Monday 30th August 2021

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Monday 30th August 2021

09:06 BST

Yesterday didn't seem to be quite as good as the forecast suggested it would be. To some degree it got the sunny spells in the morning right, but they seemed to finish earlier than expected. The sun did put in an occasional appearance in the afternoon, but maybe for only the odd minute here and there, and the forecast sunny spells were not really noticeable in the evening. In fact I doubt there were any. Oh well, at least it was dry, and at 20° C it wasn't cold.

The latest update to the weather forecast for today has made no improvements over what can be seen in the earlier screenshot above. In short, it is going to be a grey and miserable day, and it is going to be quite cool. One change to the forecast in the latest update is that the maximum temperature is now predicted to be just 18° C. There is only a 10% chance of rain, and that usually means it will stay dry. Apart from a possible temperature of 20° C, tomorrow isn't looking to be any better than today.

Yesterday was another successful day. I can only boast of doing two important things. One of them was to do enough laundry to fill the main length of the washing line. With no afternoon forecast I wasn't expecting it to dry properly, and I was right. I brought it all in at about 6.30pm, and is was all slightly damp. I hung it on a clothes horse in the front room, and I expect it is dry this morning - albeit a little cool to the touch because there is no heating in there unless I am using the front room.

The highlight to the day was another gig - a nice afternoon gig. As I mentioned yesterday morning, it was Whitestar playing in The Coach And Horses in Beckenham. While I am embargoing bus because of the need to still wear masks on them (by law !) I had to get to the gig by train. I caught a train to Clockhouse station, and walked into Beckenham from there. I'm not sure how long that walk is, but I am guessing it was more than half a mile, and less than a full mile. I've just used Google Maps to check the distance. They reckon it is 0.6 miles.

This picture gives some idea of how the band play in a narrow alcove in the pub. It makes photography a bit difficult. Some of my first pictures did not look good at all. I had been hoping my new lens would be good, but I had to resort to my widest angle lens, and also use flash for the best pictures.

I think this picture, with Roy Dalley on the left, Simon Whitestar centre, and Gus McKinlay on the right, was probably taken without flash. It was stretching my camera to it's limits, and looks rather grainy.

This picture is from the best ones that I was taking towards the end when I stopped trying to fight the conditions, and just turned on full flash (although mostly bounced off the ceiling), and stuck with the wide angle lens. It includes Matt Donovan on the drums at the back.

While I juggled settings on my camera, my phone just set itself to take this video. Of course it was cheating (sort of) because video uses quite long shutter speeds, and that greatly enhances the sensitivity in low light. For stills you would just get motion blur at such slow shutter speeds. Anyway, here's Whitestar with a song called Tiny Little Pieces. As Simon can be heard saying at the start, it is a song written during lockdown, and maybe was inspired by it.

After being at the gig for about 90 minutes, and consuming two pints of Guinness, and a double Jameson whiskey, I felt I had got enough pictures, and it was time to head for home. I decided that in terms of train travel, it was easiest from Clock House station, but I was not looking forward to the walk there. I thought it was all uphill, but in fact it was only the last bit that was a hill. I guess the booze helped, and it as also in the right direction for home, but it didn't seem as bad as I thought, and maybe easier by some metric, than the walk from the station to the pub. My timing was pure chance, but I arrived at the station with just a 5 minute wait for the train.

The first thing I did when I got home was to check, and then bring in my still slightly damp laundry. The next thing was to heat up my dinner. Oddly enough I didn't feel all that hungry. In fact I felt almost good. It is not exactly a post-covid lockdown thing because I was doing it before, but I seem to be feeling less, or even not at all guilty about leaving a gig at a time that seems good to me. It is paying off because I haven't been exhausted after the gigs I have been to since lockdown ended. I can remember plenty of times when I used to try and make it through to the end of a gig, and would get home on the point of collapse...well maybe not collapse exactly, but definitely more than ready for bed.

My dinner was the last portion of stuff I had ordered from "Fusion Grill". It was chicken wings and alleged grilled chicken (a leg and a breast). The chicken wings came with fried onions and bit of sliced vegetables like you might get in a curry, and the grilled chicken was the same. After eating that last portion I still can't make my mind up about it. It was not unpleasant, and maybe it was just that it was not what I was expecting, but I don't think I really want to order any more from that Restaurant. Having had two takeaways in the space of one week I hope I can avoid all takeaways for weeks ahead now.

After dinner I still had the energy and enthusiasm to go through most of the pictures, and the video I shot. There are some pictures I took on the journey (a bit of trainspotting amongst other stuff) that I still want to check and process the best of them. One of my ongoing projects is to make a portfolio, albeit via a spreadsheet that points to when the pictures taken, of the class 465 trains that have been the mainstay of train services around here for many years. They are being replaced soon, and one day in the future some nutter may wax lyrical about my "historic" shots.

Having taken some Paracetamol to help with my walking (standard procedure now unfortunately) I decided against taking any more to make me more comfortable in the night last night. I don't think I slept quite as well at first as I have done recently, but apart from getting off to a slow start, I seemed to sleep quite well until I got to that point when the temperature in my bedroom fell low enough to feel cold without fully pulling the duvet over it, and then too warm when I did. At about 4.30am I turned the heater on low when I got up for a wee. I seemed to sleep well again after the room warmed by a few degrees.

This morning I don't feel that bad, but probably because of the weight of the heavy clouds pressing down on me and everything, I don't feel that wonderful. Perhaps not very dynamic would be a good description. The good news is that my simplified dinner, and walking almost 2 miles yesterday (home to the station counts too !), has caused my blood glucose to fall to a much better 7.9mmol/l this morning. That seemed a good enough reason to have a mostly safe breakfast of fish fingers - mostly safe for my blood glucose, but if I had any keen edge left, it has definitely gone now.

My original plan was to go to Petts Wood to look in on their very late (because of Covid) May Fayre. In the past there has been some good music, but this year it looks to be a bit dreary. The Petts Wood May Fayre web presence is appallingly bland, and it was only this morning when Jo (who was not an organizer) managed to get, and send to me the running order for the stage. The very best on offer is - 3.00pm Petts Wood Collective - Pop music featuring Ron Silvester and Mike Baron - and that is hardly appealing. I may still pop along, but I think I'll probably be doing more important stuff like snoozing, and listing the pictures of trains that I have taken !