It may be that carrying my very heavy, mostly beer, shopping from Aldi yesterday morning, after the wear and tear of gardening the previous day, proved too much for me. It took a long time to raise the enthusiasm to do anything until almost mid afternoon yesterday. Even then, it wasn't that much, although I did top that off with a brief spell of heavy work later in the evening.

  The most active thing I did yesterday was to clean up the path from the back door, past the kitchen, and into the actual garden. There was all sorts of organic litter there, including a dried fox poo or two ! There was also some junk that needed disposing of. One particular annoyance on the path was moss. I used the hoe to scrape off a fair bit of it, but I feel I might have to finish the job with something like bleach one day. I noticed that it had been eating the concrete where it had been growing for the last year.

  I swept everything up as best I could, and got some of the junk ready to take out to the skip up the road later on. I don't think my work made a huge difference, but it does look better now, and it felt like I had done something worthwhile. It is all part of the little steps that add up to big ones as I rehabilitate my garden, and compliments the small incremental improvements I am making indoors. I really must try and get in the right frame of mind to do more painting indoors.

  It was around 4pm that I had a visit from Michael. Earlier in the day he told me he was going to the sausage shop in Beckenham (https://www.englishsausages.com), and would I like anything ? I said yes please, and suggested a half kg of one type of sausage, and a half kg of another. Michael said he could ask for kgs because they sell by the sausage. That is at odds with their website, but no matter. We agreed on 6 Cumberland sausages, and 4 spicy Sicilian sausages.

  I was expecting Michael to arrive in his car, but he went home first, and walked here with my sausages. I invited him in for a quick beer, and for the first time in ages he agreed, and had a bottle of the Dutch beer I had in the fridge. His quick visit turned out a lot longer than expected because he had a lot to say. It was nothing special - just a week or two of gossip and stuff that he had had no one else to talk to about.

  After Michael left I put the Cumberland sausages in my mini oven/grill to cook. In the meantime I had an Aldi "peppery salad" with some oddments of cheese , as a sort of starter before the main course of sausages. The sausages took a bit longer to cook than I thought, and once they were nicely browned I tried to leave them to cool off a bit. I was a bit too keen to try those sausages because I had heard how wonderful they would be, and I did start to eat them while they were still a bit too hot.

  I have to say I was quite disappointed by the sausages. They didn't seem peppery as Cumberland sausages are supposed to be. They did seem to have a strong taste, but that tasted seemed to me like the meat was just starting to go off. Maybe years of supermarket sausages have made me lose any appreciation of (alleged) real sausages. I had originally wanted Lincolnshire sausages, but they didn't have any. I wonder if they would have been better, and more importantly really strongly tasting of sage ?

  I went to sleep a little later than usual last night because I wanted to read to the end of the book I had been reading. It was Ben Bova's "Earth" and it was good reading right up to the last chapter when it all went soft, and all the intrigue just sort of fizzled out. It finished with so many loose ends that it could be described as ragged. It was written the year before he died at the age of 88, and I guess at that age I should cut him some slack. I have doubts I will ever live to be 88, and if I do it seems crazy that I could still be creative at that age.

  I seemed to sleep really well last night - based on the fact that I remember very little of it. I'm not sure if I woke up to pee more than twice, and the memory I have of getting up is so hazy, or dreamlike that I can't even be sure it happened more than the one time around 5am when I could even have got up. I do remember dreaming, but all I can remember of those dreams were that they seemed to centre about bird spotting, and using some sort of gadget that looked like it was made of Lego or something similar.

  I did feel strangely refreshed when I got up at around 7am. As usual, one of the first things I did was to check my blood glucose. It didn't feel like I had held back from eating anything too contentious - maybe I did, or maybe I didn't - but this morning my blood glucose was down to 7.8mmol/l. That was so close to my personal target of 7.5mmol/l that I felt rather good about it.

  This morning has already been busy. I have shaved, showered and shampooed ! I have also taken in a box of goodies from Star Bargains that arrived just after 9am. I have almost stacked away all the stuff in the box - stuff like soups and cans of spam, plus other foodstuffs. It also included some bottles of "no added sugar" grape juice. It is not zero sugar, but seems safely low if I drink no more than a 500ml bottle a day.

  What happens next is tricky. I have an Amazon parcel due to arrive today, but I don't know when. I have had a text message to say it will be delivered "soon", but as I write this it hasn't left the depot in Dartford yet. Once it does that will start to make very poor estimates of when it may arrive. If the timing allows it I will probably go to the pub, and hope to have a lunchtime drink with Angela, but I feel pessimistic about it. It really looks like it is about to pour with rain at the moment, and so maybe I might not want to go out, but the weather forecast has been revised again, and once again says the next hour, not this one, will feature sunny spells. I am imagining that the next revision will say exactly the same thing with the sunny spells always in the next hour, and not this one.