- entry 2026/02/17

Allergies?

I had, for dinner, having been delayed somewhat by last night's blog article, a frozen meal from Picard - chicken and some sort of pasta and a slimy white sauce with mushrooms. This is nothing out of the ordinary, I get something quite similar from my local supermarket every so often (though as a fresh meal, not a frozen one, as their frozen selection is pretty lousy).

2am. Gurgles. Pain. Not an "I'm dying" pain like with that burger, but a "oh balls, here we go again" pain. It wasn't, actually, overly painful. Just a long drawn out emptying of the internal whatsits.

But I hadn't been poisoned. I would have been surprised by that as Picard is pretty decent stuff, it's not like something from one of the four-letter places where they're always displaying recall notices for some pretty awful things like "listeria in the cheese". In point of fact, I don't think I've ever seen a recall notice at Picard, not in store or on the website.

How did I know it wasn't bad food? Easy - as it was getting into full swing, I felt like I was being eaten alive by bedbugs. Complete with actual physical manifestations of bites that itched worse than being stuck in a room with a cloud of hungry mosquitoes.

This was a good thing.

Well, not good for me as such, but good in that it was a slightly overenthusiastic but completely ordinary allergy reaction.

As to what - no flamin' idea.

It's my own fault really. I have a simple rule of "only eat new things on a Friday afternoon" (in case stuff like this happens). Yesterday wasn't a Friday afternoon.

Mom had a famously wonky gut. So it seems that of all of the things I could have inherited (her brains, ability with languages, musical ability...), what I ended up with was a digestive system that randomly explodes for no clear reason.
Gee... thanks mom.

On a more serious note, I think sometime I'm going to have to go to the doctor to discuss allergy testing. Given her reaction to when I talked about autism with her [see below], I don't really have much confidence with her being able to help with things that are a little out of the ordinary.

Oh, I should probably add - once everything had calmed down, all those bites? Mysteriously gone. The body is a weird thing at times, isn't it?

Mental health unit

But it gets better. I was speaking to some community nurses that came to work. Something to do with healthy eating, we got a lecture, she was pleased that I don't drink or smoke or take drugs but she was slightly less pleased that my method of dosing sugar in my tea was to tip the bag until "it felt like enough" (and if I wasn't sure, add a little more just in case ☺).
Anyway, afterwards I approached them about it, and they first said I needed the CMP and then they revised that to the CATTP because that's the one that deals with adults. No idea what it means, the French love acronyms. Anyway, they are both part of a large mental health unit in Rennes, and there is an offshoot based in Janzé. That's a town that's like... I dunno, 20 or 30km up the road. I think Janzé might be our administrative sub-prefecture or something like that. Never needed to find out, but for a doctor living here, not knowing the medical facilities literally two or three towns up the dual carriageway is a pretty poor show.

I'll have to email the main place in Rennes to ask them to forward my enquiry to Janzé as they don't appear to have any contact details whatsoever, I guess you are expected to simply turn up and ask at reception or something? I dunno...
Anyway, a tiny step forward.

And this evening

I'll talk about what I did another day, maybe tomorrow. But for now, here is a photo.

Whatever could this be? 🤔

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David Pilling, 18th February 2026, 17:01

Mystery hack - USB on one side (power?), audio jack on the other. ESP32 Cam. Obviously you take a photo and it turns it into a song.

David Pilling, 18th February 2026, 17:18

Google image search says the board on the right is USB to midi. At any rate the board on the right provides a digital signal and the ESP32 cam on the left converts to analogue audio.

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