There was a lot of dew on the cars outside this morning, and the road looked damp like there might have been some rain in the small hours. Today will be much like today - very grey, and just 7° C until 10pm when, also like yesterday, the temperature will drop to 6° C. Today should be completely dry, but a 21% chance of some sort of rainfall is predicted for midday. Tomorrow may feature many random spells of drizzle, and maybe an hour of light rain. The whole day will range between dull and very dull. One change is that at 1pm the temperature may rise from even more 7° C to 8° C. Maybe the wind will be a bit lighter than today, but today's wind looks to be little more than a medium breeze.

  Yesterday seemed like it might have been a fairly good day. On the face of it, it did seem to be a day when I found enough to do, but maybe at a slightly subconscious level I must have been feeling a bit lost/depressed/unsatisfied/other negative things. It revealed itself as almost zero control of my eating, and that had consequences.

  After my early start yesterday, I felt like I was in no rush at all, and I could lay on my bed reading for as long as I wanted after I had finished writing my 3119 words yesterday - not a record, but very close to it. After a while I began to feel like I should be sensible, and I got up and had a shower. At the end of the shower I put my favourite bath towel in to soak in detergent. It would be quite some time before I finished washing it, and hung it up to dry.

  Once I was dry myself, I got dressed ready to go out. As predicted yesterday, I went to Savers where I ended up buying a bit more than expected, but it was all stuff I would be using sooner or later. It included "winter flavour" (or something like that) bleach/toilet cleaner. I can't say it smells nice, but it is not bad. It seems to smell like a mix of rotting leaves and wood, plus burning wood/garden bonfire !

  After Savers I crossed the way, and went in Poundstretcher. As predicted, I found plenty of stuff to buy in there. A fair bit of it was food, but I could only find some biscuits that claimed to have "less sugar" without really giving any reference as to what they were comparing them with - I presume it was supposed to be less than an average biscuit. I also saw, and bought some things like chocolate coated nougat bars that made a big song and dance about each bar containing only 70 calories. Sadly, the small printed showed they had a very high sugar content. I will have to be very careful about eating them.

  I can't say the walk to and from the shops was enjoyable. The actual walking action was no problem, and I could have easily enjoyed that if the temperature was at least 25° C, and hot sunshine was beating down on me. The reality was there was a numbing cold wind blowing. My torso was fine under one of my well insulated winter coats, but that wind, which felt like it should be carrying snow, seemed to blow in one ear and out the other, chilling my face and the rest of my head as it did so. I was very happy to get home and out of that wind.

  One of the first things I did when I got home was to open up and try one of the chocolate nougat bars, and to look at the fine print as I chomped away at one of the bars. What I saw may have spoiled my enthusiasm for them. Each bar may have only been 70 calories, but it had enough sugar in it to power a steam train. It may have been in light of that knowledge that I decided I didn't really like them. I very much doubt I will go as far as throwing them away, but that one packet of 5 (or 6 ?) bars may last months !

  Once I has put all the shopping away I made some lunch. It was actually fairly restrained - just two small wholemeal rolls with cheese and tomato, plus some iceberg lettuce and mayonnaise. It would be several hours before I did anything more than read, snooze, and anything. The first thing I did was to have a mid afternoon snack. Much of it was a small plate full of spicy wheat puffs - things about half the size of my longest finger, and light as a feather. I didn't bother to read the nutritional information because I was sure each individual puff had almost too little to measure (although cumulatively....)

  It was a light enough snack that I felt perfectly comfortable enough to go back to the small bath towel I had left soaking in detergent. All I had to do was to rinse all the soap out, and after one final super strength wringing out, hang it up to dry, but.... Being a towel, and soaked in extra soap after seemingly not rinsing all the soap off after a shower, it needed about a dozen rinses to get the water running slightly close to clear. I may have done 6, and possibly 7 rinses before I wanted a rest.

  The first Star Trek of the day (an episode of the original series) was still almost and hour away, and dinner maybe 90 or more minutes away, and so I started reading stuff on the internet. It was one of those occasions where one page lead to other pages, and soon I had read lots of stuff about lots of stuff. I actually missed the start of Star Trek, and then missed more of it when I went down to the kitchen to start dinner cooking.

  Dinner was effectively three courses, I started with a small plate of the "grill chips" I mentioned the day before. This time I cooked them on their own, and cooked them for longer. They were a bit nice like that, but still not as good as proper rectangular (cross section) chips. it is at this point I get a little confused. I think that because it was still quite a small portion that I cooked a second lot. I now feel sure I was originally hoping there were so few left in the bag that I could finish them off. I didn't, and there is still a very small portion left to be cooked.

  While grilled/oven cooked chips don't have all the unhealthy fat that proper chip shop chips have (and far better flavour because of it), any chips I know to be not that good for me in varying degrees. I should have stuck to one plate, and more so considering I was intending to have  third course of something rather unknown.

  The unknown was a pack of "Delta Chicken". I think "Delta" was supposed to make you think of America's Mississippi delta, and hence southern style food. They could also be called delta because they were in a triangle shape - the mathematical symbol for "change". They were triangular bits of processed chicken coated in a sort of crunchy batter. They looked like they could be nice, but they were not nice enough that I would consider buying them again.

  After I had watched the third and last Star Trek I did my usual of turning the TV off, and amusing myself by reading until QI came on at 9pm. It was not a great episode, but it was still entertaining. That finished at 10pm, and I should have gone straight to bed, but I wanted to check something first. I wanted to see if a route for some future walk would be good or bad.

  The walk would be from Eden Park railway station to the middle of Beckenham. It was basically following the course of part of the River Beck, and much of if it would be beside the water. The longest stretch would be going through Kelsey Park, and passed the long ponds in there with much wildlife to be seen. I expected it to be quite a long walk, but Open Street Map shows it to be just 1.55 miles.

  I could do that walk even now, and even in cold weather because I would be (probably) be stopping very frequently to take pictures. I will probably wait until it is a bit warmer in spring, but I might try it one some sooner sunny day. From Beckenham I would get the 54 bus home again. It is a walk I had once done half of when working in Beckenham Telephone Exchange. I am sure I remember doing the whole length of the park, and back again in my one hour lunch break. Doing it just one way should be very easy, even including the walk from Eden Park station, which is possibly half a mile to get to the park, although some of it is through green spaces with some trees.

  I finally got into bed, and I read for maybe half an hour to get better relaxed. Despite the spicy chicken and the greasy chips, I didn't seem to have any indigestion problems, and I was soon asleep. I remember getting up to pee every 2 or 3 hours, and I remember having some dreams, but none seems to have much in the way of anything I can describe. One seemed to include nuns, and maybe was some perverted sexy dream....I think I feel sad I don't remember any more details about it !

  This morning I had my first pee of the day, but as yet no poo. I expect that will happen later like I think it did yesterday. Even so, I seem to be 500gm lighter this morning. I found that strange because I thought my diet was atrocious yesterday, but maybe it just seems that way because of the "grill chips" I had. Sadly, those chips, and maybe some other little oddments I ate did me no favours when I checked my blood glucose.

  I tried twice to get a better reading on the Contour meter, but the best was still 9.1mmol/l, and that is out of the "OK" zone and into the start worrying area (but still some way from the red line at 10.0mmol/l. The GlucoRX meter actually gave a good (but not very good) reading of 8.1mmol/l. Even the Sinocare meter was OK with a reading of 8.9mmol/l. The average of all three was 8.7mmol/l, and that doesn't seem that bad, and not a lot different to many days so far this month.

  My blood pressure was initially 109/53. While that is lower than the last couple of days, I thought I could do better than that. While I tried to get more relaxed I read an article that sort of raised my blood pressure, or bits of it did. It was about the Dr Who theme music being added to a National Sound Archive - https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/11/doctor_who_theme_added_to/ - oddly enough it is an Australian sound archive. If you read the article, and then read the comments, you can try and guess which bits triggered my increase of blood pressure !

  I guess I feel moderately OK today. I am not looking forward to going out in the cold air today, but I may put on a hooded coat to keep my ears warm when I go to The Jolly Farmers for my usually regular Wednesday lunchtime drink. There is an infinitesimal chance that I might see Angela. She knows where I'll be, and if she goes to stay with her daughter today, as she says she want to, she would pass the pub either on the train or the bus on her way to the DLR station. If the times was right, either by chance or planning, she could drop in, but I am 99.999% certain she won't. Still that does still leave a 0.001% chance so I can't say it will be impossible !