The latest revision to the forecast only makes a couple of small changes to that in the screenshot above. The latest prediction is that this afternoon the temperature may now briefly peak at 12° C, and that only three hours may feature some light rain this evening - 5pm may just be very cloudy, but dry. Oh well, it is bright and sunny as I type this. Tomorrow may be very grey, a bit wet, and more than a bit cold - max 7° C

  One of my main concerns yesterday was to try and keep control of my eating - even while drinking lots of beer ! This morning it seems that I succeeded, but more on that later. About the only thing I can say I did yesterday morning was that I had a shower. That happens most morning, and so it hardly counts. I feel I must have done something, but all I can think of now is reading more of the book I was reading yesterday.

  The afternoon was where all the action was. I made a few simple preparations for boozing, and then I relaxed until I got a message from Michael that he would be outside in a few minutes. Once again he had very generously bought some bottles of Diet Coke for me from Tesco. He seems more than happy to do it, and to go even further. He usually buys me 4 bottles, but yesterday he suggested that next time he could get me 6 bottles. The reason for this is that it would cost close to £10, and I could give him a £10 note instead of fiddling around with small change ! I gave him a couple of bottles of beer as a thank you for his kind offers.

  Just after 3pm Jodie turned up for our boozing session. She only brought one bottle of beer, and she may have regretted that. The idea was that we would drink more of my beers to finish them off. My last delivery was a good few weeks ago, and I had a box o0f 12 bottles that had hardly been touched. The only trouble is that Jodie's taste and mine have diverged. To some degree I dislike many of the beers that Jodie brings with her, and she doesn't care for many I buy.

   The big trouble is that Jodie drinks beer like a stamp collector collects stamps. She doesn't drink for the pleasure of boozing, but to tick off as many different beers as possible in her "beer album". In practice that means uploading a pictire of the bottle, plus her taste experience to a website called "untapped". To my mind it is spoiling what could be the best part of the week. Yesterday was a bit better than last week when she spent most of the few drinking hours glues to her phone. That doesn't make for good company. Yesterday I was retaliating, sort of, by leaving her to it, and going to my computer and ignoring her while I read stuff on my PC.

  I almost forgot that there was one other thing I did before the boozing session. It was around midday that I cooked some sausages - and cooked them well because they were a few days past their "use by" date. For some reason that I can't put my finger on, maybe it was some sort of guilt, I didn't enjoy them as much as I should. I like sausages. I like sausages a lot, but they failed to excite my taste buds.
  After Jodie went home it was time for dinner. In fact it was an hour passed my usual dinner time. I hadn't prepared, and pre-cooked anything. I was too impatient, or too hungry, or both, to cook up anything, although with hind sight I did have some fish fingers in the freezer that I could have grilled. The important thing was to try and keep my blood sugar down. One simple thing was to heat up a can of soup. It is useful that Aldi (and Tesco - I think) chunky meat and vegetable soups have about the same amount of sugar as Heinz "no added sugar" soups, but are 5 times as nice (Heinz "no added sugar" tomato soup is almost horrible !).

  I chose a chunky beef with vegetable soup, and it seemed an excellent time to try a new chilli sauce I bought a few days ago. It is the one on the right in the picture above. I have arranged these three chill sauces in order of strength. The Tropical Sun sauce is probably hotter than red Tabasco, and I now buy it in bulk (a pack of 12 bottles). It is nice and hot, or hot and nice ! The middle sauce is pretty hot, but not as hot as the label seems to say. The one I tried in my soup yesterday was that on the right, and it was excruciatingly hot ! It is nice, but needs to be treated with respect.

  Part two of my dinner was also a sort of soup. It was canned minced beer and onions fortified with a small can of condensed mushroom soup. I put some of the weaker pepper sauce in that. I couldn't be bothered to check the nutritional values of all these things. I mainly went by instinct that they were all "safe" for my needs.


   There was nothing on TV to amuse me last night, or at least nothing unless I waited a good few hours. That more pleasant alternative was to head to bed, and spend some time reading. I may have spent a couple of hours reading before going to sleep.

  I had been reading Ben Bova's "Moonrise", and last night I finished it. I wasted no time in starting the sequel to it, "Moonwar". I read as far as the start of a new chapter starting on page 20. Then I put the book down and tried for sleep. I really can't remember anything that happened for the next few hours except that the last time I looked at the clock it had just gone 10pm.

  The next thing I knew was that 2 hours had passed, and it was like being anaesthetised because I had no recollection of time passing. I must have fallen asleep almost instantly, and then I was out of bed before I realised I was awake again. Maybe that last bit is a mild exaggeration, but a minute or so later I was having a wee and I couldn't remember whether I had woke up on my left, right or back, and whether I was covered by the duvet. I do know that I slept under the duvet for the rest of the night because it was a cool night, and I only had the heater on low.

  I described my dreams of the previous night as being sort of sad, or mildly unpleasant. Last night's dreams were more enjoyable, but also frustrating. A common thread through the bots of dreams I remember was being out and about with a camcorder, but the settings were different in different dreams.

  One dream was being by a river, and there were some semi big fish in it, but every time I tried video them something went wrong. That was also a common theme through the dreams. In this dream I seemed to have the camcorder ready, but there was too much glare from the water, or something got in the way. At one point I was standing in the river trying to get a better shot. That didn't seem to bother me, but getting out again was a problem because the edge of the river was the deepest point. I think I was sort of proud of my agile footwork using some handy rocks to get onto the bank without getting too deep in the river.

  That dream almost seemed to morph into another dream of being on a railway station. I think I was going somewhere rather than train spotting (or more accurately, train videoing). I think the station was supposed to be somewhere vaguely in south west London. Initially it wasn't served by tube trains, and then it was. It ended up as being a totally London Underground station, and partly underground. During the dream, or more likely dreams, plural, I saw all sorts of interesting trains. That included an underground train that was so ancient it had a guards van that was partly lined wit brick because it had a fireplace in it !

  Once again none of my videoing worked as wanted. People would stand in the way, or another train would pass and block the view I wanted. It was enjoyable, but frustrating. Maybe all this dreaming including frustration is just an echo of real life. I know I am not the only one that is finding over a year of lockdown being very frustrating, and with the covid vaccine being very widely used, it is getting time to say sorry to anyone who unfortunately dies now, but life has to get back to some sort of normality.

  I woke up at about 6am this morning. It felt too early, but it was obvious I was not going to get back to sleep again. I felt sort of uncomfortable, but it was not because I needed to go to the toilet. It was like the sort of discomfort I often get when trying to go to sleep in the evening. The bed is too hot or too cold, and the pillows and mattress has lumps that weren't there earlier. Once I got out of bed most of these discomforts seemed to fade away - but never completely.

  One of the first things I did was to record my temperature. I've been doing this for the past year - originally with the idea of trying to pin point the moment I was dying from Covid. That never happened, and now it is a sort of habit, and a good excuse to use Libre Office (https://www.libreoffice.org/) a bit more - although being totally free I don't need to use it more to justify paying for it like I would if I bought Microsoft Office. While waiting for the thermometer to bleep I checked my blood glucose. It was 7.9mmol/l, and after a boozing session that is lower than expected, and could be said to be in my target area. It seems that I am starting to win this game again !

  The latest update to the weather forecast has changed 11am from sunny spells to full sunshine, but the forecasters are still adamant that after 11am the sun will go in, and never be seen again for the rest of the day. The afternoon temperature could now be 12° C for a while. I am now torn between it being almost warm enough for a walk, but with no sun, still too cool for a walk. For reasons unknown, I don't seem to feel any enthusiasm to go for a walk, and I have to admit I have no enthusiasm to do any gardening. I really don't know what I want to do today except to do a little bit of laundry. I would almost be happy just spending the day reading, but I worry about being too sedentary - that way leads to all sorts of complications.  It is possibly the sort of day where exploring the rail network with my camera would be good, but not good enough to warrant having to wear a mask.