This morning has started off very wet. The rain probably varies between light and medium heavy, but seems to have been quite persistent since I first looked outside (maybe around 6am). At the moment the sky is very dark grey, and it looks as if the rain could go on forever, but it may be like yesterday and brighten up mid morning. The latest revision to the forecast says the chance of rain after 10am will be no higher than 10% for the rest of the day. There could be sunny periods around midday, and a full sunshine for 4 and 6pm. It is only a chilly 9° C now, and the afternoon high may be no more than 14° C. Tomorrow may start bright and sunny, but by early afternoon, and maybe a bit before, we will lose any sunshine, and there could be some hours of light rain. It will be even colder - just a chilly 12° C maximum !


  When writing yesterday morning I had doubts about going out for a walk. I am not sure when it was a change of heart, and decided that not only would I go out for a walk, but I would choose a route that was a bit longer than my previous walk or two, and would include a lot of hill climbing.

  Without intending to do it I seem to have realised that the more hills I tackle the better I get at it. I seemed to tackle a few hills yesterday that I could have avoided in the past. The first hurdle was going up Rosenthal Road from Rushey Green to Mountsfield Park. I did that non stop (except for the briefest of stops to blow my nose), but I will admit I found it hard going.

  I was probably still warming up at that point because after entering the park, and going back down 75% of the hill, it felt easier than usual to go back up to the top.  Note: "easier" does not equate to "easy".  I still had to grit my teeth a bit to do it non stop. Once at the very top I did stop to take a few pictures, but I don't think I actually needed to rest, and could have carried on walking, but I could be deluding myself. Anyway, you have to stop when there are photo opportunities.
  This picture looks under exposed, but that is deliberate to preserve some detail in the clouds. This is the view upon entering the park from the top of Rosenthal Road (although it is actually a few yards into George Lane at this point). It illustrates what the sky usually looked like during my walk. There was a lot of blue, but a few clouds, like the one just to the left of centre of the picture, that would sometimes drift across the sun for a minute or two.
   I was walking around the park in the opposite direction to usual, and somehow that made me see it differently. Maybe the big difference was the angle of the sun rather than anything else. It is a lot lower in the sky now as the seasons move on. This view was the closest I could get that made me think of the old Windows XP desktop wallpaper.
  As I said further up the page, when you get to the top of the hill you have to take a picture of the view. This time I used a lot of zoom to get a close up of the Crystal Palace TV transmitter mast. I had to enhance this picture by increasing the contrast, among other things, because the original looks very flat. It was like I had taken it on a dull day. Maybe it was during one of the brief dull periods, or maybe it was big streak of bright cloud behind the mast that fooled the camera. Although I admit that cloud does not look bright at all in this picture.
  Turning the camera to the right reveals this view, and in this picture the sky does look very cloudy in the distance. This is almost the view in the opposite direction from when I was up Hilly Fields. Just left of centre of the picture is the school at the top of Hilly Fields. It is The Shard, near London Bridge station that is in the centre of the picture. To the right is one of the three tower blocks opposite Lewisham Hospital, and the big building from the centre to the left of the picture is the new Lewisham Hospital building.
  I took the opportunity to walk through the new estate built on the grounds of the old Hither Green Fever Hospital. If it wasn't for the automatic barrier, and a bit of car sticking out beyond the bushes, this view could have been very "olde worlde". It is the main entrance drive to the hospital grounds. The funny thing is that my memory from days when the hospital was still in use was that the entrance road was ordinary tarmac.
  A few of the old hospital buildings still exist. This building, which originally held the "Discharge Rooms" (as it says on the red plaque at the top of the arch) is now used for something, but I am not sure what. The left hand side of the building was for waiting rooms. That, or possibly another part of this building is currently used as a pharmacy. I think there are a few preserved bits of the old hospital, and some day I shall explore a bit more of the estate.
   I knew this sign existed underneath this railway bridge a short distance from Hither Green station, and it seems I waited quite a few years before actually walking past it. It did so yesterday, and took a snap of it. Unfortunately the sun was in such a position as to be able to shine over the left hand edge, and bleaching it out. I will make a point of walking this way again some time in the hope of getting a better picture.
  The last time I stood on the footbridge looking down on the River Quaggy as it enters Manor Park, it was a warm sunny day, and the river was just a trickle. If it hadn't been guarded by a load of kiddies and their mums I would have gone down for a close look, and even gone for a paddle (sort of - I would still be wearing my waterproof boots). Yesterday what was a mere babbling brook was trying to be a raging torrent after the recent rain.
 Just to prove it is Manor Park.... This is by the Longhurst Road entrance.
  Who wouldn't want to live in such a nice named road ?
  This is a closed pub at the junction of Ryecroft Road, and Courthill Road, SE13. I've passed it once before maybe a couple of months ago. It has a sign up saying for sale, but nothing has changed except for the sound of someone working inside. I would have to check my old pictures, but I think that maybe it has had a new lick of paint. At the moment there is no external sign that anything else has changed. It would be nice to think that it is going to re-open as a pub, but that seems unlikely in this day and age.

  I was feeling quite good on this walk, although that is not to say that feeling even better would not be very desirable. I found my legs sort of ached almost from the start, but they didn't really seem to get worse apart from when going up one of the steep hills. Even that was a short lived ache. Even my feet seemed almost happy, but I had taken care to cushion all the common sore spots. I wasn't aiming to walk more than 3 miles, but there was an easy route to make the walk longer by walking the entire length of the north end of Ladywell Fields. That took the entire walk up to 3.7 miles, and that was a fair bit of exercise considering the hill climbing involved. I would dare to say it took the same effort as a 5 mile walk over level ground.

  When I got home I didn't feel in a rush to get my boots off and strip off my outdoor clothes. The first thing I did was to go out into the garden and do some "gardening". Now admittedly it was just a 5 minute session, but it should count by some rule or another. What I actually did was to cut off a few vines (branches, shoots, bunches, ???) of tomatoes to bring indoors. I hope to ripen them by putting them in whatever sun can shine through my bedroom window. It was actually sunny as I did this. Some do seem to be turning from green to red, but whether they will all ripen enough is something I will have to hope for. (Just checked, a few more are starting to ripen this morning).

  With my few minutes of "gardening" done, I stripped off and weighed myself. As usual I had lost a fair amount of weight - even if most of it was dehydration. It was still not as low as the readings from a few days ago. I seem to be going through another annoying little (I hope it's little) peak again. I didn't have too much time to worry about it because I had to get the back room cleaned up again for the "Thursday Club - Catford branch". A couple of hours later and Jodie and Michael would be round for some beers and a gossip.


    At 1.25pm, the heavens opened for a while. It was probably all over in about 10 minutes, but for about that long the rain fell like stair rods ! Then the sun came out again. It was all over so quickly that by the time I had put shoes and a shirt on, grabbed my waterproof camera, and put a hooded raincoat on, I missed the actual rainfall. The top picture shows a few puddles that hadn't been there before, plus a general sheen of wetness across the road. The picture underneath shows the next blue sky heading towards me.

  Fortunately both Jodie and Michael missed any rain as they came here. We had a very pleasant drinking session. Maybe an hour before I had a tin of canned Ravioli to "line my stomach" before embarking on my drinking session. It didn't seem to work that well. I drunk enough beers to erode any of the care I should have taken with my dinner. Our drinking session ended at about 6pm - a good time because I didn't have my dinner too late.

  After the beer I felt ravenous, and I ended up eating what I hoped would be two dinners. That was based on the idea that I thought I had some rice to go with the lamb dhansak that was to be my main, and only course. I ended up eating the chicken tikka too. I have to admit, maybe with hindsight, it did feel a bit excessive, but I don't think I can blame it on what was to come.

  I went to bed feeling rather bloated. It was a bit uncomfortable, but I managed to get to sleep a bit later than intended. I slept for maybe 3 hours before waking again feeling more uncomfortable. It was then that I realised it wasn't bloat from eating too much, but trapped wind. That became much more obvious when it started to escape the trap. Sometimes it was more like trapped howling gale than just wind. At around 3am I paid two visits to the toilet, and reduced the pressure a lot, but by that time my sleep was too disturbed. I think I was awake from before 2am until at least 5am.

  I managed to sleep, sometimes a bit fitfully, until about 7am. After getting up, and having another wee, I weighed myself. I was shocked by what I saw. I seemed to have put on a lot of weight - more than should be theoretically possible in just 12 hours ! Since then I have visited the toilet several times, and my weight is still more than it should be, but it is less shocking. I really ought to be very careful about what I eat today. on the other hand, my blood glucose level is a very satisfactory. It is 7.7mmol/l, a lot lower than yesterday's 9.5mmol/l, and not far off my previous monthly average (although I think this months average is looking like it will be over 8 instead of about 7.5.

  With the sun almost breaking through I think it is likely I will go for a walk today, but it may be just a very short one. I would like to take a look at the "Bridge Of Doom", or maybe "The Bridge Of No Longer Doom" now that the repairs should have been completed, and the bridge re-opened. Of course there is a chance that the rain may have delayed the work - particularly if painting was involved. In some ways a visit tomorrow may be safer. The other thing I do intend to do is to have a play with some of my old computer bits. I have a couple of second hand mother boards, with processors, that may be faster than my current PC. Sooner or later my PC needs an upgrade, and rather than buy something there is chance, admittedly a small chance, that I might have something here already. Anyway, it is a long time since I had a play with computers, and I could be loosing my skills.