Today may see a bit of cloud reducing the sunshine to just sunny spells, but at the moment this may only happen a few times from mid afternoon onwards. Once again the forecast says the temperature may reach 28° C. Tomorrow may see full sunshine until 6pm when the last couple of hours until sunset may only see sunny spells. It will probably be a few degrees cooler, but still very warm.

   I had to go out for a walk in the lovely warm sunshine - both because my health demanded it, and because it was warm and sunny and rather lovely out. However before I could go out I had some tasks to complete. First of all was some laundry. I washed 3 t-shirts plus some underwear. Once washed I hung it outside to dry. There was not a lot of wind to speed up the drying, but it was all 99% dry when I brought it in some 7 hours later.

  With the laundry done I turned my attention to the garden. All I actually did was to get the hose out, and give everything a good watering - particularly the stuff growing in pots. While I was out there I took a few snaps...
  My nasturtium plants are trying to outgrow the adjacent tomato plant. The only flowers they have produced are hidden in the foliage. With hindsight it seems that it was a bad idea to grow the two next to each other.
  For a while my Companulas were the success story of my garden. I regularly "dead head" them. I am not sure if you are supposed to, but they keep flowering, and yesterday there were probably more flowers out at one time than at any other time.
  It was only yesterday that I found out these bright yellow flowers are California Poppys. They seemed very slow growing, and it was only something like 6 to 8 weeks ago that the first flower appeared. Now they are producing new flowers seemingly every day.
  I was tormenting a spider with the hose and was viewing my big tomato plants (almost a small bush) from the other side. I saw a glimpse of red inside the tangle of plants. It was a nasturtium flower that was just opening, but a little lower than that (in the middle of the red circle) was something else that was a deeper red..
  The red thing was my first ripe tomato. All my tomato plants are grown from seeds of baby tomatoes (on plant, which is not doing that well, is from a baby plum tomato seed). This tomato was only as big as a BIG gobstopper, but once washed it was delicious. I hope it is sign that more tomatoes will be ripening soon. I almost wonder if I should cut off the still very undeveloped tomatoes at the time of year so the plant can concentrate on the tomatoes that are almost, or are full sized, but still green.


  It was gone midday before I went out for my walk. The sun was beating down, and it felt good except for a few things. I think that maybe the air was very dry, and on two occasions it seemed to dry my throat enough to cause a bit of coughing. The first time it happened I had a couple of sugar free mints, and they caused my mouth to moisten again. The second time the coughing stopped by itself after a minute or less. Of course it could have been Covid-19.

  The other thing that was a bit weird was how quickly I tired on what was only a short walk compared to my current average. I seemed to be mostly OK walking to the top of Mountsfield Park, but started to tire when going down the hill towards Lewisham Park. One good thing is that my right knee didn't give me any trouble. In fact it seemed to hold up better than the rest of my body.

 There was one other thing that was a disappointment despite being predictable. I timed my walk to be in Lewisham Park at about the right time if Angela had gone to sit in the sunshine instead of going to one or other of the local pubs to her work. I have to admit I have no idea if she is back at work. I know that she was in Devon for the weekend, and she may have had additional days off work. Maybe I'll take another walk through the park in a week or two to see if she still visits it, but I suspect she spends her lunchbreak in the pub.


  I suppose I took this selfie in the park, with the view behind me being the view from Angela's favourite park bench, more to tease Angela than from any narcistic reason.  I sat on her favourite park bench for about 15 minutes, and that may have been my downfall. I felt far worse for that rest than if I had continued walking. I just sort of seized up. It felt a struggle not to take the most direct route home, but I wanted to try and get a bit more distance on this walk by going home via the Ladywell Road entrance to Ladywell Fields. In the end, the best I could do was to stretch the walk to 2.6 miles.

  I guess I should feel happy that the first third of the walk was uphill in various degrees all the way to Hither Green Lane. That was possibly equal to twice the effort of walking the same distance on the level....err, I'm probably clutching at straws here. The best thing about the whole walk was that I temporarily lost enough weight, mostly by dehydration in the hot sun, to equal my weight after the previous days walk. Once again I was in uncharted areas of the weight display !

  I have to admit it was very good to get home again - more so than usual. I really was knackered when I got in. I did my best not to eat anything, and only drink chilled water for a few hours, but my stomach was really rumbling with hunger by about 3pm - too early for dinner, and too late for lunch. I think I was probably quite empty after the effects of the bean stew I had for dinner the previous night !

  I sort of satisfied my hunger with a couple of cans of soup. The creme of mushroom soup promised to be low in both calories and sugar, but the Mulligatawny soup seemed to have more sugar than I would have guessed. I then held out until dinner time. My dinner was a special concoction that was probably part inspired by the bean stew (with sausage and duck) I had the previous night. My "invention" was pasta with kidney beans - a whole tin of kidney beans. Apart from a small squeeze of tomato purée, a bit of garlic, and the last spoonful of jar of pesto I had been using as a dip for rice crackers a day or tow ago, that was the only ingredients. It was surprisingly nice.

   By bed time I was feeling OK, and I felt about as comfortable as I can be when laying in bed. It probably wasn't long before I was fast asleep. Once again I slept solidly for the first 4 hours. At least my memory is that I slept solidly, but I do seem to recall I had some dreams. I can't recall many details of those dreams (and later dreams), but they all seemed to be on the theme of photography. Maybe this was because I didn't get my camera out once on my walk (I used my phone to take the selfie).

  This morning my blood glucose is a little bit higher than yesterday. That is probably thanks to the pasta, but maybe the beans played a small part. It is not a big increase, and still within the OK range. More annoying is that my weight this morning is identical to my weight yesterday morning. It may be a temporary thing. The whole (big) tin of Kidney beans that formed half of my dinner are only now several hours after getting up, doing what beans do. I expect something is going to happen sooner or later that will reduce my weight by a couple of hundred grams (wishful thinking again).

  Yesterday was my third consecutive day of going for a walk. Maybe today it would be beneficial to rest a bit. There is still plenty to do here - including washing a bath towel and hand towel. That will generate a bit of sweat with the day now warming up fast. One thing I think I am probably going to do today will be very unusual, but may become more common next year. Provided there is no fox poo in the middle of my lawn I think I am going to lay on a big towel, on a shower curtain as a ground sheet, and see if I can get some sun burn. I quite fancy cooking my back and shoulders in the sun. It feels like it should do some sort of good, but quite what is an unanswered question for now. I'll let you know if anything notable happens.