08:24 BST

  There were some unexpected sunny spells yesterday afternoon, and it made it seem nice when I was walking through the park. They may have even raised the temperature a degree above the forecast 14° C. By midnight the temperature was down to 10° C, but also by then there were some quite heavy clouds to stop some of the warmth escaping out to space.
  I don't recall a sunny spell at 8am this morning. At the moment there are some bright white areas of cloud, and some darker cloud. The darker clouds suggest rain, but the forecast says today will be completely dry. The late afternoon may feature sunny spells. The day started at around 7° C, and rather than dropping to 6° C, as forecast for about now, my thermometers say it is just about 8° C. This afternoon's sunny spells may only raise the temperature up to 11° C, but that may feel OK when the sun is shining. By 10pm the temperature will have fallen to 8° C, but it may not drop much lower, and tomorrow will start at 8° C. It seems tomorrow will also start with some light rain or drizzle, and the whole day could feature a mix of light rain and drizzle. Tomorrow afternoon may reach 15° C, but the rain will spoil that.

   I managed to keep my word count down yesterday, but I think I still said anything worth saying. I may aim to do the same today, but I have quite a few pictures to describe. On the whole, I think I can say that yesterday was a good day.

  Writing far less than usual had it's benefits yesterday. Among them were a reminder that I am not trying to set a record of the longest diary entry, ever ! Also it gave me plenty of time to have a rest, and to wash my hair and have a shower. In an ideal world I would do the same today, but as stated in the paragraph above, I have pictures taken while out yesterday, and each will be accompanied by a sentence or two of explanation.

  I managed to get my self ready to head for the park, and ultimately The Jolly farmers Pub around midday. That meant I could walk as slowly as I cared - if I wanted. It seems I did want it. (Bear in mind that my phones tracker put the last journey at the top, and so my walk to the pub is at the bottom). I only managed a fairly poor 2.115mph as I walked to the pub. It has to be remembered that I did stop to take pictures, and even pick up two copies of The Metro on my way, and I didn't pause the tracker while I was not moving. That will have dragged my measure speed down a little. One oddity is that I have not used any pictures taken while walking to the pub, and that is because the most photogenic sights were in the Therapeutic Garden behind St Mary's church, and I only went there on the way home.

   I think I had three pints of Guinness in the pub, but maybe it might have only been two. It was nice being there to hear some of the gossip, but it was not terribly exciting like some Wednesday visits are. I managed to complete the quick crossword in The Metro, but I could not concentrate enough to find any answers to the Cryptic crossword clues. Poor light was one excuse. It was difficult reading in the poor light, and in particular, the Cryptic clues needed very careful reading to try and work out an answer.

  It is sort of odd that my walk back home was slower (1.576mph) than my walk to the pub. I had barely left the pub when I realised I should have made one last visit to the toilet in the pub. I was not exactly busting, but I was approaching it by the time I got home. I could have taken the more direct route home, but I like to see if anything is happening anywhere in the park - although that doesn't include the south end of the park, but it does include the Therapeutic Garden behind St Mary's Church.
  It was a bit of a shame that it seemed to be dull while I was in the Therapeutic garden. You can see the almost complete cloud cover in the background - although note the very small bit of blue at the top left of the picture. Without bright sunshine the tree can't show off it's flowers to best effect, and the other flowers that looked bright to my naked eye seem to be a bit dull.
  There are many beautiful flowers in the garden, but maybe it is the dull grey light that stops my camera recording the vibrancy of them as seen by the naked eye. If I had increased the exposure to make it look brighter it would start to bleach out details of the flowers. I guess the best thing is to go there and see them yourself.
  It was a shame that I didn't have one of my big DSLR cameras with a 300mm zoom lens with me. Trying to get this picture of a grey wagtail, which was on the far side of the river,  using just my pocket sized Nikon was pushing it's limits, and my photo editing skills.
  I was halfway home when I took this picture. I think (but without a lot of confidence) that these are the leaves of a lime tree. They are well know to car owners who park their cars under a lime tree, that they ooze a sticky sap that is good for ruining car paintwork. That same sap seems to attract hover flies. There were loads of them on or flying around the tree. Their black and yellow stripes (or other patterns) make them look like they can sting, but they are apparently harmless.
  The pattern on this hoverfly makes it look like a wasp, but it is probably about a quarter of the size of the usual annoying wasps. I felt no danger trying to get in as close as possible to take these pictures. I couldn't get as close as ideal because they would just fly away. I had to use zoom to get a close up from a distance (if that makes any sense).
  Strictly speaking, this should have been the first picture in the sequence because I took it in the pub, and specifically in the gents toilet cubicle. After I got home, and had the visit to the toilet I was waiting for during most of the walk home, I tried looking up Chris Townsend to see if he was famous (or infamous). I could find nothing obvious, and a search for the initial C.T.L.F. came up with a blank as well. Who he is, and why he is not free, remains a mystery to me.

  As well as looking forward to the use of my toilet, I was also looking forward to some lunch. I felt hungry after my pints of Guinness, and my walk in the fresh air. Incidentally, I haven't mention that my walk to the pub was not too bad, but my walk home started to get quite uncomfortable towards the end. It was not my bladder, although that was not exactly silent, but my ankles.

  I thought I was starting to strengthen the weak muscles again after doing lots of mostly short walks, and indeed, walks to just Tesco are now generally OK, but yesterday's longer walk did get quite painful, and I had to stop a few times towards the end to give my ankles a rest. It is hard to say just what part of my ankles is actually causing the pain. I was also getting some more minor pain from  my knees (mostly the right knee). The good news is that I have no chest pains for now (until the next bit goes wrong).

  Back to my late lunch, and because I had nothing ready prepared I had to make lunch up as I went along. It was mostly a couple of cheese and pickle filled Paninni rolls, but I grabbed other stuff too. I am sure I would have eaten less if I had something definite waiting for me ready to eat. After eating I had a lie down, but I couldn't completely relax for too long because I wanted to get the pictures transferred from camera and phone to my PC for selecting and editing.

  It didn't seem long before it was almost dinner time, and also time to watch the 6pm news. There were three things I ended up having for my dinner, and all were on their use by date (or I might have not had all three). One was a simple lamb keema ready meal - basically fried lamb mince with peas and some diced potato in a sort of curry sauce. The other was a Chicken Vindaloo ready meal. The latter was nice, but I spoiled it by trying to eat it too soon after it came out of the microwave.

  It is one thing to be burned by hot spices - that is masochistic but tasty - but another to burn yourself because it is scalding hot. It was handy that my third and final course was "sliced tropical fruit" with a few scoops of ice cream on it. The only real tropical fruit was the slices of pineapple. The other two fruits were slices of different types of melon, and I don't consider them to be tropical (I think we can grow most types of melon locally).

  After dinner I watched some TV, but I don't think I stayed up that late watching it. I headed for bed in plenty of time to spend half an hour or so reading in bed. Once I turned the light out I seemed to not only fall asleep close to instantly, but also straight into a dream. The dream was set in a house that may have been the one I spent a lot of my childhood in. One feature of that house was the way it had had a modern bathroom included when semi modernised by the council before we moved in.

  One room which was presumably a lot bigger, was divided into a bathroom and a bedroom, and you had to go through the bedroom to get to the bathroom (fortunately the bathroom did not include a toilet - that was in a very small room at the top of the stairs). The bedroom was going to be my bedroom, but I didn't care for it. The dream was set in the middle of a hot summer, and I knew I would want, or even need to sleep naked on top of the bed. I did not want all and sundry passing me on the way to the bathroom when I was naked and exposed.

  That dream seemed to end when I woke up to go for a pee. I seemed to get up to do several very large pees in the night. I did worry that my blood glucose was far to high - a cause of frequent peeing. I needn't have worried about it, but it did distract me from remembering a second dream that I know I had, but cannot remember a thing about it.

  All that peeing was good in one sense. After getting up this morning, and weighing myself, I found I had lost 200gm. That is not much, but after all I thought I ate yesterday, I expected to have put weight on. I did have one more pee before I had breakfast, and if I had weighed myself again I may have found I was actually 400gm lighter than yesterday. Also, if I had had a decent poo, I might have added another 100gm loss (I always find it a shame that poo seems to weight so little).

  My blood glucose was actually quite good. The average of all three readings was 7.17mmol/l, and that is a bit less than yesterday, and only 0.9 higher than the average of the whole of March. This morning my readings were 6.8 (very good), 8.1 (a mere hint of bad) and 7.6mmol/l (good). This morning my blood pressure is higher than normal, but actually more in the range that the nurse and doctors expect. It is 135/54. My meter describes it as "high normal".

  Today may have some elements of excitement. Between 13:23 and 15:23 I am expecting delivery of my latest beer order. Even at the latest it could still arrive before Jodie arrives for a beer tasting session. I think, or hope, there will be a few beers in my order that will be of interest to Jodie. A few are from Australia, and although there is a fair chance she will have tried them in the past, it would have been ages before she signed up to Untappd (the social media web site for dedicated beer-ophiles, and so she will still need to log and review them. 
   2210 words today.