Awful head cold last week, one of those that buggers up the ears (could barely hear sounds below about middle C, making everything sound tinny like it was on a cheap radio).

If you’re concerned about your blood pressure it’s worth getting a blood pressure monitor (choose a type that’s listed by the British Heart Foundation or the NHS). Just being in a doctor’s surgery or hospital can cause “white coat hypertension” and it doesn’t take tensing up much to add ten or twenty mmHg to your blood pressure (1mmHg isn’t much pressure).

If you can test at home and take an average over a decent amount of time, then it will give you a much better picture of what your BP actually is, and whether there is a problem, and if there is a problem, if what you’re doing is helping to fix the problem.

Related, is people holding handheld radios (walkie talkies) sideways, popularised by ‘cool guys on tv doing it’.

It’s actaully very bad to do this - transmissions on handhelds are supposed to be vertically polarised (base station antennas are always vertical) and holding the radio sideways will transmit a horizontally polarized signal. This actually really matters - it can reduce by as much as 30dB the received signal strength at the other end (and -30dB is 1/1000th)