We see in the return of GMT with glorious sunshine today. There was sunshine before I got up, and the sunshine should stay all day, although it is going to feel like a very short day with sunset at 4.41pm today. Despite all the sunshine it will remain cold with the air temperature only reaching 14° C. Of course in direct sunshine, or behind glass, it will hopefully feel quite warm. Tomorrow may start and end damp with either drizzle or light rain, but from 8am to 10pm it should stay dry, and maybe not too grey, but no sunshine if forecast. The temperature should reach 15° C.

  With the benefit of hindsight, yesterday was a fairly good day. Not a great deal happened, but it seemed to not happen very smoothly. One good thing is that I managed to do what was only a slight possibility when writing yesterday morning. It all started with a shower - something I am trying to find excuses not to skip recently.

  Not only did I shower, but I also washed my hair, and most of it was done in pleasantly hot water, although the water was starting to run a bit cooler when I had my final rinse off.  The earlier hotter water when washing my hair, and then the heat from the hair dryer when drying my hair, did make sure my head was lightly cooked, and left my head sweating a bit, but fortunately I went out into the cool air fairly quickly before the sweat undid all I had achieved under the shower.

  I did what was really only a possible thought when I mentioned it yesterday. I headed out to Poundland, and then crossed the main road to have a look at what was happening to The London & Rye, the pub that Wetherspoons closed and put on sale a few months ago.  Walking to Poundland is about the limit of my comfortable walking range while I suffer from angina, but right outside Poundland is a road crossing to get to the pub on the other side. Waiting a minute for the lights to change was the perfect rest to reset myself.
  The London & Rye was still there looking not too dissimilar to when it was run by Wetherspoons. The big change is that all Wetherspoons branding has gone, but the name remains. I have no idea who has bought the pub, but it is at worst a "Pubco". I tried to peep through the doors, that being the only glass I could get close to, and what I saw suggested that it may not be long before it re-opens. All the table and chairs are there and laid out very much the same as they used to be. I couldn't see the bar to see if it had any stock.

   If it were not that Antic operate the new Catford Constitutional pub across the road, I might have thought that it was Antic who have taken over The London & Rye. Antic are not known to waste money on wasting anything still on site, and relplace it with anything new. Old tat is their corporate style ! After taking a picture of the pub, and being as nosy as possible, I recrossed the main road and went into Poundland.

  There was one thing in particular I hoped to buy from Poundland, and it was sugar free biscuits. Happily I was able to stock up with two packs of three different types of sugar free biscuits. They should keep me going for a fair time if I eat them sparingly as I intend to (but !). I also bought a few other food items including a small bag of jalapeño flavoured pretzel pieces. Maybe they were pretzel pieces,  but to my eyes they just looked like hard bits of toast.

 I also took the opportunity to buy some glues and silicon sealer for the next time I need to repair the crack in my bath tub. Fortunately the latest repair, using a strip of rubber, cut from an old rubber glove, seems to working better than expected. Sometimes I get suckered into buying a new "toy". In this case it was a selfie stick that had, as described, a built in bluetooth shutter button, although in reality it was clipped to the stick. Anyway, it seemed to work as expected as the picture on the left demonstrates. One thing that doesn't work, although maybe I just haven't worked out how to do it, is a tripod function. Three arms can be pulled, but they are floppy, and I can't see how to latch them into place so they can take a bit of weight.

  As I mentioned, the walk to Poundland was OK, but I could feel that it was about the limit of my range before angina pains started to get uncomfortable (and if I persisted, really quite painful). Waiting to cross the man road, although possibly less than a minute, seemed enough to reset the growing angina. The walk back home from Poundland, despite being obviously the same distance,  didn't seem to push me to my limits, and in some ways it almost felt good.

  I had only been home around 15 minutes, and had only just finished putting away my shopping, when the phone rang. It was my friend Sue. She got me up to date with her latest disasters. She missed the patient transport ambulance calling at her front door to take her for her dental appointment at Kings College Hospital, and has had to reschedule it for the 20th November. She is lucky to get another appointment so soon.

  She recently had an accident where she stood on something sharp, and had a very bad cut on her deformed but healing feet and toes. She needed to call a paramedic out to dress the wound. It is possible that despite being extremely painful, it might have done some good by cutting through what she describes as a web that has been one reason her toes are so deformed since she went down with sepsis 2 years ago.

  There was other stuff we talked about, and while we talked I scoffed the whole small bag of the Jalapeño flavoured pretzel pieces. They were only supposed to be a sort of taster before I had something like a can of soup for lunch. It was getting on for 5pm when I managed to end the call with Sue, and I could then think about dinner. It was still maybe an hour before dinner time, and I had a snack of some sort, but I can't seem to remember what it was.

  My actual dinner was modestly big, but theoretically mostly safe. It was a can of Scotch Broth soup with added chilli sauce and croutons. I followed that by a Golden apple with a chunk of cheese. Then I had one of the big oranges I had bought from the mini supermarket on Catford Bridge. It peeled fairly easily, and was rather delicious. The final part of my dinner was a small pack of sugar free chocolate flavour wafers. It felt like I had eaten rather a lot.

  I watched a few hours of TV last night, and once again it was another documentary series, with all episodes shown back to back, on the PBS America channel. It was about the liberation of France at the end of WW2. It was all a bit of a mess with different factions doing it differently, and almost warring with each other. One of the episodes was about how bad the American troops were when they got to France. Many rapes of local girls were reported, and several rapists were hanged by the military commanders who were trying to impress on the French that they really were the "good guys". Compared to the Germans they were, but it seems they still didn't cover themselves with glory.

  The Documentary was really only about the Americans, and no mention of ant English troops causing any trouble. I doubt if they were as good as gold, but evidently not so bad as to be worth any mentions. One thing they were probably not guilty of was black market racketeering, and other organised crime. I think unlike the British troops, the American troops were supplied rations by the ton load, and maybe only half of it was ever eaten by their GIs. They still fed well, but some unscrupulous characters were estimated to have made a million Francs by selling stolen lorry loads of stuff.

  I headed to bed at about 9pm (BST), but couldn't get comfortable. I seemed to have some joint pain around my right elbow, and to a lesser extent, my right wrist. I had other less painful, but still bothersome aches here and there. I had to get up again and take some Paracetamol. Maybe an hour later i felt OK to try for sleep again, and I think sleep then came quite fast.

  I think I had some enjoyable dreams last night. I vaguely remember one seemed to be set in a large building that was a bit like a large telephone exchange, but it also had a cafe/bar like canteen, and an area that seemed to be for repairing large screen TVs. In several "scenes" there was one or more Americans present. In one room one seemed to be a bit like a guard. In other scenes they seemed to be contractors fitting new telephone exchange equipment.

  There appeared to be no storyline in the series of scenes, although with it starting at a table, drinking beer, it ended logically with me having to find may around new, and sometimes not even unboxed, equipment to get to the toilet. I think the dream ended as I got to the toilet door. Maybe I woke at that point because I really needed a pee in the real world. One odd thing is that I seemed to pee very little for more than the first half of the night, but then peed in larger and larger quantities until I got up.

  I was a bit concerned that the lack of peeing in half the night would mean I was retaining water, and my weight would look even higher (It seemed to be annoyingly high before going to bed). Once I had finally got up, evidently having a really long lie in (I had forgotten the clocks had changed in the night, and had a lay in plus an extra hour !), I went to the toilet for a big pee, and a fair sized poo. According to the scales I had lost an impossible 900gm since yesterday morning. My weight was once again looking fairly reasonable, although in the last month or three there had been several days when I was a whole kilogram lighter.

  Once again the impossible happened. Weight down, blood glucose up. Thankfully not up to bad amounts. The Contour meter read 8.1mmol/l, and although sadly not quite low enough to be in the light green, it is still very good. The GlucoRX meter read even better at 8.0mmol/l. Once again the Sinocare meter read higher, but even 8.8mmol/l is not terrible.

  My blood pressure was slightly high (by comparison with my usual) last night, and it seems the trend continues this morning. My first, and curiously my lowest reading, was 111/48. By any metric that is excellent, but it is still higher than my average of 106/48. I don't even need to start worrying unless the systolic pressure (the first one of the pair) goes over 120mmHg, and even then not really worry. My doctors say the real trigger point wll be if it goes over 140mmHg.

  Three things should happen today. The first may be a visit to Tesco. It is not essential, and I'll only do it if I am ready fairly early. The second...or third thing, will be a delivery of most of my last Amazon order. The most significant bit will be the new blood glucose meter I have bought to see how it compares with the others. I hope to report on it tomorrow morning. The other thing, more likely to be the second thing, will be a beer tasting session with just Jodie. Michael could join us, but seems to be too busy on a Sunday or something.