The title describes the weather conditions today. It’s unpleasant but only to be expected in November.

Last night we dined in a South Indian restaurant and were disappointed by the food. This morning we thought we owed it to ourselves to make up for it with a full cooked breakfast in a local cafe. A bit so-so, if I’m honest.

To avoid the weather, we took to the DLR (Docklands Light Railway). This is a network of driverless trains serving, as its name suggests, the area of Docklands.

Trains do carry a human agent who can intervene in emergences or when the volume of passengers necessitates human control of the doors.

And this is where we came – to Stratford. No, not that Stratford, the one on the River Avon associated with Shakespeare, but Stratford in London.

This is perhaps the chief attraction of Stratford, the Westfield Stratford City shopping centre or mall.

This is not my ideal environment but it is at least somewhere to go on a day of bad weather. You can tour the shops, stop for coffee and even have lunch if the spirit moved you to do so.

The only disadvantage is that everywhere tends to be crowded, as this photo taken in Costa Coffee shows.

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This post suffers a discontinuity at this point. On leaving the shopping centre and progressing to the bus station, I tripped and fell, damaging my right hand and hitting by forehead on the ground.

British Transport Police officers came to my aid and took me to their office. They carried out first aid while we waited for paramedics to arrive and, subsequently, an ambulance crew.

The damage was considered serious enough to require hospital treatment and I was transferred by ambulance to Newham University Hospital.

There, I was X-rayed, CT-scanned, blood and blood-pressure tested and bandaged up.

It was around 6:30 pm when I was released. We returned via Stratford, where we had a meal, and then took the DLR back to Crossharbour.

My use of my right hand is limited at present and this will impinge on my ability to post to the blog but I will do my best to keep up with events.

I took this photo from the lounge window this morning at about 6:20. Sunrise is at 6:54 so the sky, just visible, has begun to grow light. The camera is turned to the right as there is another building directly in front.

You can see part of the dock with lights reflecting in the water.

We are spending a couple of days in an apartment in Docklands with a relative of Tigger’s.

The early part of the day was spent collecting said relative from the railway station, having lunch then filling in time before we could access the apartment by going on a bus ride. I felt no particular inclination to record this part of the expedition in writing or photos until we reached Greenwich.

Here we made a visit to what was originally the Millennium Dome and is today an O2 centre.

Above is what I am tempted to call a street in the O2 because it looks very much like a high street in a small town, except that instead of the sky, there is a canvas roof covering the whole site. This gave me the curious sensation of being an extra on a film set.

This is another view from inside the dome though I don’t think it does it justice. In the centre is a sweeping staircase, flanked on either side by an escalator.

The yellow legs on the right, looking like something from a set of a film of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, are part of one of the twelve supports holding up the roof.

A partial view of the Dome from outside. It is a peculiar structure and I cannot imagine what possessed the architects to design it. The huge roof is suspended by cables stretched from the aforementioned legs and I can’t help wondering if it might one day collapse.

This is a more general view of the area which has plenty of open space.

I took this to show the tops of some of the supports holding up the canvas roof. In the foreground is a long glass canopy covering the path from the tube station to the O2.

While waiting for the bus out, I photographed this now historic vestige. Properly called gas holders, they were popularly called gasometers. The iron skeleton that is all that is now left originally contained a drum that rose and fell as it was filled with gas and this was used by consumers.

The gas, of course, was “town gas”, that is, gas made from coal. When the UK changed over to North Sea gas, the gas holders lost their purpose. By this time, however, they had come to be appreciated for their historic value. Some are now listed buildings while others have been modified for new use or incorporated into new buildings.

We changed buses in Poplar where I took a photo through the railings of All Saints Church. As the style might suggest, it was built in the early 19th century (1821-3).

We eventually arrived at Crossharbour and gained possession of our apartment.

This is a quick panorama of the lounge and kitchenette. Not that you can see much detail because of the small scale.

Having made the acquaintance of the apartment, we went out to do a little necessary shopping at the nearby ASDA store.

Darkness had fallen giving this view of the docks with lights reflected in the water.

Some of the buildings are monstrously big, like this cylindrical blot on the landscape. Docklands no longer fulfils the purpose of its name, being given over to office blocks and luxury apartments.

Another memento of times past: these three cranes that once loaded and unloaded cargo ships from all over the world, stand silent and still. Sealed and immobilised, they remain as monuments to an era that is gone for ever.

The docks remain, but no ship can access them now because, even if the water were still deep enough, which I doubt, the entrances are blocked by new roads and bridges. All that sail on these waters today are coots, swans and visiting gulls.

Yesterday evening I went for the long awaited consultation with my dentist. He had been on holiday during the mini-drama of my toothache described in my previous posts on the subject.

He sat and listened attentively while I told the story. In this opening gambit, I refrained from detailing the other dentist’s dire prognostications regarding the ultimate fate of that tooth, preferring to let him reach his own conclusions. He knows my teeth, so to speak, better than a stranger coming upon them for the first time.

While I pretended to relax in the chair, he took an X-ray and while this was being developed, had a good look around my mouth.

He then showed me the X-ray and outlined his conclusions. Happily, these are much more optimistic than those of the other dentist.

Despite having an unusually deep filling, the tooth in question was sound. The problem was its proximity to its next door neighbour which favoured the trapping of extraneous matter, giving rise to the sort of infection that I had just endured. Work will need to be done (I won’t bore you with the details) which will settle matters for the foreseeable future.

Being of an anxious disposition, when things go wrong, I tend to think the worst. This time, to be fair, the stand-in dentist had encouraged my pessimism. It was a relief to find that the situation was not as bad as I had come to imagine. So it was that, as I bade my dentist goodbye, I heard myself say “Once again, I leave happier than when I came.”

Quite so!