Aaarrrgh, I can’t sleep. I don’t remember dropping off at all last night and I was feeling so tired this morning that I had to cancel two appointments. The first was for the nurse at the medical centre who was going to change the dressing on me “botty”. I’ve got a boil, y’see. On me botty. It was incredibly painful at the start and was bleeding quite badly. It’s had three changes of dressing so far and two courses of an antibiotic. It’s much better, but not completely cleared yet.

The other appointment was at Joondalup Hospital, the Day Care Unit, for an aged person’s guide to physio, to coin a phrase. I couldn’t have coped with it today.

So after a very light breakfast, I went back to bed and tried to get some more sleep. But as usual, I could only manage an hour. That’s all I can ever manage. Not good. I’m building a very large sleep deficit.

That hour, plus another hour of resting made me feel much better, anyway. * see below

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I think I mentioned that I have a new phone, or if I didn’t mention it, I have. I had to buy it because of the shut down of the 3G network. Although my previous phone was a 4G model, it didn’t have the voLTE protocol. It meant I could send and receive SMS messages, but no voice calls in or out.

The previous phone was a OnePlus 3T and I’d had it since 2017. Not a bad run, and if it hadn’t been for this voLTE bizzo, I would have kept it forever. It was good.

So I chose another OnePlus, Nord something, with, not only 4G, but 5G as well. In theory I can use it as an internet hotspot at speeds of 3Gb/s or something like that. But at a big data cost.

However! I hate it! The software is bloody awful. It’s Android, of course, but it will not leave me alone, constantly trying to force me to install bloody Tik Tok and other stupid applications that I don’t want. Plus trying to force advertisements on me, so badly, so infuriatingly that I’ve had to install Ad Blocker. But even that constantly shows an ad!! Bloody hell! It’s bad enough that if I could figure out how to do it, I would return it. If it’s not too late. I bought it through Amazon.

I’ve realised that I think I can upgrade my old phone to give me voLTE. That would put me in a quandary. I think I should do it anyway, even though I only have one SIM card. I could get another one, of course. Hmmm.

This new phone has a twin lens camera, and the main sensor is 104Mpixels! That makes file sizes of around 38,000 x 28,000 pixels or 100MByte files. That’s far bigger than any of my stills cameras.

Of course, it assumes I have the energy and strength to go out photographing.

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I’m watching Foyle’s War on TV. What an absolutely superb program this is. The star is Michael Kitchen. I’ve never seen him in any other production, yet he’s magnificent in this role. There are quite a few episodes in this series. I’ve seen most of them before but I don’t remember tonight’s. Highly, highly recommended.

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Speaking of TV, I’m almost embarrassed to say that I’m addicted to two other programs on Seven, Million Dollar Sales New York (and the same program set in LA), and Shark Tank which follows it.

The first is all about real estate sales in New York (and LA) and holy smoke, there’s nothing under $2m, going up above $15 million for apartments and town houses. One NY town house this week was four stories and had an indoor salt water pool. Virtually all the properties have pools and the locations with views are all important, naturally.

Nearly all are already furnished and if not, the agent has to arrange to have furniture brought in for the prospective clients, a process called staging.

Today’s program in LA showed a mansion, there’s no other word for it, at $60 million! And the client didn’t bat an eyelid at the price. She didn’t choose that one, but another one at $16.5 million with a decision almost on the spot after a five minute phone conversation with her husband in London.

The other program, Shark Tank, is based on the UK program called Dragons’ Den, where people with inventions or ideas for enterprises pitch their product to people with money seeking investments. The inventors make a short five minute presentation asking for money at a certain percentage of their company. Whether their pitch is attractive or not is the interesting part.

What’s also interesting is the difference between the UK production and the USA version. The UK “dragons” are cold, almost malevolent, very unfriendly. I assume it’s by design. And each entrepreneur is required to walk up a steep staircase before reaching the main floor, meaning they’re somewhat out of breath and uncomfortable as they have to face the dragons.

By contrast, the US “Sharks” are good natured, natural, friendly and jokey, putting the entrepreneurs at ease from the start. Except for one “shark” all the others seem like very nice people. The one exception is abrasive, self opinionated, egotistical (he calls himself Mr Wonderful!) and hard to deal with.

Anyway, the show is entertaining and addictive. I enjoy it very much.