The latest revision to today's forecast has throttled the temperature back to 15° C by removing the 16° C shown for 3pm in the screen shot of the earlier version above. With non stop sunshine still predicted to last all the hours of daylight, it should feel warm today - which it needs to be after a light frost this morning My thermometers agreed it was just 1.2° C at 7am, and the thin veneer of frost on some of cars outside agrees with that ! Tomorrow, and maybe the next couple of days might be very similar to today, except tomorrow may see the temperature hit 18° C.

   Yesterday morning I suggested I might go to The Metro Food Centre in Catford to buy a few extra ingredients for a nice healthy salad I was planning for dinner last night. I did indeed go out and bought more than I intended. One thing was a bit of fennel. I don't think I have ever tried fennel before, but I like liquorice type flavours, and so I thought I would give it a go. I only bought a small piece which had some fresh looking greenery still on it. Before I could try it Jodie got her hands on it, and announced that it was probably stale because it seemed very tough.

  As I write this I still haven't tried it for myself, and that is because I never did have the intended salad. I'll come to the reason for that later. Other things I bought in the shop, apart from salad ingredients, were another 5 tins from the range that includes bacon and giant beans. The cans have no English description, and so it is a guessing game as to what I have actually bought. I think 2 of the cans should be bacon and beans, and it is possible one of the cans is some sort of vegetarian version.

  There was one other can from a slightly different range that said exactly what should be in the tin, and the pictures looked like what I expected. It was rissoles in giant beans. The picture showed beautifully browned rissoles floating in the beans. The reality was that it was like a scoop of spam in beans. It wasn't unpleasant, but I couldn't enjoy it when it was nothing like I expected. I also bought two packets of "Turkish" sausage, and the one I cooked yesterday was exactly what I expected. It was delicious.

  It wasn't all that long after 3pm that Jodie turned up for a Sunday beer tasting session. The idea yesterday was that we would try and stick to some light beers because Jodie had a gig to go to later in the evening. The only trouble was that I didn't have many low (under 4%) alcohol beers, and the two I offered, some tradition English bitter, were turned down. All this didn't matter to me because all I had to do at the end of the session was prepare my salad, eat it, and if necessary, go to bed.

  We didn't have any very strong beers, but I did have more than Jodie. She was pacing herself, and I was getting thirsty. I did have one strong beer all to myself - or I was about to when Jodie suddenly piped up that she had only had it on draught before, and if she had a least a taster she could log it in the untappd web site. It is traditional that before Jodie leaves she has a small tot of whisky to "keep the cold out" - it was a tradition that started in much colder weather. I had a whisky as well, and then I had tow tots of Ouzo - because I could !

  Those two tots of Ouzo just took me over the edge. I wasn't rolling drunk, but I was drunk enough that the idea of spending time preparing all the ingredients for a salad was not appealing at all. I had pre-cooked just a few new potatoes, having learned my lesson when I cooked too many and pigged out on them. I had those potatoes, along with a few bits of mange tout I found at the back of the fridge on their last legs, and had also pre-cooked, with a large "Turkish" sausage that I roasted/grilled in the mini oven/grill. It was a very delicious meal, but not quite as healthy as intended.

  I'm sure I watched something on TV last night, but it was evidently so bland that I can't remember a thing about it. I spent more time after my dinner reading a few things from the internet. I then went to bed, and read for while. The book I am currently read is "Gold" by Isaac Asimov. Half the book is made up of some of his earliest short stories written for SciFi magazines rather than books. The other half is series of editorials, or other factual stuff that he wrote.

  One such article was about the art of writing when seen from his perspective. It made me think about how I might wrote stuff, and by stuff I guess I really mean fiction rather than all this scribble that makes up this diary, or blog, or whatever... It was an interesting 10 minutes, but it carried over into my dreams. That was no bad thing except it is hard to remember if my subconscious came up with anything good in those dreams.

  From what I can remember I was thinking about how a robot, who apparently was a successful write, might describe his craft. Almost all of it has now evaporated to wherever dreams go to when you wake up, but one interesting fact remains. The robot had a cat, and the cat's name was Morningdale. It was a name I had read or seen earlier, and I find the name curiously nice. It probably has some sort of meaning or significance, maybe for old English, possibly even Shakespeare, but on a more basic level it just sound nice, and bright, and sort of joyful.

  I didn't really sleep that well last night. It was the old, old problem of feeling too hot under the duvet, and just slightly too cool without it. I seemed to be constantly position with various bits of me uncovered. Of course it was obviously not constantly because I slept for long enough to wake up with a hand, or some bit of me gone to sleep/pins and needles.  The closer it got to an arbitrary getting up time of 7am, the worse it got. I actually got up at about 6.45am.

   It seems not having a salad for dinner, and having a plate of less healthy stuff, plus some other maybe not-too-good stuff during the day, didn't hurt me too much. This morning my blood glucose was exactly 8.0mmol/l. I would have preferred 7.5mmol/l, but it was still very good compared to some of the wild readings of a few days ago. This morning I even checked my blood pressure, but I didn't do it until I had had a breakfast of a bowl of instant noodles. It was a very low 96/58. I sometime worry that such low reading are a bit too low, but then again I know I have to do as little as rush upstairs to get it a lot higher !