08:22 BST

  The forecast said last night would stay very mild, and it actually seemed to be warm. As I write this it is already edging past 22° C. Strong sunshine all day should raise the temperature today to 30° C. Tomorrow may be exactly the same as today, and the day after may almost the same with the high only being 29° C. The next couple of days after that could also see 29° C. We are definitely having a heatwave !

  Yesterday was not the good day I expected it to be, although with hindsight I probably should have expected that. It was good that I did some exercise, and this morning my blood glucose level is really good, although paradoxically it is at the expense of my weight again.

  The thing I was looking forward to yesterday was giving Ayse (my favourite barmaid) her birthday present. After I had finished writing I had a short rest, and then did the trio of shave, shampoo (and conditioner) and shower. The shower and shampoo were not under anything more than slightly above tepid water, and so I shouldn't have needed to spend time cooling down, but somehow I still needed to do so. It was probably not helped by my bedroom being quite warm, even with the window open, and the heat from my hair dryer.
  One of the first things I saw after walking to the end of the road was this sign. There is a similar one I can see from my front windows, but I have yet to actually pass it. The road closure is for filming for an advert that is taking place on Sunday week. As I mentioned yesterday, or I think I did, a total cast and crew of 50 will be making a film of a shopping trolley rolling down the road. It may take several hours to film this one scene. I find that astonishing.
  It was warm and sunny when I started walking, and maybe that spurred me on, or maybe something went screwy with the tracker on my phone. I have examined the trace to see if there are any weird bits, but it seems to have recorded where I walked exactly. The info on the left of the picture above is my record of the walk from home to the "curly whirly" footbridge over the railway in the park. It said I walked 0.514 miles, but that is about the distance from there and back home.

   That error has made my walking speed seem to be twice as fast as it probably was. Even in my fittest days ever I could barely manage 4.218 mph. There is a setting in the tracking app that makes it calculate things in a different way. I can remember having to use that on one of my phones, but the symptoms of not using were lots of odd squiggles on the trace on the map. I didn't see anything like that yesterday.

  On the right of the picture above are the details for my walk home from the pub. I know there is a small error in that. The GPS trace seemed slow coming in, and the small discrepancy was for the first 50ft of my walk home from the pub. After that it all looks good. The distance, 0.833 miles, and the speed, 2.082 mph, is about right. I do walk a bit slower with 2 (or more) pints of Guinness swilling around in my gut.

  At the point I took the screenshot on the left of the picture, by the curly whirly footbridge, I was, just about on cue, feeling the strain, and wanting to stop for a brief breather. I think that if I had truly walked at 4.218 mph I would have wanted pure oxygen, but I just needed a small rest. I took the opportunity to have a squirt of my TNG spray. Apart from a strong tingling under the tongue, it didn't seem to make a difference, but when I got to the pub, having gone via Ladywell Station, I realised it had made it easier.

  I think that I maybe stopped less times than without the spray, but it is all a bit subjective, Unfortunately I made a tragic mistake when I got to the pub. Somehow I didn't stop or even pause the tracker. I was debating which to do, but it seems I did neither. The tracker continued to track me indoors with a very poor GPS signal, and all the errors made it looked like I had walked over 2 miles instead of just under a mile.

  Once inside the pub I had a great disappointment. There was no Ayse. I can't blame her for taking the day off on her birthday, but after lugging her birthday present all the way to the pub it was even more disappointing . It was also a bit disappointing that Emma was on duty, She is OK, but not a patch on Ayse. I ended up chatting with Tom for a fair bit of time - comparing our medical experiences.

  I don't know how old Tom is, but he is probably not that much difference in age to me. He does seem to have bad luck with his treatments. From the way he describes his experiences with medical staff, he probably does himself no favours. He sounds too adversarial, and not very co-operative. My experiences, except maybe with the hospital cardiology department, tend to be fairly positive.

  Just 5 minutes ago I had a phone call from the doctor at my GP who is their heart specialist. She just wanted to let me know that she had heard from the special cardiology group that she had hoped to refer me to. They turned down her request, as she had warned me that probably would, because my case is not serious enough, and it would also be stepping on the toes of the normal cardiology department. I thought that was a very nice touch.

  I had just two pints of Guinness, as usual, before I left the pub to walk home. I walked along the opposite side of the park to make my entire walk a sort of big loop. The walked is next to the river, and I stopped at each bridge to have a breather, and see if anything interesting was going on. Only at one spot did I see something which was possibly interesting. I thought it was a bird, and indeed there was a bird in the frame of the picture I took, but when I zoomed in I think I had captures an extremely blurred picture of a rat or vole. If I had had had my big Canon DSLR camera with 200mm zoom lens, I might have got a usable snap of the bird and the rat - is indeed it was a rat or vole.
  Going back to soon after I left the pub, I took a snap of this pigeon. At least I think it is just a pigeon. What caught my eye, and particularly from the side (which I didn't get a decent picture of) it's colouration strongly reminded me of Egyptian geese. Maybe the eye facing away from the camera had more of a ring around it like those geese.  I wonder if it is really a wild bird, or one that has escaped from a fancier. It does look in very good condition for a wild pigeon.
  I know and have photographed fruit at the orchard at the far other end of the park, but I have never seen any obvious fruit trees on the river bank at the Ladywell end of the park.  Now I have seen one, and it seems to be a crab apple tree. I wonder if this is the first time the tree had fruited. I am sure I would have noticed fruit in previous years if it was fruiting then.
  I think in previous years some effort has been made to control all the blackberry bushes along the river bank. Having said that, I can remember taking a picture of a very long spiky blackberry shoot intruding out at about head height on the path. This year here does seem to be a bumper crop of berries. Many of the ripest have all ready been harvested, probably by kids. Many are still in flower, and many are are still green or red, but there are an awful lot of them.
   I am not that good at identifying flies, but I think this is a hoverfly that is having a drink of nectar from this blackberry flower. I've just checked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoverfly, and my guess at hoverfly seems right.

  When I arrived home I felt a little tired, but it didn't seem to take long to recover from it. Maybe that is because my mind was distracted by thoughts of food. One thing I was think was that it would be really nice to get a portion of Singapore Noodles from the noodle shop on the high street. I then thought how I could make something similar using instant noodles, some chunks of chicken, and a mix of hot sauce and white pepper.

  The noodles idea never came to fruition. I did have a portion of choc chip and mint ice cream. It was so nice that it was hard to fight the idea of eating a lot more of it than I actually did. Even then it was a tiny bit more than intended. I think I followed it by something more, but I can't seem to remember what it was. It seemed to be some time before I transferred the pictures used here today off my camera and phone, and did the necessary editing.

  I then had a lie down, and assumed I would snooze, but I spent much of the time reading. I did find my eyes closing while reading, and I put the book down without opening my eyes. The odd thing is that I was not aware if I did snooze. It just felt like I was literally resting my eyes. I know that after an hour and a half I went back to my PC and had a snack of some rice crackers, and some sourdough crackers with sliced cheddar cheese.

  Once again he affairs of the world were less important than bloody sport. I think that yesterday the BBC 6 O'clock news was replaced/delayed by a couple of hours for Match Of The Day, or some old bollocks. I watch some of the BBC News Channel as I ate my dinner. That dinner was two quarter pounder jalapeño burgers. They were from the Tesco "Finest" range, but found on the reduced price shelf. They were pretty good, but maybe not worth the full price. I ate them with heaps of coleslaw and potato salad.

  I did have a small snack or two later on after dinner. I also had a couple of cans of lager to wash it all down. The idea of the beer was to act as a diuretic. I hoped to pee a lot last night and reduce the swelling of (mainly) my left leg. That does seemed to have very slightly worked, but I did not get the hoped for weight loss.

TV was very patchy again last night. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was probably better than Star Trek: The New Generation, but only marginally. An old edition of QI was probably the most entertaining. That finished at 10pm and once again I went straight to bed afterwards, and read very little before falling asleep. I think I slept very solidly for 2 or 3 hours before waking up between an hour or two hours later for a pee. My intent of peeing more in the night seemed to be happening, and I am sure it was the lager that was doing it.

  It seemed only slightly cool when I woke up at around 6.20am (although for a short while I thought I might have got up soon after 5am, but I managed to resist that). I needed a pee, but at that time nothing else. I did try for a poo, but once again it was just wind. When I weighed myself I had put on 500gm, but a later pee, and also a poo took that down to 300gm. It is not much, but my current eating regime is putting small amounts on most days. It is something I need to change.

  All the extra peeing in the night might have indicated my blood glucose had gone high. All I had eaten yesterday should have raised it a lot (even one of the cans of lager had a lot of sugar in it - the other hand none). In actuality my blood glucose was very good again. The Contour meter read 6.2mmol/l. That is excellent ! The GlucoRX meter read 6.4mmol/l, and that too is extremely good compared to the readings I was getting most days last month. The new Contour Plus meter read 6.8mmol/l. That was sadly a bit higher than the other two, but still very good.

  The (possible) highlight of today should be the afternoon beer drinking session with Jodie and probably Michael. It is a shame that my beer order will not be delivered until roughly sometime between 5 and 6pm. There won't be time to chill any of the beers. It would have been handy to to have some of the weak beers I ordered, although maybe not the Radlers (beer brewed with lemon - like an unpleasant tasting lemonade shandy). Jodie is looking forward to some of the Radlers she has put in the fridge because she thinks they are the perfect drink for 30° C, but I think otherwise.

  With the beer delivery being so late in the date, and not enough time to chill any of the beers, I think I will buy a couple of low (but not zero) alcohol beers from Tesco. I was thinking that the beer delivery could be this morning, and so the morning would be too busy for time to go to Tesco, but I think it maybe be a fairly relaxed time.