08:43 BST

  I guess I could say I was quite cross with the weather forecast for yesterday. It got the temperature about right through the day, and the sunny spells in the morning, but it didn't say that the sunny spells would continue well into the afternoon. What it did say was that there would be rain around midday, and then in a later revision it showed rain for 4 or 5 hours, but instead of rain we just had more sunny spells. Admittedly the afternoon did get quite cloudy, and the sunny spells tended to be short and far apart, but it didn't rain. I doubt a single drop fell any time from pre-dawn until midnight. The prediction for 17° C turned out to be about right, although I seem to think it may have been a degree or two higher at some point.

  

  The early forecast for today is not too different to how yesterday actually turned out, but of course it has been revised since taking the screenshot above. It is now saying that the sunny spells will last until midday, and then the thickening clouds will not let a single ray of sunshine through for the rest of the day. I have my doubts' but maybe I am being overly optimistic. One change for the better is that now it says there will be three hours in the late afternoon when the temperature will be 19° C. Tomorrow may feature a lot of sunshine or sunny spells, and the temperature might briefly peak at 20° C.

  The forecast for a wet afternoon, plus the fact that Angela was not at work, and so we couldn't meet for a lunchtime drink, sapped any enthusiasm to do anything at all. I ended up doing almost nothing yesterday, and that included getting up properly - i.e. I couldn't be bothered to have a shower, or put on fresh clothing. I did consider having a quick wash with a damp flannel, and clean clothes to nip out to the shops, but I couldn't be bothered to even do that.

  I spent a fair amount of time just reading. Then just after midday (I think) I got a phone call from Sue, and as usual she kept me talking all afternoon. I had all the time in the world and so a mega length phone call didn't matter, and it was probably good that it distracted me from food. I could easily have snacked too much while partly bored.

  Although it was not the original reason for the call, we ended up first on the subject of photography. Sue claims she can only accept unedited pictures, and thinks things like airbrushing is wrong. I managed to convince her that not all "air brushing" is wrong because it is a lot more than making American models look thinner. In it's simplest form to can be "painting out)" something that intrudes on a picture. I gave her a typical example of when she is taking snaps of a band playing in one of the local pubs, and she gets a perfect shot of the singer, but there is a disembodied hand on the edge of the picture. That hand can often be removed in a photo editor, and it doesn't change a thing about the look of the main subject - the singer.

  There were other simple forms of editing that Sue thought she disapproved of - mainly because she hasn't got the tools to do them with. When I explained them to her she did agree that doing things like making a face a little bit lighter can improve the looks when the picture is taken in a dark pub. She did admit that she does use the simple photo editor in her iPhone to brighten some dark looking pictures. That rather disproves her idea that editing pictures is somehow completely wrong. She still has this fixation that her pictures should look "natural", but is that natural to the human eye, or to the camera's eye. The human eye has some wonderful inbuilt vision processing, and can pull pictures out of all sorts of problem that the camera can't - although many things can be corrected in a good photo editor.

  All the talk of phones and taking pictures lead on to the perpetual problem that people have who do everything on their phones, and don't use a computer. It doesn't take much to fill the entire memory of a phone. It is a problem that Jodie is always coming up with. I have solved Jodie's problem. I bought her a memory stick that she can plug straight into her phone, and move all her pictures to that until that fills up. At which point she can buy another.

  Sue's problem is that she has an iPhone, and I know very little about them. I had a look on Amazon and found a possible solution to her problem. It is a little box that costs about £14, and plugs into the iphone. The box has sockets for standard and micro SD cards. Provided that Apple has provided a basic file manager, and I think they have, and Sue can learn to use it, she can start to transfer her pictures to a stack of SD cards. I opted for free delivery, but it seems the adapter box, and a cheap 32GB SD card will be delivered to her today. If it all works she owes me £23, and if it doesn't she can give it all back to me. I may not be able to use the card reader, but I can always use SD memory cards.

  It got to 4pm, and I was feeling hungry. That seemed a good enough excuse to hang up, and sort myself out a snack. On this occasion I kept in control, and just had two cans of soup. One had a fairly low sugar content, and the other, a can of Tesco smoky bacon and lentil soup was even lower. It's effect on my guts, particularly after I added a generous amount of hot chilli sauce, is probably going to be explosive, but today is not a day when I am likely to go very far from home.

  I had my dinner a bit later than usual - I think it was even later than 7.30pm. It was some rather greasy feeling, despite being grilled, sage and onion flavoured chipolata sausages. I didn't know they would seem so greasy when I decided that, just for a change, I would have a bottle of cider.

   It did recommend it was drunk ice cold, and I think that would have improved it. It would definitely have given it more "bite" when it came to flushing the sausages from my mouth. I am not a cider lover, but this one tasted fairly pleasant at first. Maybe that was because it was cool, but not chilled, when I started it. Towards the end, maybe after it had warmed up a bit, I found I was not really enjoying it. Of course I still finished it the the very last drop !

  There were two episodes of QI on last night (one was an XL version which lasts for an hour). I watched both episodes, and the second finished at about 9pm. I was in bed,  very soon after, and I read until almost 10pm before going to sleep. Last night was one of those now very common nights when it can feel a bit too warm under the duvet, and yet it feels too chilly to leave too many bits uncovered.

  It must have been around 2am when I turned the heater on low, and after a while I was comfortable to sleep with an arm and/or a leg or two uncovered. I can remember having dreams, but I can't remember anything from them this morning. On the whole I slept well, but at 5am I discovered I had a problem. At that time it was either not so bad, or I was too sleepy to worry about it.

  That problem was more apparent when I got up. I think the semi-circular canals one one ear were misfiring. I didn't feel dizzy, but I definitely had balance problems. It was mild, and with enough concentration it was not enough to stop me doing anything. It was remarkably mild compared to a time about 15 to 20 years ago*. I had noticed some odd clicking, almost like a bit of loose ear wax in my left ear, a day or two ago. I am guessing the problem is in my left ear, although I don't think I can blame it on wax. Maybe it's some sort of mild infection.

* On that occasion, I was working in my second job (out of the three I had during my entire working life - the last one lasted 10 years, and I was between jobs for about 3 years. That suggests the first time I had something similar, but far worse, was probably at least 15 years ago, and maybe more like 20 years. On that occasion, I woke up feeling like a drunken sailor. I had to hold on to the wall to get to the toilet. Having a shower was "interesting". The clearest memory is going to work. I was fine if I held my head perfectly still. I couldn't look left or right to cross any roads, and fortunately I didn't have to cross any busy roads. Whatever the problem was, it just faded away during the day, and I was completely normal when I left work to go home.

  Of the three easy measurements I can take to give some sort of indication of my health, all were good except my blood pressure which was still OK, but not as low as it is later in the day. The systolic pressure was 132, and the diastolic 72mmhg. That is about normal for when I first get up, and I am rushing around and stuff. My temperature was a very typical 34.9° C for just out of bed. My blood glucose was a very typical 8.2mmol/l. I would like that to be under 8.0mmol/l. but it is rare to keep it under that for more than a day or two at a time.

  I've just been to the toilet, and I thought my slight lack of balance had faded away, but it was one of those visit where use of the bog brush was indicated, and I definitely felt very strange as I bent over to look down the pan. I think that is a very strong indicator that the problem lies in (probably) just one ear. However, the improvement over just a couple of hours suggests it won't be long before it is just a memory.

  I think I can say there are two definite things I will be doing today. One is to take a 24 hour late shower, and while I am at it I shall wash my hair - hopefully my ear problem will not be too distracting as I hang over the edge of the bath to wash my hair. The other definite is that Jodie is, or at least was definitely going to join me for some beer tasting this Thursday afternoon. Of course in these dynamic times anything could happen in the next half hour (according to Stingray).