Yesterday morning I suggested that the only thing happening yesterday would be the traditional Thursday afternoon beer session, but there was something else I was thinking about possibly even while still in bed. It was to give the kitchen surfaces a good clean with bleach. Even if there was another mouse in my kitchen after taking out the corpse of the one my trap got, I thought the clean, and bleach smelling surface may deter it.

  It seemed like quite a job to do that cleaning. I had a count up of the tins of soup I had to move out of the way before starting. I didn't realise I had accumulated so many. There 48 of them ! I don't think I'll be buying any more soup for a while unless I notice any shortages of my favourite low sugar soups. I don't mean those soups that blatantly say "reduced sugar" on the tin. On the whole they still tend to have a high sugar content. I am talking about soups that quietly say in the nutritional information panel that they don't have much sugar in them - ideally less than 2.5gm per half can.

  I thought it would be a long job as I gloved up before getting the bleach out, but even though I also did the washing up at the same time, and even gave the sink itself a good scrub, the whole job didn't really take that long at all. If only I could clean the floor to a nice sparkle in the same time......  Actually that would be impossible because 39 years later, the lino-like floor tiles are well past their "best before" date. Many are chipped, and many are now loose.

  Nevertheless, the kitchen was smelling clean in a bleachy sort of way when I finished. There is now more space on the counter tops now I have moved a few things around, and more importantly, I have now got the cans of soup in a nice neat stack at the back of the counter top. Some time in the forgotten past I just plonked a few cans of soup down at the front of the counter on the assumption I would soon be using them up. I didn't, and in time a huge untidy pile of soup cans grew up around those first few.

  I basically rested after that kitchen cleaning until Jodie arrived at an unexpected time. She had noticed that there was signalling problems affecting the trains at Lower Sydenham. She made the curious choice of leaving home extra early, and taking a train to London Bridge. She then did some shopping in Borough Food Market before getting a train back to Catford. By that time all the trains from Charing Cross to Hayes were cancelled, and that left enough gaps for the trains from Cannon Street to Hayes to run with some, but minimal delays. It did make those trains rather crowded though.

  I was expecting Alan to either be with Jodie, or to meet her here, but apparently he was having some drinks with his mates (possibly watching football) in a Croydon pub. As usual, Jodie was drinking slowly, and ignoring me in favour of her phone for enough of a time to get boring for me. I ended up fitting in a few beers while Jodie was almost sipping hers. One such beer was a can of 9% Karpackie (Polish lager beer).

  Jodie left a little bit earlier than usual, but by then I was feeling drunk. I think she left at about 6pm to get a rain that was slowly coming down the line for London Bridge. It was a bit late getting past Lower Sydenham, but managed to make up a bit of time when Jodie left the train, to get a tram at Elmers End. While that was going on I started my dinner. It was roast chicken thighs accompanied by Pak Choi.

  Before cooking the three chicken thighs looked as if I would be having a very big dinner, but of course they shrunk while roasting, and then each one has a fair sized bone in it. It ended up as being a not very big dinner. Even the Pak Choi after a fairly light cooking ended up as quite a small vegetable portion. Later on I would have some lumps of Stratford Blue cheese on oat cakes, and also some unsalted mixed nuts.

  I think it might have been before 9pm when I had eaten my dinner, eaten my snacks/supper, watched some TV, and read some pages from the book I was reading. At that point I felt ready for sleep - and I was ! Later on I would wonder if I had forgotten to brush my teeth. I am sure I could still taste that blue cheese all through the night, and even when I got up this morning.

  Initially I slept for at least 3 hours without a break, but I was dreaming....or was I ? It was an odd sort of dream that was obviously heavily inspired by the book I was reading (Isaac Asimov's "The End Of Eternity"). What made it odd was that it seemed like I was thinking up a new plot and storyline based on the background of the book. It seemed to be a dream, or indeed several dreams, but it was more like the sort of thing I might do while laying awake in bed. The only weak clue I have that it was all in dreams is that I am sure I can remember waking up for a pee after being asleep.

  The rest of my night was marked by shorter periods of sleep, and often short periods of being awake. After that first period of sleep I woke up with several bits of me aching. One bit was my right elbow. I think I must have been sleeping awkwardly. I took a couple or paracetamol, and that cured any further aches. I think I also turned the heater up to full. A few hours later I was too hot, and turned it down again, and an hour or two after that I felt too cool and turned it up again.

  I probably shouldn't have needed that extra heat during a mild night, but maybe it was that old problem (for me) of too hot under the duvet, or too cold without. Maybe I was running a fever, and indeed my temperature was a little bit higher than my usual corpse like morning temperature. It was reading 35.7° C - a fever is usually taken to be a temperature above 37.8° C. For my purposes the most important reading was my blood glucose level. Despite all the booze, and drunken eating, it was exactly the same as yesterday, 8.5mmol/l. Last December I would have considered that good, but now it is a bit annoying that I couldn't manage to control my eating a lot better.

  Although this afternoon may feature sunshine....errr....the forecast has just been revised again. The latest prediction says that only 4pm will feature sunny spells, and with the sun setting at 4.55pm, that hardly counts. I was going to say that it was still unlikely I would be going out. It now seems a lot more definite than "unlikely" ! I don't really know what I will be doing today. I'll probably wash a hand towel, some underwear and a t-shirt, and I may do something computer related. Maybe that will just mean doing more work on my spreadsheet train photo catalogue.