Both the Met Office and the BBC weather forecasts agreed their would be mist this morning, although the BBC may have over egged it to fog, and it was definitely misty earlier this morning. It did appear to have lifted, but a look out the window just now shows some haze in the distance. Once the sun manages to break through, today may be like a single degree cooler version of yesterday. Just 16° C forecast, but sunshine and sunny spells to make it feel warmer. Tomorrow could be very wet until mid to late afternoon when the sun may come out - a couple of hours before it sets again ! Most of the afternoon could be just 15° C, but a single hour at 16° C is currently predicted.

   Yesterday was generally a good day. Being able to leave the heating off, but still feeling warm because of the sunny spells, was a good thing. Later on my visit to the beer festival, held in The Catford Bridge Tavern was also good. The long wait for my beer delivery was less good.

  With all the important stuff due to happen in the late afternoon, I could take the morning and half the afternoon slow and easy. One thing I did do, probably before midday, was to have a nice warm shave, shampoo and shower. It is not perfect, but I have mostly learned to tame the excesses of my water heater to give decent temperature water. Prior to washing I had my third (I think) visit to the toilet. It was very productive, and after my shower, dressed only in underpants, I weighed myself. It seemed like instead of putting weight on, I had taken a little off in the last 24 hours.

  By maybe 2pm I began to see reports about my beer delivery. I was stop 112 on the drivers run, and he had already delivered over 80 parcels. That, and several more checks on the progress, gave me hope that my delivery would be a fair bit earlier than the official estimated time of between 5.32 and 6.32pm. It seemed best to abandon my plan to go to the beer festival for maybe one pint, and rush home again.

  I knew I would be late, and messaged Jodie to say so, and waited. The delivery actually arrived at about 4.45pm, and once I had given it a quick inspection, I put on my coat, and almost rushed to the pub. I knew I couldn't really rush, but I think I went a bit faster than ideal. I arrived at the pub just before 5pm, and so theoretically an hour late. As expected, I was just at the point of when things start to get painful - angina pains - when I arrived at the pub. I was also very slightly short of breath, but I still had plenty of breath to order my first pint.
  The first beer that attracted my attention was the Gipsy Hill breweries "Leg It" a gingerbread flavoured brown ale. The gingerbread flavour was nice, but the beer left a sort of nasty taste, and that spoiled it. For my next beer I passed over the beer in the middle, Portobello's "Star" British bitter. Maybe it would have been nice for reasons I'll come to later, but I opted for the Five Points brewery's "Railway Porter". A good porter can be very nice, but this one tasted like it had been brewed with badly burnt toast.
  My next beer was Portobello's "Malster mash". It was served direct from the barrel, and even though Portobello's head brewer was in attendance, I don't think it had been served well. While I was paying for it, and obviously before I tasted it, I spoke to the head brewer, and he did his best to convince me it would be a great beer, and emphasised that the brewery were using very traditional hops (Goldings and Fuggles if I recall correctly) to make very traditional beers. I didn't have the heart to tell him that it was not nice at all.

  In my amateur viewpoint, it was as if the spile, the stopper that is supposed to be set to allow just enough air to trickle into the barrel as the beer is poured from it, had been either left out, or was far too loose. The beer tasted as falat as a pancake. I fear that many of the other barrels would be like this.

  My final beer was a pint of "Old Freddy Walker" from the Moor brewery in Bristol. It was an "Old Ale" - quite strong, 7.3%, and thick and smooth. It made for an excellent end to the boozing session. I guess it only needed a couple of sips of it to get me drunk enough to strip off my old t-shirt (a 2006 Catford Beer Festival t-shirt), and put on my new festival t-shirt bought at the same time as I bought the last beer. I was in a semi discrete position, but quite a few people could have seen my naked torso if they were looking in the right (o maybe wrong) direction. The really good thing about it was that the biggest the barman could find was an XL, and yet it seemed to be a good fit. As my weight seems to keep going up and down, according to the scales, it seems I have shrunk a bit over the last few years.

  It did feel like I could be making a stupid mistake, and indeed it did turn out to be a bad mistake for other reasons, but I had this mad idea in my head that I would go home via the fried chicken shop. I can't remember when I last had any fried chicken, but I definitely had some last night.

  I did my usual of smiling, trying to appear friendly, and saying please after asking for just three pieces of chicken. I was sort of surprised that it was only £5, and said thank you as I was handed the change from a £10 note. A few minutes later I was handed my box of chicken, in a bag, and started to walk home. I guess I walked fairly fast because it was dark, and I didn't want the chicken to get cold.

   I didn't feel all that bad when I arrived home, but I most definitely would not have wanted to walk any further. After getting out of my outside clothes, and also had a pee, I sat down and opened my box of fried to chicken to see there were four pieces in it. In a shop where many of the customers can barely speak English, and others can barely do better than grunt - and do it in a surly argumentative sort of way, it definitely pays to be polite and friendly !

   Once I had eaten, and degreased my fingers, I picked up my phone to slowly type a message. After a long period of being ignored again, I had received another message from Angela while in the pub. She says that on Monday she starts her radiation therapy, and in preparation for this she had had another MRI and/or CT scan so they could pinpoint the exact spot they want to hit with the radiation. To make sure everything is very accurate, Angela had to wear what she described as a mask. I think it is a bit more than a mask. I feel sure it is to hold her head absolutely still so the radiation beam doesn't hit the wrong target.

  Angela mainly wanted to say she was terrified of the treatment, and also that she found the "mask" very uncomfortable, and it was chafing her skin somewhere. She did say it was noticed by the radiologist, and I would hope that when the treatment actually starts they can put some padding, or even just a sticking plaster over the spot it rubs. I gave Angela a quick answer in the pub, and a longer response after I had eaten. I'll be sending her my thoughts today.

  The only other thing I did, or at least intended to do before going to bed, was to prepare that pictures I have used here today. The only trouble was that the four pieces of chicken, on top of the beer, gave me horrendous indigestion. Some of is was also heartburn, but just some of the burping was pretty unpleasant. I thought at one pint that I might throw up. With some antacid liquid it settled down enough to finally get to sleep by about 11pm (I had actually intended to get to sleep around 9pm).

  I did not sleep well at all last night. I can't remember a single thing about them, but I think some of my dreams were not pleasant. The worse thing was the ongoing stomach upset, and the other worse thing was the amount of time I woke up to have a pee. I knew after drinking four pints of beer I would be waking up several times in the night, but I seemed to wake up many times, and then only have a small pee. I suspect it was something to do with some of the intestinal pressure (I was farting like a trooper for a lot of the night) and my inflated intestines were pressing on my bladder or something.

  I slept a bit better in the last hours of sleep, and even managed to sleep through to just gone 7am.  It was no surprise that I needed another pee as soon as I got up. I also managed quite a large poo while I was on the toilet. To my great surprise, after all I had eaten and drunk, I seemed to be 300gm lighter than yesterday morning.  Sometimes I think my subcocscious has a better idea of what I should be eating than my conscious does. It seemed the four pieces of chicken on top of 4 pints of beers was not such a bad idea.

  There was more proof of this when I checked my blood glucose readings. This morning I am happy to say I scored three (light green = good) cherries. The Contour meter read a very good, maybe even excellent 7.1mmol/l. The GlucoRX meter read 7.3mmol/l - not quite as good, but still very good. The Sinocare meter was spot on my latest target at 7.5mmol/l. In the unlikely event I can eat carefully enough today for similar readings tomorrow, I would hope to see a drop of a few hundred grammes on the scales tomorrow morning.

  Apart from writing a longer message to Angela, and trying to do yesterday's crosswords in Yesterday's Metro, I have no real idea what I will be doing today. I do feel like a nice snooze or two might be nice, and there is a very small chance I might pop along to the beer festival again for another pint of two. I'll be on my own if I do, so unless I can find a copy of the Metro at the station, it would be boring to sit there by myself. I will probably go on the spur of the moment if I go at all.