The strong winds, coming from the west, which is usually a warm direction, continue, but the BBC thinks they will calm down around midday. The Met Office reckon there will still be a strong wind almost through the whole day. I noted it was about 8° C a bit earlier, and that is the warmest it has been in the early morning for a while now....although having said that, it was almost 10° C when I walked to Aldi at 8am yesterday. I guess I got carried away saying this morning was unusually warm. Today is not going to get a lot warmer. Just 12° C are predicted by this afternoon. As well as being warm, or mild, those winds from the west carry a lot of moisture, and I doubt anyone can really predict when it will rain today. Everytime any of the weather forecasts are revised the times when it will rain keep shuffling around. I gues the best I can say is that it is going to rain at any random time today, and probably quite a few times. The wind should have calmed right down for tomorrow, but it isn't looking like it will be a nice day. It may only be 10° C at best, and once again there are going to be random showers with just a small chance the sun may peep out for a few minutes now and then. We seem to be getting March weather in May.
   The most notable thing, apart from going shopping in the morning, was my boozing session with Jodie yesterday afternoon. She only brought one beer with her this time. It was the dark version of Delerium, and it was very nice ! It was like a less intense Trappist beer. Of course like a Trappist beer it was very strong. I would have been more than happy to have had 3 or 4 bottles of it and nothing else.

 The beers pictured above, from Pistonhead, were a Xmas present from Jodie, and yesterday we drunk them (mainly because I was running out of beers to offer). I have to admit they were both nice, although one was nicer than the other. I think the nicer one was the Dry-Hopped Lager, but I am a bit uncertain about it. That sounds like a good reason to test them again sometime.

  We were going to drink both the bottled beers pictured on the left, but we only drank one of them. It was the "Zodiac" brewed by Omnipollo. That is one of Jodie's favourite breweries, and I don't think I have liked much, or indeed any of their brews. Jodie is such a huge fan of anything "Scandiwegian", plus anything Finnish, that she has a sort of taste blindness, and thinks nasty beer is good !

  We also tried the Lime Vodka I had bought in Aldi yesterday morning. It does have a pronounced lime cordial sort of smell, but the taste is a lot more subtle. It may be the lime that gives the vodka a slightly rough, maybe acidic taste. I don't think it is a vodka to drink near, but it goes well with some lemonade. I don't think I'll bother to buy the Mango flavoured version of it.

  I was going to urge Jodie to leave in time for the 6:18pm train, and I expect she would have retrospectively agreed had she known that. I was a bit late realising what the time was, and so I didn't urge Jodie to leave then. Instead she left to get the 6:48pm train - and had to walk to the station in the rain because it had just started raining. She might have made it home in the dry if she had left earlier.


  Once Jodie had left I tucked into my dinner. It was a simple affair, and maybe a bit too simple with hindsight. I had a started of prawns in katsu flavoured breadcrumbs. I am sorry to say they sounded much nicer than they actually tasted. The taste of the katsu breadcrumbs completely overpowered the delicate flavour of the prawns. Well they had to be tried, but next time I'll pass them by in Aldi without a second glance. The second, and final part of my dinner was breaded haddock, and that was very nice.

  You could say there was a third part to my dinner, a dessert, but almost an hour passed before I ate the last of the cherry cake that came in my order from Star Bargains. It was a bad idea to eat it last night. At least it made me feel bloated, and at worse it was very detrimental to my blood glucose level. I did stay up watching some TV before going to bed, and when I did it was nice to lay down and take the weight off my stomach !

  As I lay in bed reading I could hear the wind howling outside, and every now and then a gust would drive heavy rain onto my bedroom windows. I wondered how I was going to get any sleep with that going on, but it seemed to calm down by, and maybe even sometime before 11pm. Once I put down the book I was reading, and turned the lights out, I seemed to fall asleep quite quickly....or to put it another way, I can't remember much at all before I was waking up again. I seemed to wake up a lot in the night. I guess I had to pee out all that beer sometime or another !

  I'm sure I didn't wake up just to pee every time I woke up. Maybe it was the wind. Maybe it was my wind ! In some cases I think it might have been because I was getting bored with my dreams. I do have a very vague, vague in the extreme, idea that I had one dream where I seemed to have reached a dead end in the plot narrative, and just couldn't see any way to dream any more. I have no idea what that dream was about now, but I do remember one or some of my dreams were set in an approximation of one of my old workplaces (from when I used to repair TVs).

  It was gone 6am when I woke up for the last time. It was sort of odd that I really didn't want to wake up then, and thought I wanted more sleep. Sometimes I do manage to get back to bed and get, in rare cases, as much as another 90 minutes sleep. This morning it seemed obvious I was destined to not go back to sleep, but to get up and start the processes of the day. The first of which (usually after a visit to the toilet) was to check my blood glucose. This morning it was more like I feared yesterday morning, although still not as my worst fears for yesterday. Yesterday it was a most satisfactory 7.8mmol/l. This morning it had shot right up to 10.5mmol/l - into the danger zone. Well it is only dangerous if it stays there.

  I have no more cherry cake to eat today, and that will make it easier to stay clear of the naughty stuff. I still have other naughty stuff, but I think today will mostly be stewed lean beef and green vegetables. The only unknown is that Gravola (Granola) I mentioned yesterday. It did make for a pleasant breakfast - not great, but just pleasant. I am unsure how bad it is for me, or indeed if it is bad, but it is something I have to have more of or I will be wasting the litre of milk I bought yesterday.

  In an ideal world I would go out for a walk today, and every time the sun comes out (it still keeps popping out in pure defiance of the weather forecast) I do feel the urge to go out. The catch is that at any time it could get a lot duller, and the likelyhood of rain seems very high. I could go out with a raincoat, but if it is 12° C out I would overheat in it, and if the sun came out I would be par boiled in it ! It is possible I might take a chance of going out without a coat. On the other hand, I now have new ink cartridges for my printer, and I have to set aside some time to design and print a cover for the DVDs I have made of the gig in The Rutland Arms in 1997. That time could be today.