Yesterday was quite a good day. The quick description is that I had a shower, and went out for a walk with my Cannon 600D camera. I thought it was time I gave it an airing.

  The rest of this is going to be as brief as possible because it is getting late and I intend to go out for another walk today. This time it will be to The Jolly Farmers. I'll just say I had breakfast, had a shower, and soon after I went out, although somewhere in that I did have a short snooze. Let me start with some pictures taken using my Cannon 600D camera. It is quite a good camera, but some of the close-ups may have come out better if I used my mobile phone. I am almost forgetting one important thing before I went out - a postal delivery !


  I was about to go out when I saw a white jiffy bag hanging out the inside of my letter box. It had to be one of two things. One possibility was a solid state hard drive I ordered from Amazon days before the prices doubled for memory products. I have been waiting at least a couple of months for it to be delivered, but I doubt it will be delivered until the price of memory products has got back to what they were - if that even happens. I am unsure about legal terms, but effectively I have a contract with Amazon to sell me the solid state drive for the price they were asking at the time. If the send it now they will be down on the deal about £159 - and they would not be happy about that !

  The other thing that jiffy bag could have in it, and did have in it it, was the "kit" for my upcoming colonoscopy. The most significant item was two sachets of super strong laxative powder I will have to dissolve in water, and drink in the last day before the colonoscopy. Incidently, that is medical shorthand for shoving a camera, on the end of a long tube, up my bottom.

  The laxative will cause what will be a huge diarrhoea attack, and that should flush out my entire digestive tract so the camera can see other things than a load of faeces. The laxative has to be super powerful because in the four days before the procedure I have to go on a low fibre diet. That will cause bad constipation - I know this from experience !


  It is handy that among the paperwork there was the handy page, reproduced above, that suggests low fibre foods. I am happy to see that ice cream is among them. I am expecting I will be living on cheese sandwiches made with white bread, and ice cream for 4 days, and probably instant noodles (long suspected of being the cause of constipation) because I think they would be classified as pasta.
  I had hoped there may have been some sunshine on my walk. There were some small bits of blue sky, and they did let in an occasional ray of sunshine, but the view to the north, as seen above, was not terribly exciting, and even looked threatening. Fortunately even the greyest clouds didn't shed any rain.
  I did not use any trains yesterday, but I did take a short breather on Ladywell station. The picture shows "Networker" train 465165. Until 3 or 4 years ago, these Networker trains were the standard train on the Mid Kent Line to Hayes (Kent). They have slowly been displaced by class 376 trains that are so bland I don't think they have a name, and more recently (albeit still some years ago) class 707 "Citybeam" trains. Some Networker trains have already gone for scrap, and some time in the future they will all have gone, and probably never to be seen again.
  I am unsure if these are actual Violets, or just violet flowers. They are in the graveyard next to St Mary's church. On my previous walk around the church I briefly talked to a lady who saw me taking pictures of flowers and stuff. She told me there were violets a bit further down the path. From that I have to assume these are the violets she was talking about, although this is just one of several patches of them. The only trouble yesterday was trying to find an open flower that didn't looks as if it was well past it's best. The one in the centre of the photo seems to be the best I could get a photo of.
  This was an interesting find (although it is in plain sight). The stone says the wall belongs to the Metropolitan Police, and was rebuilt in 1935. I had assumed the wall was built as the boundary of the cemetery, but evidently not. Beyond the wall was the site of the old Ladywell police station. That was converted to flats, and the station yard now has a couple of houses built on it. It make me wonder if the met Police still own this wall !
  I had seen this flag flying in the park, but had never stopped to read it until yesterday. I had never heard of the Green Flag award before, but thanks to Wikipedia I now know what it all about - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Flag_Award
It is evidently not too hard to get the award because 2,227 parks have been awarded it (but I think that is across the whole country).

  My walk only covered 1.625 miles, and I only managed an average speed of 1.777mph. My actual speed was probably a bit higher because I didn't bother pausing the tracker when taking pictures. Sometimes, particularly when in the graveyard by St Mary's church, I would stop for several or more minutes trying to get a reasonable shot, or looking for stuff to take pictures of. I should have actually lengthened that time because I was often a bit too hasty to get some snaps, and they came out lousy and unusable. As I mentioned further up the page, I could have got better close up pictures using my mobile phone.

  My walk got uncomfortable towards the end as my ankles, and to a lesser extent my knees started to get uncomfortable. Other than that I had not difficulties, and I felt comfortable enough to extend my walk by doing a complete circle around St Mary's Church. One day I would like to take some pictures inside the place. I am sure they used to leave the doors open, but maybe because of vagrants they are always closed when I walk past now.

  I am obviously still recovering - not from my heart valve replacement procedure. That seems to have settled in nicely. I think it was weeks of laying on hospital bed and indeed my own bed. It has left all my nicely toned (possibly) leg muscles weaken. All these semi long walks, and the shorter walks to the shops, are slowly getting things better again. I can remember many years ago when a walk to Ladywell and back was completely knackering, and how persistence gradually got it to be just a routine walk. From then on I tackled increasingly long walks. I hope it will not be too long before I can do some longer walks. Fortunately there is no immediate rush until the weather gets brighter and warmer.

  Once I got home I had a late lunch of a couple of Pannini rolls. One had the last couple of chilli flavoured sausages I had had the day before, and the other had corned beef and cheese in it. I then did nothing except transfer my pictures from camera to PC, and select and edit them. I also had a snooze - I could hardly stop myself once I was laying on my bed. In no time at all it was approaching dinner time.

  My dinner was very simple - it was a chicken madras ready meal. I have to say it was not as good as hoped. I am starting to think that Aldi does better curry ready meals than those Tesco sells. I followed the ready meal with some ice cream. It was a bit more than "some". I finished off the 500ml tub because I thought it only had one and half portions in it, and it didn't seem that a half portion was worth keeping. (Any excuse !!).

  After watching some TV I went to bed, read for half an hour, and then quickly fell asleep. I had a pretty typical night. I seemed to sleep well, and only got up a couple of times to pee. I know I had one or more dreams, and apart from a small fragment of one, I have no memories of any of them. That tiny fragment concerned making a flash "bomb" (more or less a bigger version of what photographers used to used). We, although I have no idea who the other person was, were making the device in someone's school desk - and I have no idea why !

  This morning I have no had a poo (not enough fibre in my diet, but I had assumed that the curry ready meal might have had the same effect), and so my weigh has gone up instead of dropped. This morning it was a gain of 400gm, and yesterday it was 300gm. I am supposed to be losing weight, and not putting it on. I had hoped that yesterday's walk would be worth a few grams of loss, and not a gain !

  Even my blood glucose is not as low as hoped. The average of all three was 7.27mmol/l. Actually, on reflection, that is not too bad at all, and is lower than yesterday. I guess I feel fairly OK this morning. My blood pressure was (just now) 120/51, and that is probably about perfect.

  There are two things that make me feel less than perfect. One is that it is now 11:41, and in an ideal world I would have had my morning snooze by now, and I would also have had a shower and washed my hair. That still might have been almost possible and still not be too late getting to The Jolly Farmers for my usual Wednesday lunchtime Guinness. Now there is an added complication. An Amazon order that was supposed to be arriving tomorrow is now arriving today, and the email notifying me about it actually has an estimate of 11:45am to 3pm delivery time. All this means I dare not even have a shower until the order arrives because it could literally arrive right now if it arrives at 11:45am - that is right now as I write this.

  I think I am going to try and go to the pub after the delivery - even if it is after 3pm. The walk will do me good, and I would like to see my favourite barmaid. It feels important after not going out last Wednesday because I had had a stomach upset. Oh well, nothing to do now except wait.