I feel that today's forecast is going to be no more reliable than the recent day's forecasts. It is almost 10am as I write this, and so far this morning there has been a lot of sunshine, but the sun is now hazy as thin cloud bubbles up around it. The sun seems to have warmed the morning up a bit, but only by a couple of degrees. It is now around 9° C. First thing this morning it as closer to just 7° C. The most recent update to the forecast has got a chance of being correct. It correctly forecast the light cloud that has appeared, and it says there is a 40% chance of rain, but I think it could stay dry. The cloud will get thicker and grey for a while, but this afternoon could be brighter, and there might be an occasional sunny spell. It could be a dry evening. The afternoon temperature will be about the same as yesterday, 12° C. Tomorrow could see a lot of rain falling throughout the day, but it could be a whole degree less cold than today.

  The morning rain put me off doing anything outdoors yesterday. Unfortunately it was another case of the morning setting the agenda for the afternoon. There were a few hours in the afternoon when there were cheerful sunny spells - sometime quite long lasting sunny spells. I could have gone out for a walk if I had chosen to do so in the early afternoon, but the morning rain just left me depressed, and I made my mind up to mope all day...sort of. Anyway, Sundays always have been, and will always be, the most boring day of the week.

  I started yesterday doing nothing more than laying on my bed reading, but as I wrote yesterday, the book I am reading is a bit turgid. One problem with it is that there are too many heroes, and hardly any villains. That is the simplest explanation I can find. I shall read it through to the end, and then I will read a much funnier book by the same Author - Harry Harrison. I shall be reading one of his Stainless Steel Rat stories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stainless_Steel_Rat.

  After reading for an hour or so I started getting a bit restless, and considered other things to do. I had already prepared for something else to do by leaving a black bin liner next to the cabinet by my bed. This cabinet is actually a very old, welded steel,  19 inch rack cabinet turned on it's side, and boxed in with contiboard. Maybe 40 years ago I had some mad idea about building a big transmitter in it, but I never did, and having acquired from an old friend I found it was impossible to get rid of again.

  Using it as bedroom furniture seemed like a fair use for it, and I had started doing that well before I moved here towards the end of 1983.  The only trouble is that there is probably stuff at the back of it that has been there since I moved here. Yesterday seemed like a good time to get rid of some of the stuff in there to make room for more stuff. I managed to make a fair bit of room in there by getting rid of some old boxes that various stuff had come in, and were stupid to keep. Some boxes, like those my cameras, and lenses came it are worth keeping because they would probably enhance the value of the photographic stuff if I were to sell it.

  There was one box of stuff I had to grit my teeth, and close my eyes as I dumped the whole thing in the wheelie bin. It was box with about 30 or more DVD cover disks off old PC magazines. They probably had loads of interesting stuff on them, but probably nothing that couldn't be downloaded off the internet. Another box contained CD cover disks, but there wasn't room in the wheelie bin to dump them this week.

  Yet another box was full of audio CDs that were freebies sent to me by some record companies in the days when I was doing pirate radio. Almost all the music on those discs is pretty awful, but some may be OK-ish. I really don't want to just throw them away, but that may be their ultimate fate. However I will not dispose of the discs in any way possible - they are not the sort of music that would sell well from charity shops, but that could be their final fate - before I make mp3 copies of them. I spent a fair bit of yesterday  afternoon ripping CDs to mp3 files. One day I may even try listening to them.


   Another reminder of the past popped up when I grabbed an old note book to make some notes. On the first page of the notebook I found a travel itinerary I had made (pictured on the left). The mention of "smoke" when there were some long periods between changes of trains dates this to prior to September 2013, and it was probably from 2011 of 2012.

  I don't think I actually went on this trip. A 3 hour journey for what was possibly no more than a one hour coastal walk did not seem a great idea, and of course it would probably be 3 hours to get home again ! I never did this journey, but I did reach the ultimate destination that I was aiming for. That was Deal. My intention was to walk the couple of miles from Martin Mill to Deal.

  What I actually did to get to Deal was to splash out on the High Speed Train from St Pancras that only took something like 90 minutes to get to Deal. Of course I had to get to St Pancras first, but that is relatively quick. I can't remember, but it may have only taken 2 hours from home to Deal. I mainly wanted to see the pier at Deal. It seemed a fairly nice pier, and another to add to my collection of pier visits.

  I had tried to eat carefully yesterday, but ultimately failed when I had two Thai flavoured pot noodles. I dread to think of how much sugar and stuff were in them, but it was probably more than was good for me. It is ironic that they weren't even that nice - just merely pleasant.

  My dinner was half and half, good and bad. I ended up eating the last of the Polish white sausages. For some reason they did not taste as garlicky as the first ones I had eaten from the pack the previous day. It might have been that I didn't cook them for so long yesterday. They still seemed browned enough though. I ate them with lightly boiled greens and some marrowfat peas. I thought the latter might have quite a lot of sugar in them, but I didn't check. Maybe they didn't though for reasons that became apparent this morning.

  After my second terrible sleep the night before I took a couple of Paracetamols before going to bed last night. I was definitely feeling tired by the time I turned the light out, but last night I fell asleep fairly quickly. There was only one period in the early hours, around 2am if I recall correctly, when I was awake in bed for longer than 5 minutes. I think it was about 25 minutes. On the whole I seemed to sleep quite well, and it was just getting light when I woke up.

   This morning my blood glucose was 7.5mmol/l. That is what my monthly average should be (but won't be this month) and about as near perfect as I can hope for. Evidently the pot noodles were not as bad as I feared, and the marrowfat peas likewise. That blood glucose reading was very slightly higher than the morning before, and once again my weight seems to be going in the opposite direction. This morning my weight was far too high, but slightly less than the morning before.

  Waking up just as the sun was starting to rise, or about 6.30am was useful. Sunrise was officially 15 minutes later at 6.44am. I wanted to get up early this morning to carry out a bold experiment. I wanted to try shopping in Aldi without wearing a mask. Several people said that it was their policy not to challenge anyone not wearing a mask. That was indeed the case. I even paid for my shopping with cash ! I got there at about 8.30am, half an hour after their official opening time, and as hoped, it was quite quiet in there.

  There were several reasons for shopping in Aldi. It should have been cheaper than shopping in the little supermarket on Catford Bridge was an important reason. Another reason was for a greater variety of food. Yet another reason was because I needed stuff like shower gel, laundry detergent and fabric conditioner. All of which I feared running out of in the next few weeks.

  I was fairly particular about buying stuff that I believed was fairly healthy, and that even extended to a silly, but still enjoyable purchase - ice cream ! One of the ice cream brands that Aldi sell is "Goodness", and as the blurb on the label says, it's lower in sugar and fat than typical ice creams, and a full tub only contains 350 calories. I had that tub of ice cream for breakfast. I have to admit that it was a strange choice for breakfast - doubly so on a quite chilly morning, but it was delicious !

  Prior to going shopping I had a shower. So that and the shopping makes two things done this morning. While writing this I had another long and rambling phone call from my friend Lee. That makes three things done this morning. Once I have finished writing here that will be four jobs completed. That sounds enough for one day ! I expect I'll do more. If the sun stays out when the latest revision to the forecast says we should be having a shower as I write this, I may even decided to risk going out for a short walk. Tomorrow I shall reveal what I actually did because I have no specific plans now.