The sky is nearly all grey and cloudy as I write this, but somewhere to the east is a gap in the clouds, and the sun is actually shining. The latest revision of the forecast shows the sunny spells now lasting up to midday, and then restarting again at 5pm. No rain is forecast, but after yesterday I am not sure if I can believe that today will be totally dry. At least it might be a bot warmer than yesterday. The temperature should reach 21° C this afternoon. Tomorrow should be very sunny with the temperature reaching 24° C in the afternoon. The day after may be just as warm, but with a lot less sun.
   While the latest revision to the weather forecast was saying it was bright and sunny yesterday morning, this was the reality as seen from my back bedroom window at approximately 10am. The timing of the picture was not ideal because the sun was peeping through one of the blue patches of sky. 10 or 15 minutes later it was as dull as ditch water outside. This is the view to the north, but to the south there were some much darker looking clouds to be seen.



  As I said yesterday morning, all my health indicators suggested I was in good form, but I didn't really feel it. Nevertheless, I did feel that I ought to get out and get some exercise. I must confess that I am getting bored with my two local parks, but the River Pool Linear Park can still be a bit pleasant, and more so on a cooler day when long trousers are more suited to the temperature, and very much more suited to walking along the narrow path by the river. The latter is the biggest attraction of that park to me.

  I didn't attempt to break any records yesterday, and I just did the simple walk as far as the bow string bridge, crossed the river, and walk back again. On this occasion, as a test, I turned off both WiFi and mobile data once the Simply Walking app had read my starting coordinates, and loaded the appropriate map. With no distractions from external sources my route was just pure GPS signals. Apart from a tiny squiggle when I went through the subway under the main road, the app appears to have captured my walk exactly. I feel sure I can say with a lot of confidence that I walked 3.17 miles (I'll knock off the 0.004 because of that tiny error when the GPS signal was lost under the subway).

  The walk felt very routine, and apart from one toe being abraded because of a sock issue (I think), it was otherwise very easy, and otherwise painless. (Note to self: Check that sock to see if there is some mysterious lump of something right above my middle toe on my right foot.)




  There was one anomaly yesterday. We have not had any rain in the local area for a fortnight or more (at least I can't recall any), and yet the river was running a little deeper yesterday. I am not sure of the source of the River Pool, nor where that source might be fed from, but it would be some way to the south of here. Somewhere to the south of here, the Surrey Hills maybe, there must have been some recent rain. There is also the possibility that even earlier rain might have taken weeks to seep through the rocks before raising the river level. I must admit that the reflections on the water make this photo a little indistinct, but you can just see that my favourite rocks were completely surrounded by water yesterday. The exposed shingle river bed was also almost back under water.
  I think this is a dog rose. It is very plain compared to ornamental roses, and has far less thorns. I can remember one growing in my back garden 30 years ago, and now I think I have another growing - on the opposite side of the garden ! The one in my garden has no flowers (yet), and also no thorns at all, but the shape of the leaves, and how they are placed on the stems, looks identical. My one was starting to get a bit tall, and so I snipped off the top. Hopefully that might make it expand outwards. If it finally flowers it should look nice, but as yet there are no signs of buds on it.
  The tree that is the subject of this photo amazes me. It is the one whose trunk is growing at a 45° angle rather than the more traditional upright. I can see no obvious reason why it should be growing at this amazing angle, but I guess something happened in the past to make this happen. What amazes me most is considering how strong the wood, and the root system, must be to allow it to grown at that angle without either snapping, or uprooting itself.

  The only thing that spoiled my walk was what was probably something to do with a gang dispute. Six young black men appeared to be holding two others prisoners. Quite how that turned out is something I probably don't want to hear. They were certainly not discrete about it with loads of people on foot, or even more on bikes, going past every minute. If it did end with something more than a shouting match then hopefully someone would have called the police.

  At the end of my walk, or at least before the last half mile, I did some shopping in the Sainsbury's Local shop by Catford Station. Before I went in there I noted that the sunny periods were getting shorter and shorter, and some clouds looked very threatening. While I was at the checkout, having bought all I wanted, someone said that it was raining outside. It certainly was ! When I left the shop I walked into a heavy downpour. I guess it was short lived, but by the time it has stopped, maybe half way home from the shop, I was feeling rather damp !
  I am getting out of sequence again. I took the above picture at the start of my walk. It is a high angle shot of the window boxes (there are two small ones under the foliage) on the windowsill nearest my front door. For weeks and weeks it didn't look like these plants would do much, and then one day the first flower appeared. Since then it has become something like I hoped to achieve, and continues to get better day by day. I think that once the flowers seem to be finishing I might replant them all in the front garden, and see what happens later, and maybe even next year.

  One of the treats I bought in Sainsbury's was a couple of ready made cheese ploughmans sandwiches. I thought, but wrongly, that they would mess up my string of good blood glucose, and weight readings. Had I know the negligible effect they would have I would probably have enjoyed them twice as much. After eating them I lay on my bed for a siesta. I think as much as a couple of hours passed while I was either reading, resting my eyes, or sleeping.

  After that couple of hours I felt I really ought to do something. One such thing was to waste more time trying to persuade my mini digital video recorder to work properly. I tried two memory cards, and also tried formatting one of them in the device, but each time I tried to copy a VHS tape there would be file corruption. I have concluded there is a big chance that the device has crap firmware because I don't think it has ever worked properly since it was new. There is another very slim possibility that the "wall wart" type power supply could be faulty. One of my jobs today is to try it with another power supply, but I feel very pessimistic it will make a difference. Eventually I will probably have to fall back onto using my Samsung DV camcorder, which fortunately was a grey import, and didn't have the external record function disabled to avoid EU tarrifs. It seems a long winded way to do the digitisation, but at least it usually works.

  I forgot to mention that before I went for my walk I washed a couple of t-shirts and a couple of tea towels. I hung them outside to dry, and so I had another reason to be annoyed by the un-forecast rain earlier. Fortunately there was enough breeze to dry them quickly, and they were essentially dry when I took them off the line at dinner time. After the sandwiches I had earlier I had a very slightly later dinner. It was a ready made salad that I enhanced with a bit of sliced raw onion, and sliced deseeded chillies, and some lean looking ham.

  About the only TV I watched last night was about 75% of the film "Two Way Stretch" starring Peter Sellars and a host of other well known faces from the period. By 8pm I had taken to my bed to read. By 9pm I had turned off the light, and turned over. Three hours later I finally got to sleep. I thought I was tired, but evidently not, although once asleep I seemed to sleep quite well. I thought that getting up just after 6am was a bit early, but that was what my body wanted to do even if my brain said it was a stupid idea.

  This morning I did my usual routine. My blood glucose was up to 7.7mmol/l, thus proving those sandwiches were not innocent, but my weight was at an all time* low, and thus proving the sandwiches were innocent after all....sort of. My temperature was very low, but I don't usually take it so soon after getting out of bed so early. Taking 10mg of Bisoprolol seems to have corrected my blood pressure, and getting a nice low reading with no special effort. It seems that this morning is another morning when I am fit as a fiddle. Once again it is a shame I don't feel like it, but I guess there is not much I can complain about.

* I am not sure when I changed from stones and pounds to kilograms, but it possibly pre-dated my bypass operation in 2013. I seem to recall I did have a brief flirt with it during an earlier period of dieting back in the days when I was going swimming with Patricia, but it is probably only in the last 12 months when I have go the feeling for kilogrammes. Bearing that in mind, I can't remember a time when my weight was less than it was this morning. The thing that makes it more exciting was that I had also reached a point where the scales were hovering around the point when the units digit could have been one less. It actually settled on a whole number with no decimal place. If I can do something similar to the last couple of days I should see the units digit go down by one soon.

   At the moment I feel like a snooze, but I will probably have a shower, and get ready to go out for a walk. I have not made my mind up, but I am toying with the idea of following the Waterlink Way north instead of south. I could potentially end up in Greenwich ! (Although I doubt I will).