The camera is best illustrated by the picture on the original retail box it was sold in. I was lucky to get almost the complete kit when I spent something that I am sure was less than £20 in (I think) The Salvation Army charity shop in Catford. The only thing missing was the software CD, but that was of no concern for any practical reasons.

  What I am very glad about is that it came with an adapter to enable the use of a cheap and very common micro SD card in the XD-Picture card memory slot. XD cards are still available, unused, from Amazon, but they are in extremely short supply, and bloody expensive - £56 !!! There are cheaper, and very dubious XD cards available on Ebay, but I have strong doubts they would all work.

  My very first digital camera, and Olympus C100, also used what is now an obsolete memory card - The Multimedia Card, or MMC card. The other thing that it shares in common with the X42 is that it takes rather good pictures, and the X42 manages very acceptable pictures in poor lighting. One difference is that the X42 has a x5 zoom lens. The C100 didn't have any optical zoom. Olympus don't make any consumer cameras now, and that is a shame, but they still exist making microscopes, and medical imaging equipment.
  I had only taken two paces into the park when I came across these crocuses (at least I think they are crocuses) already flowering, and bringing a bit of colour into the park.
  I saw plenty of Ring Necked Parakeets high in the leafless, and heavily pruned trees at the side of the sports arena. It wasn't a good pose, but this one was the easiest to get a snap of using full zoom. It must have been at least 20ft up the tree.
  Between midday and 1pm the sunny spells were a bit thin on the ground - which was a shame. There was a lot more blue sky to be seen behind me when I took this shot, but that would mean shooting straight into the sun. This picture, looking north towards Ladywell, does show a sliver of blue sky in the top left of the picture.
(09:54am and the sun has just come out at full brilliance for just a few minutes - contrary to the pessimistic gloomy forecast).
  You may notice some slight grain on this picture. The sun was behind a cloud, and the light was a bit dull, but using a lot of zoom, and just hand held, the camera has captured a fairly good snap. Many of my little pocket cameras would opt for a slow shutter speed for less grain, but that would give a lot of motion blur at full zoom, and produce a worse picture. I think I rather like this camera.
  This is another example of how the X42 can capture a fairly good image when using full zoom in dull light. One of my DSLR cameras could do a better job, but with lens, would have cost 10 or more times the price of the Olympus X42.
  I have been aware that there was a name board above this tin can of a stand alongside the sports arena in Ladywell Fields, but until yesterday I had never known what it said. Now, with the aid of full zoom, I can read it. I can't say I had ever heard of Clinton Rhule before, but I have never taken any interest in sports stuff, and even less for football. You can look his name up by doing an internet search if you have any interest in that direction.

  The walk in the park was enjoyable, and lunchtime with Angela in the pub was very enjoyable. I don't think there was any one highlight about it though. It was all warm, happy and intimate - or as intimate as you can be in a pub. Maybe it was better than I thought because like any high there is always the downside of coming down again. I could feel a smidgen of sadness walking home as I dwelt on the idea that I would have to wait another week to do it all again.

  I was distracted from that sadness by another small. but needed sadness. During the night the mouse (hopefully just the one) in my kitchen had managed to eat the grains of bird feed without setting off the trap. I guess those few grains were just a snack because it was obviously out looking for more while I was out in the park and pub. I came home to a dead mouse in one of the traps. I took it out and left it on the tree stump that supports the bird table. I just checked, and it looks like some lucky crow or magpie had fresh mouse for breakfast.

  It wasn't long after I had dealt with the mouse, and I was feeling OK again with the thought that if I was lucky, that was the end of my mouse problem (I am hoping it was just the one that had got in through the kitchen door while I was outside, and the door not closed). I was soon brought down again by a call from Jodie. She told me that Kayak (a Dutch band who I like) would be playing in London again in May.

  That was good news until I went to the website of the venue, The Islington Assembly Hall. The ticket price, including booking fee, was £34, and that seemed a lot to me. It put me off a fair bit, but what nailed the final coffin home was "All ticket holders are required to demonstrate a valid NHS COVID Pass. This can be one of the following: An NHS COVID Pass on the NHS app or a negative PCR or negative NHS Lateral Flow Test registered online and taken with in 48 hours of the show door time. Entry will be denied to those that cannot provide evidence of one of the above requirements.". I've had all my jabs, but I am not going to add dodgy government apps to my phone, or even phone up the NHS to get a printed covid passport sent to me. The idea of doing so just makes me feel very cross and depressed.

  From that point on I felt so depressed that it cause almost physical pain. It did not do good things to my eating, and I ate all sorts of old crap before I managed to reign in my hunger. I had sandwiches and crisps as snacks, but my dinner was more controlled. I just had three roast chicken things (with bones and skin on them). My original intention was to have some green vegetables with them, but I just couldn't be bothered to cook anything else.

  During and after dinner I watched some TV, but nothing really caught my attention enough to be enjoyable. I think I was in bed with a book before 9pm. I had drunk a few large whiskies before going to bed, and maybe they hastened me putting the book down, and going to sleep earlier than expected, although I have no real idea when that was - probably before 10pm, maybe a lot before 10pm.

  I would say I slept well because in a way I did, but I had loads of dreams, and they were not nice dreams. They rather spoiled the quality of my sleep. I can't remember the earlier dreams, but I do remember a vague outline of the one of the last dreams I had. I think I had been at work, or something work related, and I was able to get a lift home. That lift started in a small car, and for part of the drive it had to be driven in reverse for no obvious reason. The car seemed to morph into a very small bus as we progressed.

  I was trying to track our progress, or at least see where we were using my phone, but the map would not come up. Eventually we got to what I thought of as Lee Green, and I thought I recognised a road that I could use as a short cut to walk home. I got out of the bus, and once again tried to get a map on my phone to help navigate my way through the side roads, but my phone went crazy. It had been infected with a virus, and stuff was popping up on the screen faster than I could get rid of it. It was so active that the drain on the battery was making it get hot, and so on top of everything else I was worried that battery may catch fire.

  I am sure there was much more to that dream, but that is the best précis I can remember. I was more than happy to wake up from it. That was at about 6am, or an hour before I really wanted to get up, but I needed to go to the toilet for a pee and a poo. After that I tried to go back to bed, and I did sleep, but not for long. It was just after 7am when I checked my blood glucose. After all my snacks I knew I had ruined a fair start to the month, but it was not as bad as I feared. It was 8.5mmol/l and not that much more than my typical readings so far this year.

  I will try to do better today, but that is probably clutching at straws on a day when I am liable to be drunk my dinner time. It's Thursday, and that means Jodie, and I think Alan too, will be over for another beer tasting/drinking session. It is possibly the only significant thing that will happen today. I hope it is one of the better sessions. It will help if Alan is here for most of it, but generally he tends to come later to meet Jodie before they go off to some other drinking establishment (or a gig).