wasn't really doing much walking in them, and I had plenty of distractions. I decided I would wear them to walk to the pharmacy and back. It soon became apparent that they felt stiff, and needed breaking in. On the plus side they didn't seem to hurt my feet, but the stiffness did cause some ankle ache. I think they will need lots of little walks before I could trust them for longer walks,

  As I mentioned near the top of the page, I had received a text message from the surgery to say my prescription was ready to collect. That seemed very quick even for a repeat prescription. I was expecting the new drug I was prescribed by the hospital to take a good few days before a doctor approved it being locally prescribed. I walked to the surgery thinking I was probably wasting my time.

  When I was served at the pharmacy, fortunately by Monika, the nice Polish lady pharmacist who is usually very efficient, I apologized that I had turned up a day early, but I had this message.... She said it was for my new drug, and she remembered seeing it on the system ready to be printed out - which she did. She also said that if I didn't mind waiting 10 minutes she could make up my repeat prescription too because that had been authorised.

  I came away with my full repeat prescription, plus my new drug (which I won't be needing for maybe a month before the supply the hospital gave me runs out). That was reason to be happy, although I was slightly distracted by the effort to try and keep up a fair pace while wearing my new, stiff shoes. When I got home I looked, and felt for other damage those new shoes might have done, and fortunately I could find none. I think/hope they could be good walking shoes once I have broken them in.

  Once I had stacked my drugs away, and got into indoor "slouching" clothes I had a sort of lunch - even though I had originally said I was going to try and fast until dinnertime. That lunch was two packs of Aldi's "Protien Balls". They were little, marble sized, meat balls and each pack had a different flavour. One was BBQ, and the other was "spicy". The potentially good thing is that seemed to contain very little sugar, although things like saturated fat were very high.

  I tried to relax after that, but like the afternoon before I felt very edgy. The simple explanation was the comedown after an exciting morning, but somehow it felt different to that. It sounds all weird and spooky, but it felt like I was detecting someone in trouble. It must have been 10 or 15 years ago that I felt a very weird sensation, and I made a mental note of the time. Perhaps it was just coincidence, but a few days later I found it was the same time that 7000 miles away, Patricia had just learned that her dad had died. I think I might have emailed her to ask if everything was all right?

  The feeling I had yesterday, and the day before was sort of more vague than the time Patricia lost her dad, but it did turn out that Patricia had another shock that left her feeling very sad. I had mentioned my strange feeling on a well known social media site. I thought that maybe Angela was in trouble, and that if she read it she might contact. She didn't, but Patricia did respond via Whatsapp. Once again she confirmed it was her who was in deep emotional stress. Her sister, who she has been trying to help for various things had just been diagnosed with a mental illness - one that is very difficult to fix, but there is hope that her life can be improved.

  All this "telepathy" is very, very weird, and I am not sure if I am imagining it or not. I know I was often able to sense Angela's mood when I was in weekly contact with her. Sometimes I just knew she was feeling sad or low well before she would admit it, but that was just from a few miles away. From 7000 miles away, diagonally across the Atlantic ocean, to Argentina, is a long way for the "waves" to travel.

  It was some relief to hear from Patricia, but that was mid evening. I still had to get through the afternoon. I really had to force myself to do some more video editing of my off-air TV recordings. I did the last few The Avengers recordings with little enthusiasm, and trying to work out which episode of "Guitar Heroes At The BBC" I had recorded really pissed me off. I gave up in the end because it was soon obvious that had been savagely edited down for showing on Great TV! in the small hours of the morning. The start title sequence should show what "episode" it was, but it seems like they had edited on the wrong sequence to some episodes. I found a list of episodes and the guitarist/bands that appeared in each episode, but some got missed out, and I am not convinced that other had been added from other episodes. It seem such a mess that I decided I couldn't be bothered to do more than one episode.

  Eventually dinnertime rolled around, and I had a most unusual dinner. It was a sort of experiment that almost worked. The main dish was nothing more than boiled potatoes with half a can of butter beans. Both had a light glaze of real butter, but also some mayonnaise. It was sort of nice, but a bit stodgy. I think it was moderately low sugar. My dessert was probably a bit more extensive, with a larger dose of sugar. I must admit it was more than I really needed. That dessert was one medium sized apple, a medium sized, very ripe, and so quite sweet tasting, Conference pear. The final thing was a medium large juicy orange.

  An hour after eating I got curious and checked my blood glucose level. It was just a single meter, and it gave a very high reading of 12.9mmol/l. That was not too surprising after just eating, although if I had missed out at least the juicy orange, it might have been a fair bit lower. It was either an hour or two later that I rechecked my blood glucose, and it was down to 9.4mmol/l, and out of the danger zone. That gave me some hope for this morning's readings.

  Last night the outside temperature dropped quite low, and with the heater on low my bedroom was just warm enough to be comfortable when doing stuff, but when sleeping it was cool enough that I managed to sleep almost the whole night under the duvet. It was only in the last hours of the morning that I turned the heater up, and ended up sleeping the last hour or so of the night partly uncovered.

  It was curious that some bits of dream I seem to remember were all about being cold, or maybe just cool. I can't really remember any more details about any dreams, although I do have a strong impression that I was dreaming a lot. I also seem to think that some dreams may have been repeats, although if I could remember any details it might be the case that they were not the same, but variants on a basic theme.

  I think I knew that my blood glucose measurements were not going to be good this morning. Somehow it seemed a more definite thing than the vague worry about it I often get. This morning I was definitely right, although it was not exactly terrible. The Contour meter read 8.3mmol/l. Until I had the run of unusually good readings I would have considered that good. The GlucoRX meter did show an "in the green" reading of 7.8mmol/l, and if that were accurate it would be very good.

   The Sinocare meter more agreed with the Contour meter, and on my second try, because the first was very high, it settled on 8.8mmol/l. Once again, I would have thought that was fine last month, but this month it is another spoiler to a good string of readings. The rolling average for this month is 8.17mmol/l, and at least that is still lower than any month for the last three years. So although I've slipped a few days, I seem to still be doing better since I had my stay in hospital, and my new drug (which has nothing to do with diabetes !).

  The great excitement today (I hope) is my usual visit to The Jolly Farmers at lunchtime. It is Kevin's birthday today, and I should have offered to meet him for a swift half in his current favourite pub, The Blythe Hill Tavern, but today will be the last chance to wish Ayse, my favourite barmaid, good luck before she has a very short stay in hospital for whet hopefully will be a minor operation. It is possible that Kevin may surprise me by turning up in The Jolly Farmers. If that is the case it was good I got my repeat prescription yesterday, and won't be presenting myself at the pharmacy drunk this afternoon !
      







2716 words today