Once again the forecast hasn't got it quite right, but in very general terms it is possibly close. I would say it is much more heavily overcast than the white clouds shown in the forecast. In fact it is almost as if the dark cloud forecast for 7am has moved to now. The latest revision shows no dark clouds at all, and yet as I write this it is almost dim enough to be called twilight. With luck there will be a few sunny spells today. Their timing and quantity keeps changing as the forecast is revised once an hour (approx), and it seems it is impossible to guess when we might get a sunny spell. The latest revision to the forecast still says the afternoon temperature will peak at 22° C. Tomorrow may feature a bit more sunshine, but paradoxically it may be a few degrees cooler.

   Yesterday was not the best of days. I didn't sleep well during the night, and that left me feeling tired. Once the early morning sunshine gave way to dark clouds I felt really listless. I ended up laying on my bed reading after I had finished writing yesterday's diary/blog. A further annoyance was that I had to try and be very careful with what I ate on a day when half a gallon of custard on doorstop sized chunk of plum duff was probably what my body secretly craved (although because it was secret it didn't actually tell me this).

  It wasn't until 1pm that I started to do something more than reading and trying to snooze. I can remember laying on my bed with my eyes closed, but I don't recall going to sleep. What I ended up doing was to carry on with my scheme of trying to get all my mp3 files, scattered over several external hard disks, and a couple of computers, onto one big external hard disk (and a duplicate of it for safety). It has got to the point where there are so many duplicates that it takes boring time seeking out the files that need to be copied to the master archive disk, ignoring those already on it. Of course with hindsight it was silly to allow the files to be spread everywhere.

  Despite feeling mildly pissed off I did manage to control my eating rather better than I might have expected. I did have two packets of crisps, and also a big handful of pumpkin seeds. I know the crisps were very bad, but I don't know much about pumpkin seeds apart from the fact that I like them. I assume that if birds eat them they are probably very nutritious. It is probably fortunate that I only eat them in small quantities.

  Apart from those naughty snacks I actually ended up practising my newly invented soup diet. Early in the afternoon I had two cans of soup. One of them was Heinz Potato And Leek soup. To my great surprise it's sugar content is very low, and it is very tasty and wholesome. The other can of soup was lentil soup, and I put a tablespoonful of Kimchee in it. It was a fail. It added a garlic taste, but mostly it just tasted of old cabbage. Of course it is made from fermented cabbage, but when eaten cold from the jar it is not so noticeable. It will probably go OK in a cheese sandwich, but I shan't be adding Kimchee to soup in the future.

  I was expecting I would have dinner at 6pm as usual, but it got delayed. I received a phone call from Sue. She is suffering from the same problem that Jodie is always suffering from - their phones stuffed to the gills with pictures and videos, and complaining that they don't have enough space to even operate as a phone sometimes. Jodie hasn't moaned about it for some time now, and I hope she has finally got the hang of moving photos to the external memory drive I bought her.  Trying to school a technophobe is hard work.

  With Sue it is even worse. I recommended she buy an external memory drive suitable to plug in the Thunderbolt connector of her iPhone, and suggested a couple that might be suitable. She bought one that was supposedly certified by Apple, although it's makers name suggests it was made in a dodgy back street factory.  I had hoped that was the end of the story. The big thing with Iphones is that they are so easy to use, and "just work". It turns out this is nonsense and if there is an easy way to transfer files it is in some obscure part of the phone.

   It is really hard to describe the process when you have never used an iPhone before. It was also frustrating that Sue kept going off at tangents, and started asking questions about moving picture around on her computer. Her computer is not an Apple computer, but what is known as a "Hackintosh" - and ordinary PC that has the Apple operating system forced onto it. Once again I have never used anything but the almost earliest version of Apples OSX, and then I hardly "used it". I played with it, and used it like a Unix/Linux computer - and ignored Apple's way of doing things. To me a picture is a computer file, but to Apple it is a picture, and so is treated in a way I don't understand.

  All I could do for Sue was to try and point her in the right direction. I strongly suggested she call the Apple helpline to see if they can talk her through the procedure to move pictures from her phone to the external memory drive. The trouble is they will probably continually steer her towards using their own iCloud to store pictures, but the way Sue describes it, the iCloud can only mirror the phone as a safety net in case you lose pictures on the phone. It will automatically restore any picture you delete. That sounds damn weird, and I am sure Sue is missing something, but what that is, is a mystery to me.

  As is usual Sue talked on and on about other stuff, and lost all track of time. I had tried to bring the conversation to a close a little after 6pm, but Sue just carried on, and we didn't say goodbye until just gone 8pm. By that time the shop she kept saying she had to go to for a few items had closed. Once Sue had finally hung up I got on with the serious business of warming up soup for dinner !

  I had two cans of soup. One was another Leek And Potato, and the other was a lentil and bacon. A little later I did grab a chunk of cheese to nibble when I went down to the kitchen to grab a bottle of diet Coke, and to turn all the lights of downstairs. I did that during a commercial break while watching 2 episodes of QI on Dave. I think the second one finished at 10pm, or just before it so they had time for a load of tedious commercials. I turned off the TV as soon as the credits started to roll. I then brushed my teeth prior to going to bed to, initially, read for a while.

  As far as I can recall I felt fine laying on my bed reading, but as soon as I had turned the light out, and turned onto my side my right knee suddenly started to ache. Turning onto my other side seemed to help a bit, but not much. I tried laying on my back to see if I could fall asleep like that, but then other bits felt uncomfortable. How things progressed is a bit blurry now, but I started to get other aches in my right leg. Since a fall onto my bottom a year ago I often get a pain in the back of my right thigh when sitting down too long. For some reason that started up when I was thrashing around in bed last night.

  I think I may have got a very small amount of sleep before waking up again, and deciding I would have to see if a couple of Paracetamol tablets might help. They did, but it took nearly an hour before they kicked in, and even then they were far from a cure. They did provide enough relief to start getting some sleep. I may have even got 3 hours of non stop sleep before waking up again. By that time I was getting additional discomfort from my right ankle and calf muscle, but they were mild compared to my knee and thigh.

  By 5am it seemed like the Paracetamol were wearing off, and it was getting hard to get back to sleep again. I managed it but I woke up at least twice, and possibly even four time before I gave up at 7am. It really felt like I could do with at least a couple more hours sleep. It didn't take long before some residual pain from my knee faded away once I was up and on my feet. Even going down stairs felt mostly OK, and certainly better than some mornings in the last month or three.

  The good news is that my blood glucose fell from 9.6mmol/l yesterday morning to 8.3mmol/l this morning. That is just under my typical monthly average, and so must be continuing proof that I can exercise good control over it. Today I am inclined to use a few snips of my Rosemary plant on some new potatoes, and a lamb steak. The potatoes will muck up tomorrow morning's blood glucose reading, but hopefully if I am careful with other stuff I eat today it won't go too high.

  That brings me to the question of what I shall be doing today. The answer is "no idea" ! If I could believe that the afternoon will stay dry, and will feature a few sunny spells, I could be inclined to wash a couple of t-shirts and stuff, and dry it on the washing line. I did have an idea that I might just doing some exploring on the railways using my Freedom Pass. There are some stations that I have only ever gone through that I could stop at and explore. Woolwich Dockyard station is one such station. What I really want is to visit some stations that haven't been "modernised" out of all recognition as a station. I feel sure there should be a few out there, but I'll only find them if I go out looking for them. The catch is that I am looking out the window and just seeing a dull grey sky, and I don't really fancy doing anything today.