09:21 BST

  There was some good news about yesterday. I made it to the pub and back at lunchtime, but more about that soon. There was also some bad news. While I was having a morning shower I saw evidence that my latest patch over the crack in my bath was leaking again. One of today's jobs will be to fix it again.

  One other thing about my shower was that I had it at the full temperature that the tap can supply. That is a sure sign that we are now almost in winter. I guess I'll be turning up the temperature of the water heater soon, and start burning through some of the large credit built up on my gas payments. One other thing I'll need to do sooner or later is to close the bathroom window for the winter. It was quite a chill breeze blowing on my wet naked body yesterday morning.

  After getting clean and dressed I left to go to Catford Bridge station in plenty of time. I made sure I took a couple of paracetamol to help any aches and pains I might suffer from - particularly possible from my legs and leg joints. I also took a 300mg Aspirin dissolved in water as a possible aid against angina. Maybe these things worked because I arrived at Catford Bridge station generally feeling OK.

  I must admit that yesterday I managed to walk a tiny bit slower than usual. I am continuing to practice slow walking, and getting better. I can now manage to hold it to 3mph and even a bit less for minutes at a time, but I have to keep reminding/forcing to slow down when I start to speed up to my more normal speed of 3.3mph ! My timing was still such that I could only spend about 30 seconds resting on platform 2 before crossing to platform 1 for my train.

  It was actually the 12:19 train that I got instead of the 12:34. More unusual is that I went up and over the footbridge and felt basically OK the other side, although I could feel I was very close to suffering because of it, and I couldn't have walked very far before I would have felt worse. It is amazing how variable my angina can be, but it does seem that it is happening less lately, although I am getting some other similar pains in some circumstances.

  The walk from Ladywell station to the pub, which is a lot shorter than home to the station, can occasionally cause some trouble, but once again it was generally uneventful. I arrived at the pub early, and Ayse (my favourite barmaid) mentioned it. I had two pints of Guinness in the pub, and just managed to finish the quick crossword in The Metro, but the cryptic crossword may have been written in Martian for all the sense I could make of it.

  I think it was just after I ordered my second pint that a message came through on my phone to say my Amazon order had been delivered. I was tempted to rush home as fast as possible, but I wanted to finish my pint at my leisure, plus I knew I could not rush home. I persuaded myself to be relaxed about it, and accept my small package was either well hidden, or had already been stolen.
  On my way back to Ladywell station I noticed this squirrel posing on the top of a small tombstone in the graveyard behind St Mary's church. I am not sure why, but he (or she) looks to be quite old to me. It was after I had prepared this photo to show here and closed the photo editor, that I saw my back garden through my garden TV camera, and saw movement. I don't know how many years I have had that TV camera, but yesterday was only the second time I have ever seen a squirrel in my back garden - not that it stayed long. I saw it in the process of leaping across the garden, up the fence, across two shed roofs, and then out of sight.
  While waiting for a train back to Catford Bridge this 4 car train went through the station non stop. There seems to be a regular train movement at around this time, and my guess is that one train a day goes in for some special maintenance, and this is part of the route it takes. I thought this particular train photo was one for my big spreadsheet of trains photographs. It would have been a second picture of this train because I thought the first was an old picture from when the doors were painted yellow, and not light blue (which can just about be seen in this photo). It was an error I didn't realise until I was filling in the last details in the spreadsheet. It was actually 465008 that I had photographed with yellow doors (and light blue doors).

  The walk from Catford Bridge station to home was not completely pain free, although it wasn't too bad. I took it easy, despite the lure of my Amazon packet hidden next to the gas meter (as I later found). I think if I had rushed it would have triggered an angina attack. As it was, I merely felt the fist hints of oncoming pain. I was still very happy to get indoors to stop walking, and of course to open my Amazon packet.

  Inside that packet was a bottle of Chromium food supplement pills that may or may not help my body process sugar a bit better. There was a little box of 50 blood glucose test strips for my GlucoRX meter. The new tripod head with mobile phone holder looked to be fair quality, and I hope it will last longer than the one I bought from the 99p shop. The final item was a pack of two little lozenge shape bluetooth remote camera shutter buttons for mobile phones.

  The curious thing about those Bluetooth buttons is that they looked identical to the one I already had, but seemed to feature a different makers name. They still showed up on the phone as "AB Shutter 3", but they have different MAC addresses, and so each has to be separately paired. The final curious thing is that I feel sure that the pack of two buttons cost about the same, and maybe less than I paid for a single one. It is my intention to carry one with me, and keep a spare at home. I might offer the second from the pack of 2 to Jodie, but she probably would not be able to understand why one might be needed.

  I was feeling edgy soon after getting home. It was because I had agreed that I would take my camera along to Dik's house to take some pictures of his (current) band. Knowing how close I had come to suffering from angina just walking from the station, I was dreading how painful it would probably be walking up the hill to Dik's house.

  The stress of that was enough to make things even worse by making me feel hungry. Some of it must have been the two pints of Guinness - I usually feel quite peckish after getting back from the pub. I was thinking of just having a can of soup, and that would have been very sensible because it would warm me up when I was feeling cold, but I had rice crackers and cheese, plus other stuff. I can't remember all I ate, but I know it was a lot of stuff that individually should have been low calorie and low sugar.

  I seemed to have enough to feel very, very slightly near to mildly bloated. That would make any pains from walking worse, and start a lot earlier. My only hope was if the weather forecast turned out right. Dik had said he would call it off if the weather was against some outdoor shooting, and that he would call me around 5pm. He actually called a quarter of an hour early, and said he felt the weather was not good, and maybe we could try again next Wednesday.

  I had barely replied to his text message when the sun came out - hot and bright - although there was a huge black cloud still in the sky to the north, and I think it did later drop some rain on us. If I had had a car, or if Dik had picked me up in his car to take me up the hill (going home, down the hill, should be no problem), I think I would have gone, but I was very happy to be let off having to walk up the hill.

  Later on I had my dinner, and it was quite a big dinner, even if most of the ingredients should have been been healthy stuff. It was a diced beef and vegetable stew. It looked very big, but a lot of it was thin gravy, and I threw most of that away. After I finished it I was right on the edge of something like, but possibly not, angina pain. Just walking up the stairs was uncomfortable. I guess eating a moderately large dinner on top of a moderately large series of snacks, only an hour or two later, all stacked up.

  After the usual Star Treks I headed for bed. There was nothing else I wanted to watch on TV, and it was warmer to read my book in bed with the duvet over me. I was feeling very uncomfortable in bed, and particularly so when I lay on my side. I was feeling very burpy, and I made that worse with some antacid tablets, but they did help release some gas, and that made things a bit more comfortable.

  It seemed like I was going to have an uncomfortable sleepless evening, and that would have been doubly uncomfortable because by 9pm it seemed to be getting very chilly in my bedroom as the temperature dropped below 20° C (and even lower by morning). Fortunately the antacid tablets (four of them taken 2 at a time with almost an hour between first and last pair) did seem to help a lot, and I managed to fall asleep by around 10pm.

  Once asleep I had a pretty normal night - waking every 2 or 3 hours to pee - and seeming to do a lot of dreaming. I can't think why, unless they were boring dreams, but once again I can't remember enough to try and say anything about those dreams. I do have a nagging feeling that one dream was important, notable, or at least should have been memorable, but all I can drag from my memory is a vague idea that it included some sort of electronic box, but it seems I do not have a single idea what it did, or even what it looked like.

  After feeling so stuff last night I had some pretty gloomy thoughts about my health this morning. It turns out that it is both good and bad. My weight has certainly gone up a lot more than can be believed. My blood glucose readings are actually very good. The Contour meter read a very "normal" 8.4mmol/l. However the other two meters read far better. The GlucoRX meter read a good 7.8mmol/l. The Sinocare came close to excellent with 7.6mmol/l. This is all at complete odds with the weight gain !

  The other good thing this morning is that my blood pressure remains in the "Optimum" area with 110/47. The systolic pressure (110mmHg) is very , very slightly higher than my typical best, but it's little more than a drop in the ocean. I should be feeling good this morning, but the cold is making me feel a bit creaky, and I seem to have a stiff right shoulder. Maybe I let it get too cold when sleeping.

  This morning I should have been a bit more careful about how much I ate, but once again I was experimenting. Yesterday I had a Cup Noodle made by Soba, and it was Japanese Curry flavour. I did not think much of it, although maybe that just means it was not exciting. It definitely was not horrible. This morning I had another cup noodle from Soba. It was Peking Duck flavour, and it had occasionally hints of being very nice, but not so nice that I feel inclined to ever buy another.

   It was just a one off experiment to see if I wanted to add it to my favoured instant noodles. I don't. I should have just left it there, but I also had a packet of Buldak spicy noodles. I bought a packet of five, and today was the last one. I didn't think much of them, and I just wanted to use it up. Of course, after two medium big serviings of noodles I ought to be very careful about what I eat today.

  I will need to eat something for lunch to help soak up the beer I expect to be drinking with Jodie this afternoon. After that I am going to have nothing but soup, although maybe "nothing" is not quite true. If nothing else, I'll probably add crunch croutons to is. I expect it will be Tesco cream of chicken soup, probably two cans of it, but it is not the sort of thing to add cheese to, or anything apart from croutons.

  I did have thoughts about going to Aldi today because there are a few things it might be useful to have (and other stuff it would probably be dangerous to have in the cupboard), but I think my top priority today, before the beer drinking, is to put a new patch over the leaking crack in the bathtub. I am going to see if a patch made from a rubber glove might last longer than just duct tape. I intend to stick the rubber to the bath using silicone rubber, and once dry I will add a protective layer of duct tape over it. It is my hope that the rubber will be able to stretch as the bottom of the bath tub flexes under my weight.