Today may only be 90% as dull as yesterday, and the maximum temperature is only forecast to reach 8° C. However, all but one of my outside thermometers say it is already just over 9° C, and I suspect it is still rising. It should be dry today, but it still looks very damp outside. Tomorrow should be dry. It may only reach 7° C after a 4° C start, but sunny spells are forecast.
 
  Yesterday was an odd sort of day. Being damp, mild and dull seemed an odd combination after previous days of worse weather. If the sun had managed to break through it could have been a brilliant day....but still a bit bad, particularly in  the matter of eating.

  After a slightly earlier start to my day, and not having all that much to describe, it was one of my shorter bits of writing yesterday.Just 1,899 words. It meant I finished writing earlier, and could afford a nice rest for nearly too long, but I pulled myself together and had a nice hot shower. Since the last few days have seen warmer than Arctic weather, the water to my shower could be uncomfortably hot if it was a few degrees higher. On the other hand, I'm not complaining, it seemed a good temperature yesterday morning.

  I didn't get any last minute messages from Kevin and so I assumed I would be on my own in the pub at lunchtime. That meant I could travel light, and I didn't even need anything warmer to wear than my newest leather jacket. I didn't even need to zip up the front of it. It was such a shame that it was not a brighter, and ideally, sunny day. It still felt good to not need to wrap myself up in all my warmest stuff.

  One oddity yesterday was that it seem the train timetables have been changed, and I am not sure why. All the trains to Charing Cross seemed to be running at their normal times, and I caught my usual 12:34 train. It is the trains to Hayes (Kent) that seem to be running to a very weird timetable. There used to be 4 trains an hour that were fairly evenly spaced, but now, quoting an example from this mornings times, there is a Hayes train at 10:06, and the next one is at 10:13. If you miss the latter you have a 23 minute wait for the next one.

  Fortunately I was going to Ladywell on the Charing Cross train, and they were running to expected times still. I actually got to the station at about the same time as the previous Charing Cross train arrived, but 20 seconds too late to take a photo of the front of it. If I were all young and fit again I would have had enough time to sprint over the footbridge and catch it, but I was not in any great rush, plus I could not physically do it.
  When I got to Ladywell I was mystified by a sign directing pedestrians to walk towards the approach road from the bottom of the stairs up to Ladywell Road. I thought that maybe some kids had put it there for a laugh. When I got to the top of the stairs it was easy to see what was going one. All the footpath had been ripped up for some unknown reason. It would probably have been easier to cross to the other side of the road rather than follow the short diversion.

  I had my usual warm welcome when I got to The Jolly Farmers. It is slightly strange, but just going there for a couple of hours of a Wednesday morning makes me a regular, and I am greeted as such by Ayse (my favourite barmaid) and other regulars in there. After handing over a copy of The Metro, having a brief chat, and grabbing my Guinness, I sat down at my favourite table, and after a very brief flick through The Metro I found the crossword page, and started to look at it.

  I think it was maybe last November that they seemed to use a new crossword compiler, and very soon the letters page was filled with people complaining that the "quick crossword", that many said was just write to do on the commute to work, was now so hard that they could barely manage half of it. After a while the editor seemed to relent, and it got easier again, but then it suddenly got harder again. I barely managed to finish half of it. I could often finish it before I had drunk my first half pint of Guinness.

  I guess I like to do the crossword because it helps stretch my brain, but once it crosses a threshold of difficulty, it has the opposite effect. If I had been the sort of person with a lot to say I would have put the paper away, and taken my Guinness to sit at the bar and join in the very enjoyable banter. I do throw in a few comments from my seat at a table, and at one point Ayse came and say beside me to tell of an "event" last Saturday night. Her friend had brought his dog in, or maybe it was not actually his own dog because he didn't know how to read the signs. Apparently he did not know that the dog making a fuss by the door meant that it needed to go outside for a shit. It had it's shit inside, and Ayse said the stood over the friend, and armed him with mop and buck plus bleach and stuff, until he got the floor spotless again !

  After my usual two pints of Guinness I left the pub to go home. It looked like it had rained again (on a day when no rain was forecast) when I got outside, but it still felt mild enough to leave my coat undone. It was a mix of it being mild, and not wanting a long wait for train if I missed the second of the two to Hayes that run almost one behind the other, that I decided I would do as I threatened to do at the end of yesterday's writing, and walk home for a change.

  It wasn't a good decision for a few reasons. One very obvious one was that it was dull and gloomy, and thus not a walk to be enjoyed. Also my timing was such that I would have had only a short wait for a train. The best reason for it being a bad idea was that it turned out to be quite hard work. I stopped a few times on the way home, and my only real complaint is that my legs seemed to be really aching when I got home. It seems many years since just a three quarter mile walk would get my legs aching, but lack of practice seemed to have destroyed my stamina in that department.


  There was another reason why walking was still a good idea. I started having fantasies about going home via the fried chicken shop if I had got the train back to Catford Bridge station. I have no idea where the insane idea came from that I wanted fried chicken, but it definitely came ! I must have stopped for longer periods yesterday because my average speed was just 1.862 mph. I know I slowed down a lot as I neared home, but I thought I had started out keeping up a good pace.

  I managed to avoid the fried chicken shop by not going near it, but I could not avoid what was in my fridge. I think I must have had some sort of subconscious desire for meat, because I decided that yesterday was the day to see what the vacuum pack of smoked spare ribs, that I had bought last week, were like. The pack contained a small bit and a big bit. I made the bold assumption that they were already cooked enough, although I am not so sure now.

  I put the small piece in the microwave for 5 minutes, and I put the large bit in the mini oven/grill for 1bout 30 minutes. With hindsight I should have used them in a sort of stew, and cooked them in my slow cooker for many hours. I think that would cook it enough for the meat to fall off the bone - like spare ribs from a Chinese takeaway. I am pretty sure that both my microwaving, and grilling/roasting were enough to cook the spare ribs enough to be safe, but they were quite tough, and quite messy to eat. I didn't really enjoy them the way I had cooked them.

  Having a 100% meat lunch meant that I considered my eating quite carefully for the rest of the day. As 5pm approached I had a meal that consisted of all fruit (two different types of apple, and a Persimmon) with a small block of cheese. I thought they apples would offset some of the grease from the pork spare ribs, although they did nots seem that greasy at all.

  When it finally seemed time for dinner, around 6pm, I only ate one thing, and I did eat far too much of it. It was the second half of my one litre tub of ice cream. I just seemed to keep spooning it into my mouth until there was nothing left. After that, and the three pieces of fruit, two of which did seem quite sweet, I knew I could expect a disaster this morning !

  It was around half way through Star Trek: Voyager, that I was only paying half attention to, that I got a phone call. To my surprised it was my old friend Sue. I had been sort of avoiding her because my own heath difficulties seemed to make it too difficult to give her the support for her own health problems, and it seemed that others were able to do a far better job that I could. Plus there was also the problem that once she gets taking she never stops. It was almost 1am before I almost had to hang up on her.

  I guess it was a bit interesting to catch up on her news, but it was also hard work. I was so relieved to go and brush my teeth, and jump into bed. I had to read for about 20 minutes to get in a more relaxed mood, but once I put the book down I think I went out like a light. I would awake every 2n hours or so as normal to go for a pee, but overall I peed less because I was asleep for less than usual.

  To might great annoyance I was awoken at 7.15am by a text message from "friend" Lee. I was so annoyed I barely read his message, and there was almost nothing I waned to comment on, but I suppose I could reply sooner or later with a "get well soon" because it seems he has some sort of chest infection.

  Once I was out of bed I headed straight to the toilet for a fairly large pee. 5 or 10 minutes after that I was back to the toilet for a surprisingly big poo. I then weighed myself, and found I had put on more weight again. This morning it was just 400gm, but my weight was still 300gm less than the day before yesterday. As I probably moaned yesterday, in one form or another, I seem to be going through a swings and roundabouts sort of thing recently - over the course of maybe a week, I neither gain nor lose.

  The next thing was to check my blood glucose. After the fruit and the ice cream I had last night, I could only expect the worst of the worse. The reality was rather different. The Contour meter read 7.9mmol/l, and that is good. The GlucoRX meter read 7.2mmol/l, and that is very good. The Sinocare meter wasn't quite as good, but 7.4mmol/l is still under my very rarely attained target of 7.5mmol/l. I am now positively sure I know absolutely nothing about controlling my blood glucose level.

  It seems highly unlikely, but sometimes it does seem that giving my pancreas a big heavy load of sugar to deal with, sort of wakes it up, and it kicks out more insulin at other times. I hope this affect lasts for a while as it seemed to on some occasions in the past. I will try and use more conventional ways of controlling my sugar intake most of the time. On the other hand, maybe that gluttony last night might even have been beneficial to my blood pressure. On my first attempt at reading it, it was a bit higher, but still good enough. On my second attempt it was 102/45, and while I still occasionally wonder if it being so low is actually good, my doctors seem to be very happy when that low.

  I seem to be running slow this morning, and I don't think I'll find the time to go to Tesco as I would like to. Fortunately it would just be "nice" to go, and far from essential. I will reconsider the idea later once I have had a shower, and done rather a lot of cleaning up in the kitchen. As well as a sink full of washing up, I have apple cores, vegetable trimmings, plus loads of spare rib bones to get rid of. I also need to empty the recycling bin into the big green bin outside.

  The main thing on the menu for today is some beer tasting with Jodie and Michael later this afternoon. On the subject of beer....one thing I did yesterday was to pay off my credit card bills. One was unusually small, and the other unusually large, but still not so bad as to reduce my current account too much. I felt that I had the cash spare to do another beer order from Beer Merchants (dot com). This time I managed to find the bit where I could use all the discount points I have accumulated from previous orders - they were worth just over £10 - and that is a handy discount. The beer I ordered should be here by Sunday - just in time for Jodie not being here this Sunday, and she will have to wait until Thursday of next week to find what I have ordered. I think I have possibly ordered a few that she will be very glad to try.

   2546 words today