The consensus of my outdoor thermometers was that the temperature at daybreak was minus 1.2° C. There is currently a thick frost, and looking at the forecast it would seem likely that the frost won't melt until late in the morning, maybe even as late as midday.  Once again it looks like the day will feature a lot of sunshine, although maybe it will be more sunny spells than non stop sunshine, but even so, the temperature is only expected to rise to 4° C again. Tomorrow may feature what by comparison to the last few days, a heatwave ! It will be at the expense of it being a mostly gloomy day, and probably with light rain in the morning, but the temperature should climb to 11° C - t-shirt temperature in lots of direct sunshine !

  Sunday's are often boring days, and in one sense yesterday was a typical Sunday, and yet it felt like a satisfactory day despite nothing much happening. The most exciting thing was a shopping trip to Tesco in the morning. I got there later than intended, about 11.30am, and the store looked quite busy, but to my amazement I found one checkout with no queue, and the person in front almost ready to pay up. That seemed strange, but then I noticed all the checkouts were not particularly busy.

  I didn't buy all that much in Tesco because maybe today, or tomorrow, I will probably go shopping in Aldi. I bought 4 cans of Tesco lentil and bacon soup (just 1.2gm of sugar per half can), and a couple of packs of meat - both chicken, I also bought some red cabbage and red onions for reasons that will become apparent a bit later. I think the only other things of note were some cheese, and Tesco own brand low sugar and low salt tomato ketchup.

  I might have mentioned yesterday that I had a couple of bowls of instant noodles for breakfast to warm me up. After that I shouldn't have eaten what was a slightly early lunch of the one other thing I bought from Tesco. It was actually two packs of chicken Caesar wraps. They are not that good, or indeed good for me, but there was a stack of them reduced from something like £2.75 to 95p. That was a gigantic reduction for the Catford Tesco where you are lucky to get 10p knocked off a sandwich that is 24 hours after it's best before date. I guess they were naughty, but nice !

  I did have the opportunity for another breath of fresh air in the afternoon - rather late in the afternoon by my reckoning. Yesterday it was the "last Sunday of the month" Catford food market. Jodie wanted to go, and suggested I might meet her. I declined for two reasons. The first was that I had got into a very lazy mood laying on my bed in the sunshine, and quietly reading. The other reason was that Jodie was running on Jodie time (usually about 4 hours different to GMT) and wasn't going to get to the market until just gone 3pm. The market had been open since 10.30am, and by 3pm some of the stalls would have sold out, and possibly have gone home. Later on Jodie sent me a text to say she found the market very disappointing, although she did say it was because much of what was being sold was too spicy, or not vegetarian enough for her tastes.

  At about 5pm I started to put together some of the ingredients I had bought in Tesco. I thought I would have another go at a home made chicken shish kebab like the one I had a few days ago. I started out by cutting up a red onion, a chunk of red cabbage, and a chunk of white cabbage. I added salt, peppers, and olive oil, and then left it to stand while I started on the meat. At this point I made a big mistake. The silly thing is I had already predicted it. I had bought a pack of diced chicken breast and a pack of skinless/boneless chicken thighs in the morning.

  I think I already knew, but wouldn't acknowledge it, that diced chicken breast would be a complete waste of time, and indeed it was. It was dry and tough despite being well basted as it cooked in the oven. I knew from the last time I did that chicken thighs worked well, and I don't know why I didn't use them - possibly because then I would be left with the diced chicken breast, and no way to use it unless I made some sort of stew.

  On the whole my dinner was disappointing. The best bit was the dessert I had afterwards. It was about a small wine glass full of a museli type stuff - mostly oats with a few other seeds and stuff. I ate it dry, and it is sort of nice dry. Possibly even better dry than with milk. I didn't have any milk and so I couldn't make any comparison.  If there was one thing that came out of my dinner experiment it was a strange desire to buy some beefburgers when I go to Aldi.

  It was a very thin time on TV last night. The only thing I found to watch was the Bond film, "Never Say Die" being shown on ITV+1. Bond films were once good, but sometimes they seem very clichéd now. I decided to watch a few minutes just to remind me what film it was, but I quickly came to the conclusion that I didn't seem to recognise it. I'm sure I must have seen it before, but maybe I just wasn't paying enough attention. That is probably so because I seemed to recognise a few bits of it last night, but most of it seemed new.

   I'm not sure if I could say I enjoyed it as such, but it was a fair time filler. Maybe one thing helped it stand out a little bit was the lack of improbable gadgets. There were, of course, a few gadgets. The film makers also seemed quite restrained in their special effects. For instance I saw two cars roll over, and neither burst into flames. If Gerry Anderson, of Thunderbirds fame, had been directing that would have got through a whole tanker of petrol for a gigantic explosion as the cars rolled over. That would be completely correct for a Gerry Anderson film because that would be complete fantasy, but Bond is supposed to operate in the real world....sort of.

  One of the added joys of going to bed last night, even if it was just to read for 30 to 60 minutes, was getting under the duvet. I had the heater on low, and although it took the chill off the room, it was a bit marginal. The temperature was dropping really low outside. I think it was around 1° C when I turned out the light at 10pm. I was soon asleep, and on the whole I slept quite well. I did wake a few times in the night, and noticed that at 3am the temperature had just gone into negative figures !

  At 5am I woke up to go for a pee, and while up I peeped out the window, and I checked my radio linked thermometers. There was a thick white frost outside, and the temperature was around minus 1° C. I turned the heater up full, and went back to bed. I think I fell asleep into normal sleep, but after maybe an hour I was in a strange sort of sleep. It was a bit like lucid dreaming, but not quite...at least I don't think so.

  I was having a sort of SciFi based dream about what could be described as small round robots, maybe a bit bigger than a cricket or tennis ball. There were three of them, all similar, but with subtle differences, and they had been provided by a seaside council. They were supposed to be used like a tracker to measure distances covered, but particularly when swimming. The idea was you would pick one up, and return it after use so someone else could use it.

  In my dream a young woman had decided to keep one of these balls as a pet (or in legal terms she stole it, but that isn't really relevant to the story). Having dreamed the background information I then had to think of a plot to keep the story moving, and that was when the dream became a bit like a lucid dream. It seemed like I woke up several times, and even looked at the thermometer, while trying to think what could come next. It is possible that I dreamed that I was waking up ! The only ongoing story line that I could think of was that the battery in the device was running low, and she had no way to charge it. I think that is when I really woke up, and got up.

  After a very productive visit to the toilet I checked my blood glucose level. I wasn't sure what to expect apart from it should be higher than yesterday after eating those Chicken Caesar wraps, the noodles for breakfast, and finally the muesli type stuff in the evening. I was astonished to find that it was exactly the same as yesterday - a very nice 7.2mmol/l. In the highly unlikely event I can manage that tomorrow I might just get the monthly average down below the average for the year, but not as good as the lowest month.